Steve Jobs wasn’t a fan of Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino, California. But its six buildings, the design of those buildings, and the overall campus plan defined an entire era for the company’s employees, its products, and its mercurial leader. In fact, its new Apple Park offices, designed by Foster+Partners, are arguably less representative of Apple’s spirit than the old Infinite Loop campus, which the company occupied from 1993 to 2017. The latter embodied Apple’s unlikely resurrection in the late 1990s. The former feels like yet another Apple product.
After all, the old Infinite Loop was where Jobs and Jony Ive conceived every single product that made Apple a one trillion dollar corporation. That turned it into a legendary tapestry of anecdotes, tragedies, comedies, and design choices. For nerds like me, walking into its atrium was like being a Christian pilgrim walking into Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome for the first time.
This week, Wired‘s Steven Levy published an extensive oral historyof the original campus that tells the tales of a place that still belongs to Apple (and still contains Jobs’s untouched old office, which Tim Cook tells Levy he visits from time to time to feel his presence). Many of the anecdotes hint at how the campus design itself shaped the company and its products.
Jobs dreamt of monorails and uniforms
John Sculley, who became Apple CEO at the request of Jobs only to later betray him, describes Jobs’s early visions for a new headquarters:
Steve called it SuperSite. He wanted something like the experience of going to Disney World, with monorails going around, where everyone was in different-colored uniforms. When Steve told the Mac group that he wanted to have uniforms, they all looked at him like he was crazy.
The anecdote reaffirms that Jobs wasn’t only a marketing visionary but a true showman–a Willy Wonka in a black turtleneck.
Walking was part of the culture
Dan Whisenhunt, VP of real estate from 2007 to 2018, told Levy that while Jobs didn’t like Infinite Loop because it wasn’t his design, he really liked the interior courtyard, and used it and the campus grounds to conduct his famous walking meetings. “He had very predictable paths,” Whisenhunt says. “The first was from the parking lot through the lobby up to his office. The second path was over to Jony’s studio. That was an indoor route that was known very well.”