Apple’s Stunning New Campus Is Missing One Vital Component

Wired magazine gives readers a revealing look inside the tech giant's cutting-edge new campus.

May 18, 2017 5:00 am

The spaceship has landed in Cupertino, California.

Apple Park, the 2.8 million square foot preserve that Steve Jobs pitched in 2011 to the local city council is finally opening its titanium gates. As gleaned from a first look in Wired magazine’s June issue, the stunning state-of-the-art campus is a workplace no rational employee would ever want to leave.

Every detail has been mapped out — after all, it required a team of 250 architects, eight years, and an eye-popping $5 billion to build — but there’s one notable feature missing from the impressive, luxurious, and long list of amenities.

A childcare center.

Apple campus photos
Office interior of the new Apple campus. (Dan Winters/WiRED)
Dan Winters

There’s in-house medical and dental care, a luxe movie theater, and a 100,000-square-foot fitness and wellness center. It even has a special pizza box designed and patented by the maestro of the Apple Park café to ensure that the crust on pies never grow soggy. But there is apparently no place for childcare at Apple Park— a footnote that critics have picked up on, adding that the “snobby” and “isolated” grounds are spectacular in design, but fail to adapt to potential changes in the way people work.

“It’s an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the future,” Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley, told Wired. Another prominent architect echoed Mozingo.

“It’s a spectacular piece of formal design, but it’s contrarian to what’s going on in corporate headquarters across the tech industry,” Scott Wyatt, an architect at NBBJ, a prominent international firm that has designed buildings for Google, Amazon, and Tencent, told Wired.

Take an aerial look at the incredible campus below.

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