The visitor centre designed by Foster + Partners as part of Apple's new California headquarters has welcomed its first guests.
The centre on Tantau Avenue, Cupertino, designed by Foster + Partners as ‘architectural extension’ of the tech giant’s new campus, opened its doors on Friday 17 November 2017. It is one of the several buildings that architects has created as gateway to Apple park, of the 175-acre (71-hectare), where guests can explore the campus in an immersive and engaging way.

The visitor centre has a slender carbon-fibre roof, which sails over its transparent walls to cover outdoor seating areas on either side. The structure includes many of the same design characteristics as its much larger neighbor, with similarly sculptural staircases, stone walls, and terrazzo floors.
 

Description of project by Foster + Partners

The Visitor Center along Tantau Avenue, designed as an exclusive public gateway to Apple Park, it features an expansive roof terrace with stunning views of the main building that offers a unique glimpse into Apple Park.

Nestled within a carefully planted olive grove, an exceptionally transparent envelope sits below a floating carbon-fiber roof, which cantilevers over outdoor seating areas on either side. Its softly-lit timber soffit gives the interior an inviting warmth, while the full-height glazing dematerializes the building volume.

Visitors are greeted with a large scaled model of Apple Park – seemingly suspended in mid-air – milled and finished by the same machines that create the signature Apple products. Visitors also have the opportunity to get a closer look at the main building from the roof terrace of the Visitor Center, which offers an unmatched panoramic view of Apple Park. A delicate screen of thin, curved carbon-fiber fins shades the terrace, where people can relax and take photos against the lush backdrop of Apple Park.

Stefan Behling, Head of Studio, Foster + Partners commented, “The idea was to create a delicate pavilion where visitors can enjoy the same material palette and meticulous detailing seen in the Ring Building in a relaxed setting, against the backdrop of Apple Park.”

Special Apple merchandise, exclusive to the Visitor Center, is available as souvenirs. At the southern end of the Visitor Center is a café – a place of relaxation and repose, where visitors can enjoy the verdant Californian landscape that surrounds Apple Park.

Several elements from the main building are replicated at the Visitor Center to give people a taste of the precision detailing at Apple Park. For instance, the design of the staircases is inspired by the similar ones in the main building, clad with the same quartz stone, and the countertop at the café is made with the same marble as the main restaurant.

Read more
Read less

More information

Label
Architects
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Venue
Text
10600 N Tantau Ave, Cupertino, CA 95014, United States
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.

Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

Read more
Published on: November 21, 2017
Cite: "Apple Park Visitor Center, designed by Foster + Partners, opens to the public" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/apple-park-visitor-center-designed-foster-partners-opens-public> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...