That the Apple Park, Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino (California), is quite an engineering work – certainly there is no doubt. The famous “spaceship” (or, for some people, a “donut”) took more than three years to be erected and, despite the imposing construction that we see on the ground, we can imagine that under it there must also be something as incredible.
It was exactly the engineering of the Apple Park that The New York Times investigated in his most recent report, highlighting a tremendous feature (literally) of the Apple headquarters against possible damage caused by earthquakes.
More precisely, California has the so-called San Andreas Fault, which leaves it at the mercy of earthquakes (they occur in the lower layers of the earth’s crust); there are even theories which suggest that if a strong earthquake strikes the site, the damage would be incalculably catastrophic.
Back to Apple’s efforts to prevent such seismic shocks from affecting the structure of its headquarters, the NYT found that Apple Park has a “base isolator”, which consists of 692 stainless steel discs huge located up to 0.6m below ground level, being one of the few companies in Silicon Valley to have any kind of earthquake resistance, according to structural engineer Evan Reis.
With this structure, in the event of a possible earthquake, the disks can move up to 1.2 meters in any direction, reducing the impact caused by the movement of the earth’s surface.
Steel disk at the bottom of Apple Park | Image: Jim Wilson /The New York TimesThis protection system was chosen by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the company’s head of design, Jony Ive. For his adoption, the executives were inspired by Japanese buildings that, due to the high seismic activity on the island, use the same technique – so that such disks move as a way to counterbalance the movement of the surface.
Jobs was so concerned about this that, according to Ive, he spent four years renovating his own home in San Francisco to protect himself from earthquakes, and he could consider it “tougher than some of the city’s skyscrapers.”
Concern or not, this is an investment that is certainly worthwhile, especially in the case of one of the largest corporate headquarters in the world.
via AppleInsider
