Apple's new campus, Apple Park, is the lasting legacy of Steve Jobs.

This is the building where Apple will create its next big thing.

The half-a-kilometre wide Apple “Spaceship” that will soon be home to 12,000 employees is set to be the world’s next architectural icon.

Four months before his death in 2011, Jobs’s final public event was not standing on a stage promising “one more thing” as he might have wished but rather sitting at a desk putting the case for the new Apple campus to the Cupertino council in California.

Built alongside the 280 freeway, on the site of a former Hewlett-Packard headquarters, Jobs told the council of his vision.

“We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” he said with trademark hyperbole.

“It’s a little like a spaceship landed.”

Apple, in typical secretive fashion, has not put a price tag on the building’s construction, although a figure of $6.5 billion has been widely reported and not disputed.

Nicknamed the Spaceship during its construction, the 70 hectare site that opens to Apple employees next month has been formally named Apple Park.

Its details are stunning at both ends of the scale, from the world’s largest panels of curved glass that make up the walls to the smallest details such as the design of the door handles that reportedly took 18 months of meetings to choose and involved measurements down to the nanometre.

Reports of the brief to the building’s architects show how Jobs’s insistence on perfection in design has extended from Apple’s products to its headquarters.

No seam, gap, or paintbrush was allowed to show; every wall, floor and ceiling had to be highly polished and the timber used in fittings had to be a specific type of maple and only the timber from the heart of each tree was allowed to be used.

The 6km of glass used on the exterior walls was bent and framed in Germany, using machines specially designed for this project, and then shipped over.

The campus is more than just the iconic four-storey high ring of glass.

The closest most Australians will come to Apple headquarters will be footage of Tim Cook standing on a stage unveiling the next iPhone, in the 1000-seat Steve Jobs Theatre built underground a man-made hill beneath a glass cylinder entrance that is a 6m high and 50m wide.

Apple’s fitness focus, which is evident in the Apple Watch, extends to the building with a “wellness centre”, reportedly costing nearly $100 million, able to cater for Apple’s 20,000 employees who work in Silicon Valley.

The British architect firm Foster+Partners who designed the building also boast major projects including Wembley Stadium, London’s Millennium Bridge and New York’s Heart Tower.

Foster+Partners chairman Norman Forster has said the inspiration for the design was a London square where houses surround a park, although Jobs’s appreciation of the Main Quad at Stanford Campus is also cited as a reference point.

The main building has a 17-megawatt solar rooftop, making it one of the largest on-site solar energy installations in the world.

It is also one of the world’s largest naturally ventilated buildings, designed to run for nine months of the year without heating or cooling.

The site is 80 per cent green space and has been planted with 7000 native and fruit trees including 1000 trees dug up on site and stored during construction.

Apple's enormous new headquarters, Apple Park, is finally set to open to employees in April, featuring the Steve Jobs Theatre, an underground auditorium named after the eponymous founder. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied