Apple Campus 2 planning video touted green efforts to create the "office of the future"

The October video presented architect Norman Foster, along with other project team members, discussing the beginnings and future implications of Apple's huge undertaking. Foster notes that the now-famous circular "spaceship" structure wasn't in the original plans.

"It didn't start as a circular building, it really grew into that," Foster says in the video. "So the idea of one building with a great park was really borne out of a very intensive process."

Foster said he was contacted "out of the blue" in 2009 by late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who asked for help with the project. According to Foster, Jobs requested he be thought of as part of the team rather than a client. Foster recalled that Jobs still thought of California as "the fruit bowl of America," and wanted Campus 2 to reflect the orchard landscapes he remembered as a child growing up in the area of Cupertino.

A large part of Apple's plan, according to Apple's senior arborist David Muffly, is to bring California back to Cupertino. The former HP Pruneridge campus where Apple's new Campus 2 is being built was covered in surface parking lots decorated with non-indigenous trees, many of which were poorly adapted to the local climate.

Apple has been transplanting the strongest of the existing trees to be replanted on the site, where they will be augmented with sturdy species and small fruit orchards that will flourish to create large open expanses of greenery.

Apple VP of Environmental Initiatives Lisa Jackson reiterated that 80 percent of the site will be "green space," while the main building will be able to go without air conditioning or heating for 75 percent of the year, thanks to natural ventilation. Further, 100 percent of the campus' energy will be sourced from renewable assets like solar power and bio fuels.

The content of the video was brought to mind this morning after Apple unveiled a new "Better" video narrated by the company's chief executive Tim Cook, drawing attention to the work Apple puts into both its products and concern for the environmental impacts related to large scale manufacturing.

"Better. It's a powerful word, and a powerful ideal," Cook says in the new video. "It makes us look at the world and want more than anything to change it for the better. To innovate, improve, to reinvent. To make it better."