Steve Jobs unveils new Apple campus that literally looks like a mothership

At a Cupertino City Council meeting last night, Steve Jobs presented plans for Apple's new campus off I-280 in Cupertino. As you can see from the image above, the campus resembles a spaceship. The entire campus will be one huge round building with a courtyard in the middle. The building itself will be four stories tall, and Apple plans to re-landscape the current area to include 6000 trees. A natural gas energy center will be on-campus to power the new building, and Apple will only rely on California's power grid as a backup.

Speaking to the City Council, Steve Jobs described the new campus (as transcribed by MacRumors): "It's a pretty amazing building. It's a little like a spaceship landed. It's got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle... It's a circle. It's curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It's all curved. We've used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building... It's pretty cool."

Last November, Apple bought the former 98-acre HP campus that will be home to the new campus Steve Jobs showed off. The purchase of the 98-acre campus was in addition to a 50-acre site that Apple bought in 2006. You can check out Jobs' "keynote" to the Cupertino City Council below. Also, for those of you keeping track, this is the second time the Cupertino City Council has given Steve Jobs a standing ovation.

When I worked for Apple, coworkers who were located outside of Cupertino would frequently ask "So when are you going to the mothership next?" "Mothership," of course, being an epithet for Apple's campus at 1 Infinite Loop. Now the term is moving a step closer to the literal -- at least insofar as looks go.