Chapter 143 new park

When Jobs was 12, he found Bill Hewlett in the phone book and called him for a part he was trying to make a frequency counter, which resulted in a summer job at Hewlett Packard Instruments.That was the year HP expanded its calculator division at Cupertino Land.Wozniak went to work there, and it was there by night that he designed the Apple I and Apple II computers. In 2010, HP decided to abandon the Cupertino campus, which is just a mile east of Apple's headquarters in Building 1 on Infinite Loop Road.Jobs quietly arranged to buy the HP campus and adjoining property.He admired the way Hewlett and Packard built a legacy company and was proud to have done the same at Apple.Now he wants a headquarters that showcases Apple's image, unprecedented among West Coast tech companies.He eventually amassed 150 acres, most of which had been almond orchards in his boyhood.He threw himself into the design and construction of the new campus, which will be a legacy project, incorporating his passion for design and his passion for creating a legacy company. "I want to leave an iconic campus that can embody the company's values ​​and be passed down from generation to generation," he said.

He hired what he believed to be the best architectural firm in the world, the firm of Sir Norman Foster, which had built such beautifully designed buildings as the restored Reichstag in Berlin and London's 30 St Mary Axe Street.Unsurprisingly, Jobs was so involved in the planning of the building that he was so involved in every detail that it was almost impossible to come up with a final design.This will be his masterpiece, and he will strive for perfection.Foster's firm sent 50 architects to show Jobs improved models and options every three weeks throughout 2010.Again and again he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, making these architects start over and offer more alternatives.

When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was shaped like a giant winding runway, made up of three connected semicircles surrounding a huge central courtyard.The walls are floor-to-ceiling windows, and the interior is a row of offices, and the sunlight can shine directly on the aisle. "This way people can meet everywhere, it's convenient and flexible," he said, "and everyone can get some sun." The next time he showed me the plan, it was already a month later.We're in the big conference room across from his office, with architectural models on the table.He has made an important change.All offices will be set some distance away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, so that the long corridors will be bathed in sunlight and serve as communal spaces.He had an argument with some architects who wanted these windows to open, and Jobs never liked the idea of ​​people being able to open things. "That's just going to make people screw things up," he declared.On this, as in every other detail, he won.

When he got home that night and showed the plans over dinner, Reed joked that the building reminded him of male genitalia when viewed from the air.Jobs dismissed the comment as a reaction to Reed's adolescence.Yet he raised the claim with the architects the next day. "Unfortunately, once someone tells you that, you can never get that image out of your head," he said.By the next time I saw him, the shape of the building had been changed to a simple ring. The new design means there will be no straight pane of glass throughout the building.Everything is curved and connected seamlessly.Jobs had long been fascinated by glass, and his experience customizing giant floor-to-ceiling windows for Apple's retail stores made him very confident that mass production of huge curved glass was possible.The planned central courtyard has a diameter of 800 feet (longer than 3 typical city blocks, or almost the length of 3 football fields), and he showed me with overlapping slides that it could surround St. Peter's Square in Rome. Come in.One of his lingering memories is the orchard that once covered most of the area, so he hired a senior horticulturist from Stanford and required 80% of the park to be natural, with 6,000 trees. “I told him to make sure there was a new almond orchard,” Jobs said. “You used to see almond orchards everywhere, even on street corners, and they were part of Silicon Valley’s legacy.”

By June 2011, the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which could accommodate more than 12,000 employees, was finally planned and ready to be unveiled to the public.Jobs decided to report the iCloud to the Cupertino City Council in a low-key rather than public manner the day after the WWDC unveiling. Despite his limited energy, he had a packed schedule that day.Ron Johnson, who had built and run the Apple Store for more than a decade and was now determined to become CEO of JCPenney, had come to Jobs' house that morning to discuss his resignation.Afterward Jobs and I went to a little yogurt and oatmeal coffee shop called Fraiche in Palo Alto, where he chatted animatedly about the future of Apple products.Later that day, the driver took him to Santa Clara for a quarterly meeting of the top management of Apple and Intel to discuss the possibility of using Intel chips in mobile devices in the future.That night, U2 held a concert at the Oakland Stadium, and Jobs had considered going to see it.But he decided to use the evening to present his plans for the campus to the Cupertino City Council.

Jobs never came to City Council, looking relaxed in the same black sweater he wore at WWDC.He stood in front of the podium, holding a remote control in his hand, and spent more than 20 minutes showing the slides of the park design to the congressmen.Jobs paused and smiled as a perspective view of the clean, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen. "It was like a spaceship had landed," he said.After a while he added, "I think we might end up with the greatest office building in the world." The following Friday, Jobs emailed a longtime colleague, Ann Bowers, the widow of Intel co-founder Bob Noyce.In the early 1980s, she served as Apple's human resources director and female trainer, responsible for berating Jobs after he lost his temper and comforting injured colleagues.Jobs asked her if she could come and see him the next day.Powers happened to be in New York, but when he got back, he went to Jobs' house on Sunday.He was frail again, aching and drained, but he couldn't wait to show Powers a rendering of the new headquarters building. "You should be proud of Apple," he said, "You should be proud of what we've created."

Then he looked at her and asked a question that almost made her stand unsteadily: "Tell me, what did I look like when I was young?" Powers answered him as honestly as possible. "You were very impulsive and very difficult," she said, "but your vision was incredible. You told us, 'The process is the reward.' Turns out you were right." "Yes," Jobs replied, "I did learn something along the way." Then, a few minutes later, he repeated, as if to reassure Powers and himself. "I did learn something. Really."