Apple’s new campus will include a surprisingly low-tech structure

Apple’s new $5 billion campus, a spaceship-like ring in Cupertino, promises all manner of high-tech wonders. But it will also include a surprisingly rustic building — a 100-year-old barn.

“Apple will preserve a century-old barn that has remained in place as the property changed hands over the last 100 years,” the Silicon Valley Business Journal reports.

That’s right, Apple plans to preserve a 1916 barn next to its Lord Norman Foster-designed campus. But why?

Apparently, local tech industry moguls have made a sort of tradition of preserving the barn as an amusing anomaly, according to Curbed.

Known as the Glendenning Barn, the sturcture is named after Australian immigrant Robert Glendenning who “purchased squatter’s rights to land, living in a tent with his foodstuffs in a board shed,” according to Cupertino history teacher Mary Lou Lyon.

Eventually, Hewlett-Packard bought the Glendenning property and bulldozed it to make way for their Cupertino headquarters, but they spared the barn. When Apple acquired the land for their new campus, its location posed a slight problem. But instead of demolishing it, they carefully dismantled the barn, and plan to rebuild it next to the employee fitness center.

What better way to christen one of the most futuristic buildings in the world than with a barn raising?  [SVBJ | Curbed] —Christopher Cameron