Steve Jobs called it “the best office building in the world,” and when it opens in 2016, Apple’s new spaceship-like headquarters will also be one of the world’s biggest office buildings, rivaling the Pentagon in scale. Despite significant concerns about how Cupertino, Apple’s longtime home, will be able to deal with all the new traffic from such a large building, the project was approved last week after a process that included an environmental impact assessment and a series of presentations by Apple officials. The first presentation was an unveiling by Steve Jobs himself at a very public city council meeting; the capstone was a video, above, shown by Dan Whisenhunt, Apple’s real estate director, to the city council on October 1, and featuring the voice of Jobs.

Architect Norman Foster, Jobs’ “collaborator” on the project, known for his hulking, glassy undertakings, also makes a cameo. “One of the most memorable things, and something that was perhaps vital to the project, was Steve saying ‘don’t think of me as a client, think of me as part of the team’.” Foster says that the building wasn’t always meant to be a circle—a divisive design that could prove disorienting and inefficient but that Apple insists will increase interaction.

“It didn’t start as a circular building, it just grew into that,” Foster says. “So the idea of one building with a great park around it was born out of a very intensive process.” (Foster’s collaborations with Apple will reportedly continue: his firm has been tapped to work on the company’s glassy retail shops, which were recently given trademark status.) 

The video is light on details but the near-final specs given to the city council are world-beating. The central curved structure will require more than 6 kilometers of specially-made concave glass to enclose the 2.8 million-square-foot, four-storey building. Under the aegis of the company’s environmental director Lisa Jackson, whose last job was as Obama’s administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, the site will be designed to generate seventy percent of the energy it uses. Besides fuel cells, the project’s secret weapon is on the roof: here, Apple’s planning 700,000 square feet of solar panels, producing eight megawatts of power, which is enough to power 4,000 homes.

There will be also be bike lanes and, thanks to Apple’s chief arborist, an abundance of native trees. The idea is to offset the campus’s greenhouse gas emissions to create a net-zero-carbon impact, but also to also offset public concerns about the campus’s closedness and dependence on cars: there will be nearly 11,000 underground parking spots. (There’s so much dirt to be removed, excavating the site will take six months and require a continuous, 24-hour convoy of trucks, one former Apple manager told Bloomberg.)

On October 16, Apple’s Senior Vice President and CFO Peter Oppenheimer deflected questions about what happens to Campus 2 after Apple

Another eye-popping feature—not mentioned during the presentation or anywhere in public—is the price. Apple Campus 2 will be one of the most expensive projects in recent world history. Despite efforts to shave the budget while keeping with Steve’s vision, officials are reportedly contending with a price tag of $5 billion, surpassing the $3.9 billion cost of the new World Trade Center. As the company struggles to find its way in the post-Jobs era against competitors like Samsung (which recently broke ground on a more porous, city-like headquarters in San Jose), some shareholders have reacted with befuddlement and even fear about the gargantuan new building, and the hubris it suggests.

Then again, Apple does have $147 billion in cash, which the Wall Street Journal recently said accounts for roughly 10% of the $1.48 trillion in cash held by non-financial American companies. (Actually, to be fair, Apple’s U.S.-based cash—the cash not stored overseas to avoid U.S. taxes—is around $43 billion.) And then there’s the most important reason for the new campus: it was Steve Jobs’ last big project, and one he saw as essential not just to the future of the company, which has outgrown its current digs down the road, but to his legacy. “His most important goal,” Walter Isaacson writes in Jobs’ biography, “was to do what [Bill] Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them.”  

At a press conference on October 16, the day after the city council approved the plans, a reporter asked Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s often-private senior vice president, about what might happen after the building is abandoned by Apple. Oppenheimer stammered and smiled. “We are building Apple Campus 2 for the greatest team in the industry to innovate for decades to come,” he said. “I don’t see a day when Apple won’t be fully occupying Apple Campus 2.”

The site of the new campus won’t be without its ominous Silicon Valley ghosts though: the 175 acres of buildings and parking lots that are soon set to be turned into a glassy spaceship and a verdant garden were once home to Compaq, which few remember, and to Hewlett-Packard, that underperforming computer behemoth a young Steve Jobs once thought was invincible.