When Apple talks about its new Cupertino campus, the company almost always refers to its 2.8-million-square-foot Foster + Partners-designed ring. It speaks about the technical complexity of achieving a curved glass structure and boasts about the 30-acre park inspired by fruit orchards at its core. Tim Cook, the company’s CEO, proudly proclaimed it to be “one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world.”
But here’s a dirty secret: Most of the new structures on the 175-acre campus weren’t constructed for employees tasked with fulfilling Apple’s innovation mandate; they were designed for gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing cars. Apple had to build 11,000 parking spaces for the campus’s 12,000 employees. Square footage dedicated to cars outnumbers square footage for people by more than a football field.