Engineer spends two years building Lego Apple Park

Roughly a year after Apple opened its long-anticipated Apple Park in Cupertino, California, fans of the tech giants have been rewarded with another inspirational building to marvel at – only this one’s made of Lego.

The new design is a 1.76 square-metre Lego replica of the Norman Foster-designed Apple Park and was put together over a two-year period by Automotive engineer Spencer Rezkalla, who modelled the design on drone footage taken during construction and used roughly 85,000 Lego pieces to build it.

A close-up of the staff cafeteria contained within the main ring-shaped building. The real-life version boasts four-storey high glass doors that open up during summer. Picture: Fabrizio Costantini

“In 2014 I came across some drone footage of an enormous circular excavation being dug into the California earth. When I discovered this was the start of the foundation for a new low-rise Apple “spaceship” campus, I knew I had found an interesting and suitable candidate,” Rezkalla, who has previously designed Lego replicas of the Eiffel Tower, Burj Al Arab and Empire State Building, explains on his Flickr page.

The real-life $5 billion campus spans 71 hectares. Picture: The Lego Apple Park spans 1.76 square metres and weighs 35kg. Picture: Fabrizio Costantin

The replica features 1,646 trees, weighs 35kg and includes details such as ponds, pathways and tennis courts. The latter, however, aren’t actually found at the real-life campus.

“In watching early drone videos, I thought these two still-under-construction courts would eventually be used for tennis. So I went ahead and built a tennis court mock-up ahead of time,” Rezkalla says. “Later video reveled [sic] they are actually for volleyball. Nevertheless I decided to keep the tennis courts because I thought they looked more interesting.”

Rezkalla left no details spared when building the replica. Picture: Fabrizio Costantini

The real-life $5 billion campus features a large ring-shaped office building, surrounded by a man-made landscape of rolling hills, trees and grassland.

The 71 hectare-campus also boasts 3.2km of walking and running paths, a 9290 square-metre fitness centre, and a huge glass-walled building ensconced by meadows, an orchard and a pond.

The glass-walled building was designed to boost creativity and collaboration, but met with ridicule earlier this year after the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that three Apple employees, on three separate occasions, had made 911 emergency calls after injuring themselves walking into the glass walls.

“I didn’t walk through a glass door. I walked into a glass door,” one Apple employee told a confused 911 dispatcher.

The controversial glass-walled pavilion leads to an underground theatre. Picture: Fabrizio Costantini