Apple's amazing 'spaceship' office

Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, wants to build a 'spaceship'-type campus in Cupertino, California, to house his ever-growing staff.

Jobs, who went before the Cupertino City Council and showed them a series of drawings and plans and took questions on the 155 acre campus south of San Francisco, says the building will be completed by 2015 and will house around 12,000 people.

He says the building could be the 'best office building in the world'.

"The campus we'd like to build there is one building. It holds 12,000 people. And it's [a] pretty amazing building," he said.

"It's a little like a spaceship landed."

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The building might hold up to 13,000 people "if we get a little luckier", he said.

Jobs described the building as a 'circle' curving all the way around with a courtyard in the middle.

He said there would not be "a straight piece of glass" in the building.

"We know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use," he said.

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The property will include parking underneath the main building, and a four-storey parking structure on one end of the property.

"There's nothing high here, we want the whole place human scale," Jobs said.

An "energy centre" would generate power with natural gas "and other ways which can be cleaner and cheaper and use the grid as our backup", he said.

"We think that makes more sense."

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"I think we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world. I really do think architecture students will come here to see this. I think it could be that good," he said.

Jobs said the building "has to be designed with pretty precise requirements for safety but we'll even go beyond those".

When concern about additional traffic was raised, he said employment would not be increasing "much".

"It's like 20 per cent," he said.

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The building will be four floors high, and have over three million square feet. A cafeteria on site will accommodate up to 3,000 people at one sitting.

The campus will feature lush greenery, including a heavily landscaped centre. There are 3,700 trees on the property and Apple will bump that up to about 6,000.

There might even be some apricot orchards on the site, as a nod to the land's agricultural past.

The new facility will be built on land brought from Hewlett Packard.