Google unveiled on Wednesday its most detailed vision yet for a transit-oriented neighborhood in downtown San Jose [...]
Google’s village would add 7.3 million square feet of offices, 4,000 homes, shops, restaurants, a hotel, 10 parks, cultural and entertainment hubs, and immersive and interactive educational elements near downtown San Jose’s Diridon train hub.
— Mercury News
Google's ambitious 80-acre, transit-oriented Downtown West plan first appeared on Archinect in October 2019 and involves a number of prominent architecture and urban design firms, including Kohn Pedersen Fox (related), Heatherwick Studio, Grimshaw Architects, SHoP Architects, Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB), and SITELAB urban studio.
More details can be found on the Downtown West project website and San Jose's Planning Division.
24 Comments
The grid paver and grass, anyone ever see that successfully created in real life? Curious to know what it looks like after a few months or years.
Googlemetricism is the new style
San Jose
Toronto:
@sneakypete. maybe CA grass does better in winter?
i do hate this collage of miscellaneous fun details approach to design. it's what i imagine AI architecture would generate, an infinite sea of enthusiastic nothings.
yeah, the pavers are the thing to focus on with this project. Totally ;-)
This is an amazing project for what it represents. A return to the kind of thinking that gave us the Phallanstere and the Salt Works at Chaux (by Ledoux), where a single company creates the ideal environment for its workers. Back then whole families would be under the care of a company, now google and heatherwick and the other architects/planners are trying to build in a decentralised flavor to their centralised model, even allowing the entire existing city to take part. As ambitious as Disney's version of the city, but willfully integrated and (apparently) more diverse.
The undertone of the video is remarkable because they clearly feel the hostility of the community they want to join/control. Burned badly in Toronto they really have all the words and ideas in place and toned down a few of the concepts that freaked out the canadians. Super progressive, careful, environmental, resilient (according to them), inclusive.
And yet the entire thing feels slightly fearful instead of joyful. How in the world did they manage to do that? This is the part I find most amazing. I wonder if it is because they are taking on the role of government but dont want to provide the things that a government does, and it makes all of the good ideas feel inadequate once they recognize the problems they need to take on.
With all the possible critiques it is still cool to see that this kind of project is being imagined.
I have a personal connection to this project. I asked about the pavers because I didn't have much to add at the time. San Jose is a fascinating city for a lot of reasons, and this project and the surrounding area is remarkably aspirational.
I don't love that they are, as you note, creating a new-is-old-again corporate campus, but I think that it's a step in the right direction at least in the respect of locating it at a transit nexus, which will, if nothing else, help with the pollutive aspects of commuting.
On a somewhat different (but related) note, it's unfortunate, in my opinion, that San Jose Airport is so poorly located, leaving SJ feeling stunted considering its size.
yeah, it is something to behold. This utopian model pretending to be something less controlling is an interesting swerve.
i think it reflects the success of a development team using eye candy to divert discussion away from meaningful issues ;) as architects we're just as susceptible as the general public we just prefer more complex flavors of candy.
i guess as an architect i have a hard time evaluating a proposal based only on the PR style media. I assume there are motives and concerns to be dealt with which i know nothing about. I don't particularly care about San Jose as a city, and know nothing about the specific conditions here which it will change. Considering the scale of housing shortage in CA, a project to add 4000 units is a minor adjustment, even if it's done really well.
It is interesting to compare company developed housing to the older worker-dormitory style housing of something like Pullman in Chicago. Regardless of the openness of the environment and level of control of the company over peoples lives, it's a fascinating renaissance of the feudal system: people rent their homes and buy their provisions and enjoy their recreation all within their lord's estate. As an architect I'm obviously more interested in getting in on the design of the manor, like Palladio. :)
University of Arkansas is building way more interesting design than this fake kiddie urbanism garbage that will probably never be built or look even cheaper than these renderings suggest. I'd rather spend time at Disneyworld than wonder around these meaningless, trite non-spaces made for brain-dead philistines
thats a bit name-cally, chemex. What project are you speaking of at U of Arkansas? The Grafton Architects project is very interesting, but Adohi Hall is so bleak urbanistically, even though its a reasonable bit of architecture. The campus does not seem to get over being a campus as far as I can tell, and the spaces are as disney-fied and stilted as any other example out there. Is there a plan to do more than these? Google seems to be trying to avoid exactly the problems a campus typology represents, but you are saying an actual campus is better? How so?
I think criticisms towards projects like this (Promoted by Big Tech) is less about the architectural - there is nothing offensive about the design and the press releases waxes lyrical about all the right things - but a suspicion about the ulterior motives behind the utopian vision presented and the superficiality of the spaces' usage. One might find the inoffensive aesthetic a problem in its own right if that standardized Instagram-friendly style of calm woods, muted greens, ghostly figures, and soft lens flares has spread like a benign virus from social media to the real world.
yeah i can agree with that sentiment. Google seems intent on dodging the difficult issues as much as possible by filling in the gaps with generic safe-looking space. That they dont state clearly what they are after is a large part of the problem. It is why they failed in Toronto as much as anything. In an age tired of spin, the full-spin model this kind of project aims for rings first hollow, and then suspicious.
Not knowing much about the existing Google footprint in CA, this is clearly part of a new tech age suburbanization of the city philosophy--bored with their drably designed corporate offices, they want to "mingle with the people" in downtown urban space that they annexed. It's a kind of reverse Garden City or New Town approach that's been cooking for a while among urbanists, who see the city as a kind of playground.
The reason I refer to the U of Arkansas, is they are doing serious studies of timber construction, then building them building by building--surrounded by beautiful mountain landscape. There is no grand masterplan to take over a downtown, and no annoying tech-kid Suburban City impulse. They have their own campus, they build nice wood buildings on it, and leave it at that. The obnoxious PR here is more propaganda for urban annexation than an architecture plan. You want a 20-minute city? Why not just build offices in Kansas City or Cincinnati?
right, but the point is to not have a campus, because that is what everyone is so angry about (for good reason). In which case, you are suggesting they should simply make a campus wherever they want and ignore the issues? Or you are proposing they should make a campus outside of the city and detach even more? That seems rather a step backwards. Easier, but not helpful if the city actually wants to get more out of a company than taxes from the workers who settle in these places...and possibly not even that if they settle strategically outside the city centre to avoid taxes. Not the best policy I can imagine.
If the city wants to bring in more Google workers to live and contribute to the economy, then they should build more housing and urbanism for that. They don't need to give up control and make their entire city a Google campus. That's just going to scare away and price out all of the people they are trying to "mingle" with if they haven't already.
according to the city, this is the process by which they are building the housing. If you are asking for equity, having google foot the bill for housing is certainly a better answer than asking the city to invest in housing, isnt it?
Google's spin-off Sidewalk Labs launches Delve, an urban planning tool that's supposed to use machine learning to generate design options with integrated financial models: https://hello.delve.sidewalkla...
I trust the design variables of the Google algorithm to decide urban planning
They tried to come for the architects' jobs with Flux. That didn't work. Urban planning seems a better way for the Silicon Valley giants to further their reach into the real world. God knows what their algorithms are cooking up.
do they own the whole of san jose now?
Some kind of new urbanist Hershey, PA with a different architectural style. I am in opposition to urban scale projects with thematic ideas and human wrangling.
aaron betsky offers a pretty good summary of the google drive (to build)
he says its better than normal, not innovative, and a pretty good proof of the lie that tech companies and others tell when they say they could do better if given a free hand. If they actually COULD do better these places would be much more interesting than they are...and they of course avoid all the actual problems of urban life already discussed above.
we should be asking more not less of these big companies.
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