Apple unveils plans for sculpture: ‘Mirage’
Over 400 cast glass columns will use sand from each desert on Earth
CUPERTINO >> A new public art sculpture made of sand from 58 of the world’s deserts will transform the appearance of an olive grove outside of the Apple campus’ visitor center by the summer of 2022.
Named “Mirage” by Scottish artist Katie Paterson and the German architecture firm Zeller & Moye, the sculpture will consist of 400 pure cast glass columns made out of desert sand and formed into three clear, wavelike walls mimicking a desert dune.
Apple spokesman Nick Leahy said the sculpture is a multimillion-dollar project involving a team of dozens of artists, architects, geologists and desert experts, all with the goal of creating an outdoor public space at the company’s massive Cupertino headquarters.
“Our goal is to bring together every desert on Earth,” Paterson said. “Visitors are going to be able to walk east to west around to every desert on the planet. We’re going to make this a microcosm space that brings all these immense and diverse deserts right there to Apple Park.”
It will be no small feat to get sand from every desert in the world, melt it down to glass and assemble it in Cupertino.
Paterson — renowned for such expansive works as Hollow at the Royal Fort Gardens in Bristol, United Kingdom — said a project of this scale hasn’t been done before and that it’ll take cooperation
on a global level to pull it off.
Crafting glass from desert sand is something Paterson thought of doing before, but after he partnered with Zeller & Moye, the sculpture “really came to life,” she said. The two teams worked together before in 2016 on Hollow, a canopylike structure made from
the world’s trees.
The architecture firm’s plans call for three segments of lines made of glass columns connecting into one central space, giving the space three “main entrances,” Moye said. The free-form nature of the sculpture will create small niches and pockets where people can experience a quiet moment while enveloped by the structure, Moye said.
“We’re working with these materials in an experimental way, but focusing on one material as the core of the artwork: desert sand,” Moye said. “It has this artisanal quality because its cast glass, so it will show a lot of variations and shapes and discolorations.”
Though the firm’s background is in architecture, Christoph Zeller said “we work on the edges of the discipline.” Apple has historically partnered with the world’s leading designers, architects and artists to make its products and build its Silicon Valley campuses.
No project has matched the tech company’s $5 billion neo-futurist campus, nicknamed the spaceship, which was designed by Norman Foster and opened its doors to more than 12,000 employees in April 2017.
About 80% of the site is made up of green space planted with drought-resistant trees and plants indigenous to the Cupertino area; the center courtyard of the main building features an artificial pond.
With “Mirage,” the tech giant is hoping to bring another go-to space for Silicon Valley.
“This is a very different way to use glass,” said Christoph Zeller. “We have glass everywhere in our daily lives, but we often experience sheets of glass, glasses of water or glass vases. With this project, we’re moving away from the commercial aspects of glass and referring to the solidity of glass.”
Moye said the pandemic made people feel alone and disconnected from the world and nature.
“It’s important to have back these connections to the physical,” Moye said.