Versailles in the valley

By Alexandra Suich Bass

Cupertino looks like many other small, drab cities in northern California, with serried houses and shopping centres. Later this year, however, it will become the only place to find Apple’s newest creation: the enormous ring which will serve as the technology firm’s headquarters (rendering pictured above). Several months before he died in 2011, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and the mastermind of the project, predicted that the spaceship-like structure would become “the best office building in the world” and that people from everywhere would travel to see it.

To prove Jobs right, around 13,000 construction workers have laboured for years behind thick, high walls. The site spans several city blocks. Earlier this year, everything was hidden from view except cranes and a huge sand pile that rose a few hundred feet high, like the Great Pyramid of Giza. The scale of the project rivals the ancient Egyptians’ monuments. Every piece of glass on the four-storey exterior is curved, requiring special panes to be made in Germany – the largest pieces of curved glass ever manufactured. With a price tag of around $5 billion, it may be the most expensive corporate headquarters in history.