Don’t judge a historic building by its looks
If I told you an early work of César Pelli, the architect behind San Francisco’s iconic Salesforce Tower, was in danger of being demolished in San Jose, you might object.
As you might if I said one of the city’s few remaining examples of a major architectural style was threatened or that the clock was ticking for a distinctive building from downtown’s first big redevelopment project.
But if I showed you a picture of the Bank of California building without that context, you’d probably give the thumbs up to tearing it down. Heck, you might even want to work the controls on the wrecking ball yourself.
The concrete structure that squats on the corner of Park Avenue and Almaden Boulevard, built in 1973, isn’t pretty. But it’s the best remaining example in San Jose of Brutalist architecture — a style that emphasizes geometric shapes, minimalist design and building materials like smooth concrete and steel. Detractors say it looks like the very best of East Germany during the Cold War.
The San Jose City Council is expected to soon sign off on its demolition, along with the rest of the 10-building financial cen
ter now known as CityView Plaza, to make way for a 3.79 million-square-foot megacampus proposed by developer Jay Paul. But the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission, at the urging of the Preservation Action Council, voted unanimously last week to recommend to the City Council that the building be designated a historic landmark.
Ben Leech, PAC-SJ’s new executive director, said the nonprofit has launched a campaign, “Save the Sphinx,” at preservation. org. He doesn’t think the building, which later served as Santa Clara County’s Family Court building, is an impediment to progress downtown.
“It’s an asset to downtown San Jose,” he said. “What we can do is learn from the past, and we know that every period of architecture goes through a phase where it’s overlooked before it’s appreciated. Buildings like this will be the future gems of the city of San Jose.”
Overlooking architectural periods has precedent here. San Jose’s 1889 City Hall, a towering building designed by Theodore Lenzen with Gothic overtones that stood in the center of what is now Plaza de Cesar Chavez. We love our Victorian-era buildings now, but the old City Hall was considered an eyesore in the late 1950s when it was torn down.
Years later, I talked to people who worked in the building who called it a cramped, moldy death trap that deserved its fate. But imagine how interesting Plaza de Cesar Chavez would be today with that restored building as its centerpiece, serving perhaps as a San Jose Historical Museum.
PAC-SJ’s Leech believes San Jose would benefit from having an eclectic mix of buildings that showcase styles from different eras. And you only have to visit San Jose State University to see this concept in reality.
While buildings have been torn down over the decades, the campus still is a mosaic of the university’s long history — from the iconic 1910 Tower Hall to the more recent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library and the new Interdisciplinary Science building under construction. Buildings from the 1930s through the 1980s are interspersed throughout SJSU. Even Brutalism is represented in the old Student Union building, which was incorporated into a recent expansion instead of being erased.
For the past few of decades, San Jose has been infatuated with architecture from the Art Deco period and earlier, but anything built between the end of World War II and the mid-1980s has been considered passé and expendable. The problem is, once you “expend” a building, you can’t bring it back.
Longtime residents may remember the Security Savings building, which was on First and San Carlos streets across from Original Joe’s. The first “modern” building in that area of downtown when it was built in 1963, it had white panels on its sides that created an offset checkerboard effect and a revolving sign on its roof.
You know what? I hated the way that building looked, and I cheered when it was torn down in 1999.
Today, I have a great fondness for Mid-Century Modern structures and regret feeling that way. Part of my change of heart also may be due to the fact that while there are new plans for a set of high-rise towers on the site, we lost that building just to have a parking lot there for the past 21 years.
Leech says the responsibility of preservationists is to raise these issues, even if they sometimes seem like lost causes. “In this way I see myself as something like a public defender,” he said. “Not every building will be found innocent, so to speak, but somebody needs to argue the case.”
He hopes the City Council will take seriously PACSJ’s alternative plan, which alters the footprint of the project to allow the Bank of California building to remain where it is.
“Our analysis of the CityView Plaza project suggests to us that the site is big enough for both the new and the old,” Leech said. “So the long-view argument that this building will be more appreciated in the future is paired with the argument that it’s not actually in the way of progress at all.”
The San Jose City Council may find merit in that plan, or it may decide the building isn’t worth saving, that its historical significance is wanting, or it’s just too ugly. My guess is that Jay Paul Co. has too much invested in downtown San Jose for the council to vote otherwise.
But if this building gets torn down, we shouldn’t cheer.