The animation studio’s 22-acre home — especially its enormous main building — is full of creative details.
The Monsters University team on the Pixar Animations Studios campus in Emeryville, Calif., on June 21, 2013.
Via: Handout / Getty Images
This weekend, Monsters University became Pixar Animation Studio's 14th feature film to open at No. 1 at the box office. That is especially remarkable considering Pixar has released only 14 feature films.
No other studio comes close to that record.
One major factor that sets Pixar apart from the rest of Hollywood is the fact that Pixar is not in Hollywood. Since 2000, the studio's campus has been on a lushly green 22-acre rectangle in the middle of Emeryville, Calif., an enclave for tech-based companies just north of Oakland. "I was there once for a day," said Billy Crystal, who voices eager Monsters University freshman Mike Wazowski, in an interview last month. "And I just remember this open feeling of the campus. There were ball fields to play on, and there were exercise places — very much the Japanese influence of, 'Let's get out at 12 and we'll do push-ups and sit-ups and get into the sun.' And then they all just drifted back to make something great."
The beating heart of the campus — and of Pixar itself — is the two-story Steve Jobs Building that provides a tremendous 218,000 square feet of space for roughly 700 people to work, eat, and play. The name is not just an honorific to the late Jobs, who bought the company from LucasArts in 1986 and served as its Chairman and then CEO until it was purchased by Disney in 2006. In a very real sense, the building isSteve Jobs.
"Since Steve didn't actually make our movies, the building itself became his project," says company President Ed Catmull, one of Pixar's co-founders with John Lasetter. "This is the only building that Steve ever designed and built and carried through [with finishing] it."
"Steve loves the design process," adds Craig Payne, the senior design project manager who Jobs brought over to Pixar from his computer company Next. "He was involved in every detail of this building, down to the door handles of the offices."
Earlier this month, BuzzFeed got an exclusive guided tour of the Pixar campus, to try to figure out what it is about this building and the surrounding grounds that have helped lead Pixar to its unprecedented winning streak.
Via: Debby Coleman
