An interesting video has popped up on YouTube seemingly depicting excavators tearing through old Hewlett-Packard office buildings on Apple’s 176-acre parcel, the future home of the company’s upcoming 2.8 million square foot ring-shaped iSpaceship headquarters, also known as Campus 2.
Apple received unanimous approval for the project from the Cupertino City Council last October, prompting the company to start demolishing the site the following month. A set of aerial photographs dated February 2014 show most of the existing buildings demolished so the video was most likely captured late last year…
The clip runs one minute 30 seconds long, have a look below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA1H2AhcEMI
The clip was shared last night on Twitter by Apple fan Matthew M.
These large-scale demolitions always appear economically infeasible and if you’re wondering where the debris gets disposed of, bear in mind that most of the concrete, glass and metal material gets pulverized and recycled to be reused later or repurposed for bricks, stones, paper products, paving mixtures and what not.
The buildings served as former offices of Hewlett-Packard back in the mid-1990s. Back then, Apple was the underdog and HP was the giant so it’s ironic that twenty or so years later Apple gets to tear down HP’s former offices.
Also, when he was 12 Steve Jobs reached out to an HP founder for help on building a frequency counter for a school project.
How times have changed, no?
Apple actually bought the site from HP – that’s why you see their logo on the door of the building being destroyed.
In addition to the massive 2.8 million square foot glass structure that will be home to 12,000 Apple employees, there’s also going to be an underground parking lot for about 2,400 vehicles, a 100,000 square foot fitness center, a 120,000 square foot auditorium (also underground) for future press events and company meetings and more.
The building’s glass walls move sideways and open up into the landscape.
The surrounding area will include jogging and cycling trails, with more than a thousand bikes kept on the site.
The project is slated for completion in 2016.