| Wednesday, October 2, 2002 |
11:39 - Urban Iconography
|
(top)  |
There's a new building going up in downtown San Jose. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's been under construction now for about a year, and it's almost done.
San Jose is sort of a poor excuse for a city. The largest buildings in the downtown area are no taller than about 15 stories; this is largely because the approach path to the airport comes in right over the middle of downtown. Skyscrapers wouldn't be a good thing to have there. And in any case, San Jose is a strange beast-- a theme park of a city. It's a thing of wide palm-lined boulevards, broad sidewalks, shining modern-art buildings intermingled with Conquistador architecture-- ancient arched hotels from the glory days right next to buildings like the Adobe headquarters. There are little courtyards everywhere with fun little restaurants, there are easily accessible opera houses and stage theaters, and a surface-street trolley floats along a smoothly paved side arcade where the street level is an unbroken, polished interlock of cement and brick, into which the rails seem to magically vanish once the train has passed. When leaves fall from the trees and litter the pavement, you expect a uniformed man with a nametag to scurry out from an alcove and whisk them away before the visitors have a chance to see.
And yet it almost always somehow seems deserted. Even when there's traffic on Almaden Boulevard, right down through the heart of downtown toward this new building (to which I am, by degrees, coming), it seems hushed and respectful somehow. The wide sidewalks always seem empty. Whenever I've been downtown, I've felt like I should be stopping by an information booth to see where the concession stands are, only to find it unexpectedly boarded up-- or maybe to be greeted by a grinning and cackling evil clown face, or Yubaba come to steal my name and put me to work in the spirit baths.
So I'm surprised at the amount of new construction that's going on in San Jose these days. Maybe it's still all residual fundage from dot-com fortunes that went into real estate before they shriveled up and blew away; but the cranes have been popping up to raise new edifices one after another, just in the past couple of years. To me it's felt as though it's a band of traveling construction companies, setting up shop wherever they feel like building something, hoisting up their cranes and planting jugglers and ticket-takers outside. I've felt like taking them aside and saying, "No, see, look-- this is San Jose. You want San Francisco, further up the bay." See, even the most midtown city-dwellers in Silicon Valley use the term The City-- and by it they mean San Francisco. San Jose's just an overgrown suburb, and we're still startled to find it there over our shoulders.
So there's this new building, and I'm not sure what it's for. It's butted right up against the San Jose Convention Center, a cavernous hall that hosts car shows and high-tech symposia, but whose corridors have always seemed-- surprise-- curiously empty of people, even during the most intense periods of activity. It's like everything was built about six times too large, but there was always plenty of money so nobody minded.
Approaching the building from the east, as I do every morning, it doesn't look like much. It's kind of beige, kind of drab; it looks like it can't decide whether to be a hotel or some kind of warren for bureaucrats.
But when you pass it edge-on, you notice that the westward-facing side-- the side that fronts on Almaden Boulevard-- is gently curved. And the front is completely faced with glass. The beige stonework that makes up the back face and part of the sides is wrapped around it like a cloak; from the front, this building has a symmetrical grace that looks rather bleak and dingy in the eastern light of morning, but that flares into life at sunset, when the sun ducks behind the fog rolling over the Peninsula mountains and flickers across that curved facade. I wish I had a picture of it, but we're past the season now when I'm driving home during sunset.
Fortunately, I do get to see it at night now, and what strikes me about it-- even now, before it's been opened, or even filled full of walls-- is that big three-story colonnade at the top. Four shiny pillars, fronting what appears to be a tall atrium right at the top of the building-- that's lit from within at night. I'll definitely have to get a picture of it at some point. The columns are back-lit by a soft white glow after dark; I just have to imagine what kind of palatial Monty Burns penthouse is back there, what kind of throne room someone has planted at the top of one of the tallest buildings in the capital of an empire that's in retreat.
No, I don't expect that Silicon Valley will wither and die as the entire world forsakes all technology investment and anything with the word "dot com" in it as a foolhardy fad, akin to betting corporate fortunes on the future of pet rocks. As someone said on the radio the other day, this is a New Economy-- not quite as new as we thought it was, but new nonetheless. The Internet has changed everything, but in more subtle ways than we were willing to believe-- the old rules do in fact still apply. We're just a lot freer in how we get to set up the subjects to which those rules apply.
San Jose doesn't feel deserted because everybody's leaving. It feels deserted because it's less a city than a monument, built by people who wanted to create-- who had learned how to do so under the rules of software. Put all the pieces in place and watch the program run itself. It's SimCity writ large. People go into the city and do city things, but it doesn't feel like it has any history, really. No personality. Even though San Jose as a community has existed as long as the country has, founded in the 1770s, it hasn't been until just recently that it's been built up-- and the result is artificial, like Orange County. It has no expression on its face. Not the tired grin Los Angeles flashes at visitors, not the casual wave you get from San Francisco, not the curt businesslike nod of Chicago, not the self-consciously guilty shrug of well-dressed Boston. San Jose is a lovely place to visit, a great place to relax. But it's no New York.
It takes some getting used to. But I'm liking it more and more, just for what it is, the more I see it. After all, its clean wide streets and its palm colonnades and its gleaming new buildings do make for a personality of sorts-- and the longer it's there, the richer a tradition it becomes... until San Jose ceases to be a thing of business parks and electronics superstores, and becomes a City.
|
|
