Apple Park

Friday, drone pilot Duncan Sinfield posted his monthly Apple Park construction update showcasing breathtaking aerial views of the massive ring-shaped building lit up at night.

The mountain of dirt on Apple's new campus counties to shrink on a daily basis as contractors continually work on landscaping, planting mature trees around the site.

Solar arrays on the building's roof appear to be completely installed and light posts around the new campus are now active, too.

Aside from other impressive features and mind-boggling facts, the main building has nine entrances and sports a large café, basically an atrium-like space four stories high with a pair of huge glass doors that can be opened when it’s nice outside. The café was designed to hold 4,000 people at once, split between the vast ground floor and the balcony dining areas.

Here's Duncan's latest video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ZK-NkluqQ

In order to be able to open and close the massive glass doors quietly, they hid the necessary mechanism underground. The glass doors weigh in at a whopping 440,000 pounds each.

“The only doors I know of in the world that size are on an airplane hangar,” said Nelli Diller, a managing director for Seele Group, a German company Apple contracted to create the largest, strongest pieces of curved glass in the world for its new corporate office.

Each of the 800 45-foot-tall panels of safety glass takes fourteen hours to create.

Seele had to expand capacity by working with its autoclave manufacturer to develop a much bigger cooker that could stack five panels at once. “The one we had was the biggest in the glass industry by far. This new one is just … giant,” said Diller.

Seele also built glass panels for Apple Stores.

Both Google Maps and Apple Maps offer three-dimensional views of Apple Park, although Google's 3D imagery appears to be a bit out of date.

For a video recap of the construction progress made on the 175-acre campus over the past year, check out a birds-eye video by videographer Matthew Roberts.

If you like these gorgeous aerial scenes of Apple Park lit up at night, be sure to check out Duncan's first nighttime footage of the new campus taken about a month ago.

Apple gave Wired a rare look inside the building with many previously unknown tidbits about the project and never-before-seen photographs of the meticulously designed interiors.

Apple began moving in first employees at the start of April, with about 500 new employees arriving every week thereafter. The iPhone maker expects to finish the move-in process, complete landscaping work and open the visitor center to the public by year-end.

Apple Park has a 100,000-square-foot fitness and wellness center for employees which includes a two-story yoga room, as well as access to medical and dental services.

“I’m a big believer in people staying active,” said Cook, who is something of a fitness buff himself. “It’s something that makes them feel better and more energetic. It’s all about the fixation on the customer, and the customers here are our people, our employees.”