Check out Apple Park’s spectacular new giant glass doors

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Apple leases new offices near to Apple Park
Just when you think Apple Park couldn't get more impressive.
Photo: Duncan Sinfield

In case you hadn’t noticed, Apple’s enormous Apple Park HQ is a pretty architecturally ambitious place — and it’s continuing to underscore that point.

Accompanied by a message titled “Lunchtime at Apple Park just got a whole lot more exciting,” CEO Tim Cook has shared a time-lapse video of the giant motorized doors which have apparently just been unveiled at the Apple Park cafeteria. They’re pretty darn stunning!

As with the rest of Apple Park, the mororized floor-to-ceiling doors make prominent use of large panes of glass. They provide the Apple eatery with a new entry point and added ventilation.

It’s not clear when the doors first became operational, although Cook’s tweet suggests the feature may have just debuted for the first time. The door feature was showcased as part of the ARKit “tour” of Apple Park that’s available in the Apple Park visitor center.

While this is apparently the first set of similar doors Apple has installed at its campus, Apple has used similar doors in other buildings. For example, at the San Francisco flagship Apple Store, large (and very slow-moving) glass doors open and close to blur the line between inside and outside space.

Apple Park’s love of glass

Apple Park shows the kind of affinity for large panes of glass that modern Apple products have for aluminum. More than 3,000 gigantic curved glass panes have been used to form the walls on both side of Apple’s four-story campus, measuring over a mile around. In all, Apple Park uses more than six kilometers of curved glass, in addition to interior glass accessories like doors.

This hasn’t always been an unequivocal success for the company, however. Earlier this year, transcripts were released for a series of emergency calls made as the result of employees at Apple Park injuring themselves by walking into glass doors and walls.

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