Credit: Mikael Jansson for WSJ.

Christina Passariello published a feature story for The Wall Street Journal today titled, “How Jony Ive Masterminded Apple’s New Headquarters.” It contains many new details about Apple Park, all framed in the context of an interview with its chief designer, Jony Ive.

Regarding the question of which Apple employees will occupy the main building of Apple Park, Passariello comments on a diagram outlining the locations of each division inside the four-story headquarters:

The fourth floor will be home to the executive suites (including Ive’s design studio), the watch team and part of the group working on Siri, which will also occupy a fraction of the third floor. The Mac and iPad divisions will be interspersed with software teams on the middle levels.

One of the primary themes behind the campus mentioned by Ive is that of collaboration, creating natural places for employees to meet together – whether formally or informally. Among those places is the massive main cafeteria; “Ive imagines it as a central meeting point…leading to the kinds of serendipitous encounters that could give birth to new ideas.” Unlike many other major tech companies, the cafeteria’s food will not be free, but it will be partly subsidized.

The inner ring of the building, referred to by Ive as “the parkland,” will serve as a place to get some fresh air and have chance encounters with coworkers, but it will also host more official gatherings like the company’s weekly Friday afternoon “beer bashes” that often include featured entertainment. And in addition to making for a nice work and play environment, many of the parkland’s numerous trees will also serve a functional purpose of being “regularly harvested to provide fruit for the campus kitchen.”

The Steve Jobs Theater’s main public-facing purpose will be to host new product keynote events, but Apple will be using it for a variety of company-only functions as well, including “seminar talks, small concerts and meetings with Cook or Ive that will be simulcast to every pod on campus.”

Ive and his design team are not yet working at Apple Park; they’re scheduled to move in within the next few months as one of the last teams moving. Therefore it appears that by the end of fall, Apple Park should be up and running as home to all its planned employees.

During his research for a Wired feature on Apple Park, Steven Levy met David Muffly, the arborist who planned the tree species planted at Apple’s new headquarters. On his Backchannel blog, Levy tells the story of how Muffly and Steve Jobs planned the trees that would be planted at Apple Park, including Muffly’s recollection of the first time he saw the mockups of the building:

Jobs took him to a room that had foam-core renderings of the proposed new Apple headquarters — a verdant space with lush greenery (80 percent of the space is landscaped) dominated by a huge ring-like building where 12,000 people would work. “I was like, whoa, this is crazy,” recalls Muffly. “And I’m looking at it and my brain is like, it’s the mothership!”

Muffly was impressed with Jobs’ extensive knowledge of trees native to Silicon Valley:

Jobs knew his trees, too. “He had a better sense than most arborists,” says Muffly. “He could tell visually which ones looked like they had good structure.” On a visit to Jobs’ house in 2011, Muffly saw this in action. They were in Jobs’ backyard garden, and in a neighbor’s yard there were two varieties of trees that Muffly wanted Jobs to choose between. “There was a kind of tree that I wanted to use and one that was more common,” says Muffly. “I asked, Steve, which of those two trees do you prefer? He liked questions like that. And he looked up and he pointed to the one I wanted. I said, Thank you, Steve. That was a good answer.”

Like other aspects of Apple Park, the scale of the landscaping is immense with roughly 9,000 trees planned. What I like most about Levy’s piece though, is that it adds a face, personality, and story to those huge numbers.

Steven Levy got an exclusive, inside look at Apple Park for Wired magazine. You may have seen photos and drone footage of the outside of Apple Park in the past, but Levy explains what it feels like from the inside:

…peering out the windows and onto the vast hilly expanse of the courtyard, all of that peels away. It feels … peaceful, even amid the clatter and rumble of construction. It turns out that when you turn a skyscraper on its side, all of its bullying power dissipates into a humble serenity.

Wired’s feature is full of interesting insights from the people involved in bringing Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple Park to life. For Jony Ive, the building is an architectural and construction wonder, but also a means to a greater end:

“It’s frustrating to talk about this building in terms of absurd, large numbers,” Ive says. “It makes for an impressive statistic, but you don’t live in an impressive statistic. While it is a technical marvel to make glass at this scale, that’s not the achievement. The achievement is to make a building where so many people can connect and collaborate and walk and talk.” The value, he argues, is not what went into the building. It’s what will come out.

Still, it’s fascinating to consider the challenges that the design posed, including the four-story glass doors of the café that can accommodate 4,000 people:

For Seele, the very toughest challenge came from constructing the giant glass sliding doors for the café—they had to extend from the ground to the roof, a full four stories. Each door leaf is about 85 feet by 54 feet. “The only doors I know of in the world that size are on an airplane hangar,” Diller says.

The steel that frames each leaf weighs 165 metric tons, which is about 360,000 pounds. Structural components, like rods, weigh another 18,000 pounds. Then there are 10 panels of glass, each weighing nearly 6,500 pounds. So you have two leaves, weighing 440,000 pounds apiece, that have to slide open and closed. “And it’s a restaurant, so you want to have it move without any major noise,” Diller says. The solution was to put all the machinery underground.

The final product, Apple Park, is designed to perpetuate Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple and the company’s values:

The phrase that keeps coming up in talks with key Apple figures is “Steve’s gift.” Behind that concept is the idea that in the last months of his life, Jobs expended significant energy to create a workplace that would benefit Apple’s workers for perhaps the next century. “This was a hundred-year decision,” Cook says. “And Steve spent the last couple of years of his life pouring himself in here at times when he clearly felt very poorly.

Levy’s profile of Apple Park goes into extraordinary detail and is a must-read for anyone curious about this astonishing achievement of architecture and design.