As the largest city in the Silicon Valley, San Jose yearned for a physical structure that would help "define the identity and spirit of this extraordinary region" as explained in the competition's brief. Inspired by the original San Jose Electric Light Tower that stood 1881 to 1915, the San José Light Tower Corporation led an open call inviting architects, landscape architects, urban planners, artists, students, etc. to submit proposal ideas for the city.
Part of the competition brief asked for a creative landmark design that encapsulates a net-zero approach, "dramatic lighting" incorporated into the design, and an "impressive physical presence." The competition's jury consisted of architects, planners, landscape architects such as Walter Hood of Hood Design Studio, Julia Czerniak, Associate Dean, and architecture professor Syracuse University, Jerry Van Eyck of !melk, among others. After launching the competition in 2019, 963 design ideas from 72 countries were submitted.
The jury reviewed each proposal, and three finalists were chosen. Read each project description below.
Project Description:
How to represent the ever changing magic of Silicon Valley and create a Landmark in San Jose? In Silicon Valley's hundreds of companies have turned innovation into Art. The new icon in SanJose materializes in a gesture, like an artistic white brush stroke in sky of San Jose, formed by hundreds of rods that generate power for the building when moving in the wind creating a dynamic landmark that expresses the ever changing magic and innovation of Silicon Valley.San Jose has to be proud of his past. The shape of the 1881 Electric light Tower inspires a conical void based on a 75-foot radius within the new 200-foot 21st-century Tower to celebrate this unique moment in San José's history. The conical void allows people to enjoy an extraordinary vertical space while using the different floors of the tower.
Project Details:
500 dynamic 200ft high flexible rods will swing to the beat of the wind generating power for the whole building. The hundreds of rods represent the hundreds of different companies and individuals working together in Silicon Valley, San Jose.
Project Description:
This project cultivates and celebrates imagination by creating an eccentric biome which is composed of gigantic and multi-scaled flora inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. While Silicon Valley and San Jose is known for its technological advancements, “Welcome to Wonderland” celebrates the idea that it has been through imagination and wonder that has driven Silicon Valley’s innovative spirit.
Project Details:
The flowers are packed in a huge container (700’ Length X 100’ Width X 200’ Height) and protruded edges are sliced off. It looks like a gravel wall creating peculiar perforation to see through real nature. The minimality of a glass floor (20’ width) and ramps (5’ width) held up with the flora enhances the project’s two-sided nature, complexity and linearity, where people become a bee or butterfly.
Project Description:
The Nebula Tower revives the monumentality and historical significance of San Jose’s old light tower into a contemporary landmark with a technical design expression corresponding to our time. To reinvent the void and the mass as well as the light and the materialized, the Nebula Tower is vast yet light, precisely formed yet ephemeral, like a nebular cloud with vacuum inside. In daytime, the lattice grid and the nebulous figure of the tower offers changing images in different perspectives. At night, the superimposed light transforms the landmark and endows the void tower with visual forms within the grid.
Project Details:
Our design places a neutral cube with vaguely defined boundary at the Arena Green West bank. The cube is at the length of 180 feet and composed of a lattice grid that rotates 45 degrees to tis orthogonal form, with a hollow tower embedded within. Four arched tunnels radiate to connect the flow at the ground level. People can gather in the arena at the bottom of the tower to mediate skyward and interact with each other on the floating platforms within the lattice grid.
To learn more about the competition and its finalists click here. The competition results will conclude in 2021 when a winning design will be chosen by the San Jose Light Tower Corporation and the San Jose City Council.
11 Comments
Should have gone with a giant swastika made of the bones of genocide victims .... and a statue of dear leader zuckerberg on top
These are horrible. None of these will look this way if they're ever built. Oh wait, they are probably virtual pieces anyways...
San Jose seems pretty serious about building this. The brief declared they wanted an icon above all else.
The first one is the only one I can imagine actually being built. It won't look like this rendering but it could potentially look good. The power generation aspect of it is a nice symbolic symmetry, to me.
The other two are, in my opinion, pretty laughable & unfeasible.
Interestingly, the first one is the only one by a professional practice, albeit a very young one. The other two are by fresh graduates.
the first and last are perfect: ostensibly solid objects that in reality are completely vapid and devoid of integrity upon closer examination. a house of cards, if you will.
"Breeze of Innovation" is an interesting and decently designed project. So, with my little knowledge, I’ve been wrestling with myself over writing this comment as professionally as I possibly can.
Historically speaking, the primary source of inspiration for most artists is neither Nature, nor the Nine Muses, It is simply other artists` works. Hence, Absolut originality is merely a modern times myth. This statement is becoming even more admissible nowadays because of the advancement of the online search engines and image sharing platforms. Any art or design work can be matched up with a similar one in almost no time.
That being said, such general assumptions should not make us critically indifferent to study artists, their works and the kind of influences they leave on each other. Meticulous study of designs and artworks to differentiate those which are conceptually or aesthetically inspired by and in critical dialogue with their precedents, from those which are slightly adjusted for other situations and purposes, is certainly crucial. Especially, in respect to competitions in which a certain level of innovativeness, not originality, in the proposed design approaches is a major requirement.
A good example of the former case are modern Glass houses. Philip Johnson`s Glass house, Mies Vandrohe`s Farnsworth house and Lina bo bardi`s Casa De Vidro are all glass houses. Generally, one finds them conceptually similar and aesthetically belonging to one the same family. Yet, they couldn’t be more different if one pays attention to specific features of each glass house, such as: their elevation from the ground; walking approach and entrance to each building; column placement, construction joints, mullion design and other tectonic details. However, if one compares Breeze of Innovation with another similar project like the Julia Malysheva and Alina Kvirkveliya`s proposal for Tokyo Vertical Cemetery in 2016, it would be very difficult to reach the same conclusion. Considering the fact that both of the mentioned projects are designed to be iconic structures, the white vertical moving rods of the Breeze of Innovation and the white vertical moving tubes of Julia Malysheva & Alina Kvirkveliya`s design for Tokyo Vertical Cemetery, are with no doubt, identical. Physically, they are both designed to move with the wind. Conceptually, both projects are emphasizing the kinetic quality of their vertical elements vis-à-vis traditionally static structures. In the Breeze of Innovation, moving white vertical elements symbolizes Silicon Valley companies ever changing nature, in Julia Malysheva and Alina Kvirkveliya`s the same elements refer to dynamism of life against the stillness of the death. The former uses fifteen tubes and the later five hundred. Otherwise, they are the same projects, one moving against the blue sky of Silicon Valley, the other moving against some tall buildings in Tokyo. Their similarity becomes more obvious by looking at the beginning of the submitted animation for the breeze of innovation when there are still a few rods moving in the wind. Changing rod quantities from fifteen to five hundred and provide different renderings may make them visually look a bit different but they are essentially the same thing; Vertical Cemetery renderings are flat and more graphic-like, whereas the breeze of innovation is rendered by a 3D rendering software. Not to mention, Julia Malysheva and Alina Kvirkveliya`s have also suggested a very smart schematic technical solution for construction of their vertical tubes that I think would be very helpful for the development in the second phase of the Breeze of Innovation. Again, I should stress, the point is not whether the selected project is a replication of another designer`s project or it is merely a coincidence that they both came up with the same idea. It is not at all about the originality and other myths that we have inherited from modernists discourse. As a general approach, we may find a variety of iconic projects, utilizing multiple vertical elements for their visual impression . However, if a project almost exactly has the same physical vertical elements; the same color, the same proportion, the same operation (moving with the wind) and the same conceptual emphasis (dynamic vs static); even if both projects were designed by the same team, it could have been a concern to make it a finalist in any competition which puts so much value on innovativeness. Hence the name of the submission: Breeze of innovation.
"...writing this comment as professionally as I possibly can."
Carriage returns.
“Welcome to wonderland” is by far my favorite amongst the finalists. It really draws out my inner-child. Its designer also hints at the idea of Estrangement in his presentation. Generally speaking, rarely if ever, even adamant postmodern conceptualists, anti-formalism artists/critics, would disagree with the importance of defamiliarization as proposed by legendary writers like: Viktor Shklovsky, Bertold Brecht , Andre Breton...
However, no matter how fantastic an idea is, it is always the translation of that idea from one medium to another which truly matters in the art and design world.
If the aim is to translate Alice in Wonderland from fiction to a physical reality for provoking a sense of spatial estrangement; Frank Gehry’s Disney Opera hall or Bilbao Museum would be intriguing examples. Whether you like Gehry`s buildings or are critical of them, transversion inside them does evoke a strange sense of being in wonderland. Estrangement in art is the result of applying artistic devices (old or new) which are unique to each medium, regardless of the content and message. Gehry has invented his own unique expressionist design tools, by which he can elicit that sense of spatial wonder. Interestingly enough, one of the five iconic projects referenced on the urban confluence competition brief, is Gehry`s Bilbao.
Although I like Alice in Wonderland tale so much that it makes me a little biased towards this project over the other two submissions, this project looks like a physical incarnation of a piece of a scenery at Disney's Alice in Wonderland animation, which is turned into a gigantic piece of Pop art. Our insistence on choosing designs with some unfamiliar characters to symbolize the innovative aura of Silicon Valley, should not deceive us to select artifacts which literally message a dream story about unfamiliar situations. Whereas a fascinating spatial translation would be more like Gehry`s Disney Hall, what we are left with here is more like a good sculpture choice for Disneyland as an entertainment theme park. I believe, this selection approach, weakens, if not compromises, the whole purpose of the competition.
Unlike their apparent similarities, a competition for an urban icon and an art festival are from two different universes. One is to symbolically give to its social context and history, the other is to contribute to its own disciplinary discourse. Welcome to Wonderland, is more like a temporary installation for a Pop art festival, which the city has eventually decided to keep permanently, because it is so cool.
Just a few more common examples that we are accustomed with. If we are looking for true conceptual innovation for a landmark in the city, we may think of Peter Eisenman`s Jewish memorial in Berlin, where, instead of designing a conventional massive object, he designed a field of concrete slabs to transform an urban open space into an iconic phenomenon for the city. With the same token, if we would like to give rise to a sense of defamiliarization in an urban park, we could think of Parc de la Villette designed by Bernard Tschumi, where the continuum experience of a conventional park is turned into the experience of fragmented events.
I am not saying that we need to have such progressive projects to reinvent these typologies every time we do a competition. Not at all. I`m saying, if we do not have such projects, we may select the most highly designed community-oriented proposals which are more in congruence with our contemporary understanding of an urban icon, some of which are already addressed on the competition brief. If we do not distinguish between what is critically innovative and what is merely irrelevant but looks different, then our obsession with innovation will turn back at itself. What matters is to have a socially meaningful urban icon. Sometimes the most obvious ideas are the strongest ones.
Let me finish with this, regardless of all criticisms, I still believe “Welcome to Wonderland” stands highly above its two rivals because at least it offers a distinctive aesthetic character. The other two are already aesthetically exhausted and out of vogue.
“Welcome to wonderland” is by far..
Spot on! Very Accurate. .
This is partially directed to Nebula Tower and the Breeze of Innovation. But mostly to Nebula Tower. I am going to break down my comments into three parts:
a) Visual Language, b) Scale and Location, c) Symbolism
Visual language:
With the very limited selection possibility -three out of a thousand- we would expect the finalist’s projects to be as different as possible, rationally to maximize the range of ideas which will be developed. It is quite odd that two out of the three finalists, visually, mimic the fashionable language of porous and semi-transparent volumetric meshes made of thin and light structural elements. This is sincerely nothing but a stylistic reproduction of Sou Fujimoto`s past years projects. This can't have any logical explanation other than the dominance of a certain aesthetic preference amongst the jury members. Even having a cursory examination of Fojimato`s Taiwan Tower (2011 first place) and his Serpentine pavilion (2013) to compare them with the two mentioned submissions, will shed enough light on this issue that would make any further discussions redundant. However, if that was the dominant aesthetic taste in the jury, so the board could have simply invited Fujimoto Architects to design the Icon! For such a prestigious competition an aesthetic mock of another architect's work is not proper.
For the 2015 AARHUS NewSchool of Architecture competition , the Danish Building & Property Agency selected three well-known architectural firms: SANNA, BIG, Lacaton & Vassal. Only then, they announced an open design competition. The goal was to select three finalists from the open competition to help them develop their projects to compete with the chosen firms. Although I`m not intending to say that this is the ideal way of having a competition, at least none of the three selections of AARHUS competition ended up looking like any of SANNA`s projects.
Not to mention, Silicon Valley Nebula tower, Breeze of innovation have already picked up Fujimoto`s Taiwan tower idea of voiding an obelisk-like mass off their internal volume to leave a blurry ghost-like effect of a tower`s silhouette on their exterior. Whereas in Fujimoto`s design, the void is a critical counterpoint to any tower-like structure belonging to the past century, in our urban confluence finalist`s proposals, the voids, purportedly, are a celebration of San Jose’s historic light tower. That`s the difference!
Scale and location:
Due to the height restriction, no tall structure, either the contemporary Fujimoto-like tower or the classic Eiffel- like tower, will never be able to serve its anticipated sublime iconic role for San Jose. They are at best one third of their effective scale. They would be overshadowed and intimidated by any mid-rise building in their vicinity.
In any case, when it comes to the iconicity and visual impact of tall structures, location plays an even more important role than scale. Take for example the location of the Statue of liberty in NY or the Redeemer Statue in Rio. It is impossible to separate their iconic value from their place. Statue of liberty is the most visible icon on the New York harbor symbolizing the entrance to the United States from East, while the Redeemer Statue is positioned at a high peak of Corcovado mountain to maintain its symbolic protecting exposure over Rio de Janeiro. Although Redeemer Statue is smaller than Statue of Liberty, thanks to its strategic location, it has the sublime effect it is intended to have as an icon for Rio. Locating either of these statues in a local park in the middle of the city would ruin their power of iconicity. They would become urban sculptures or pieces of pop art at best. What would happen to the Statue of Liberty, had it been installed in Central Park?
A successfully designed Icon takes advantage of its location to strengthen its symbolic value. Guadalupe park as location, offers numerous opportunities for a variety of building typologies to become urban landmarks, yet 200 feet tall towers are definitely not amongst them. This is a problem with all three finalists. They are all making a relation to their location that is too comfortable for their design and construction, but they are in no dialogue with their location and do not add anything to their place as the confluence of two rivers. We may have all three of them in any park as art installations or a pavilion, though none of them would serve as a real urban icon.
Symbolism:
If the Statue of liberty is still relevant today, it is because it represents universal values. It was designed and built when New York was the hub of America's import /export, an important center of high-tech companies of the second industrial revolution and in the middle of the banking boom. Yet, neither symbolically or metaphorically does the Statue represent any number of those banks, trade companies or the innovative spirit of tech-industries. It does not represent anything from the past either. It represents enlightenment and liberty as universal human values shared by all Americans!
The future of Silicon Valley, Saint Jose or Guadalupe park confluence cannot be reduced to a few hundred high-tech companies or their entrepreneurial innovative spirit. Neither their history can be diminished to an image of an old Light Tower. Of course, all of them are constituents of Saint Jose`s overall identity (for which we are very proud and grateful). The point is, over insistence on symbolizing these exclusive characters of contemporary Silicon Valley, rather than proposing an icon that could inclusively represent all the communities in San Jose, is more like setting up a flag for those companies in a public property.
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