While a lot of renders of the new spaceship-like Apple headquarters have been leaked since 2011, but now more than 20 new images have leaked from the City of Cupertino's municipal archive, according to Wired, which unearthed the images in a big exposé today.
For the first time, architectural renderings of the landscape around Apple's big round campus, along with the underground parking lot and an underground auditorium for Apple's future press events.
According to Wired, Cupertino's public officials approved the new spaceship campus, called Apple Campus 2, last month. Designed by architect Norman Foster - who also designed the glassy Gherkin in London, England - the glass ring will rest on a 176-acre tract of land in Cupertino, California. The campus is slated to be completed and opened by 2016. The main ring will be wrapped by glass - much like the Gherkin or the modern roof of the Reichstag, which Foster also designed - or, a lot like Apple's flagship retail stores.
For example, the minimalist, four-level, open-air cafeteria will be lined with three levels of windows, as well as light, stone walls and no obvious support structures, besides large steel pillars. The glass just outside the cafeteria - and indeed surrounding the whole ring - are 40-feet tall, concave panes of glass.
The cafeteria will open out into an outside eating area, replete with wooden outdoor furniture, patio umbrellas, and trees - inside the ring.
The Apple Campus 2 will feature its own transit center, where employees can arrive after commuting from around the San Francisco area. The Corporate Transit Center will be flanked on both sides with wide, white, Apple Store-type stairs, which lead to the main ring spaceship hq. If you drive to work, there are two places where you'd possibly end up. The most elite is a 2,000-space subterranean parking garage below the main headquarters. To get there, you'll take a small, "futuristic" tunnel, according to Wired.
Other drivers will park in an above-ground parking garage on the south end of the Apple Campus.
Finally, there's the campus itsel - the landscape surrounding and inside the ring - which is extensive and planned down to the shrub. In this plan, you can see the large ring and the smaller ring inside (the underground press event auditorium).
Surrounding both rings are hundreds of trees: red meaning persimmons, brown for olives, orange meaning apricot trees, purple for plumbs, pink for cherry trees, and a big almost smiley-face grid of yellow - apple trees, of course.
If Apple was looking to impress the press (and their 13,000+ employees), it looks like going with Norman Foster was the right idea. Check out more images in Wired's exposé here.