While that name is self-ordained, San Jose makes a good case for it. The city is home to such leading tech powerhouses as software maker Adobe Systems, networking giant Cisco and America's favorite online garage sale, eBay. San Jose also owns the region's major airport, and hosts the bulk of its cultural attractions, including a new museum of technology. Along with its economic transformation, San Jose has become a major metropolis of nearly 1 million people, putting it just one notch off the list of America's 10 largest cities.
You might think that the "capital" of a place with Silicon Valley's global influence would have an impressive "capitol" building of its own. But if you go to San Jose's city hall, prepare to be disappointed. It is a small, drab structure that smacks of 1950s functionalism. Like most office buildings of its era, it is set away from downtown. It looks about the right size for a city of 100,000, which was roughly San Jose's population when the building went up.
All that is about to change, however. San Jose is building itself a dramatic new city hall. The government center will be not only suitably grand--to match the city's newfound prominence--but also a unique monument amidst the Valley's faceless office parks. In every way, San Jose is thinking big. It hired a prominent architect, Richard Meier, fresh off of his success with the Getty art museum in Los Angeles. Meier's plans show a huge domed rotunda next to a 19-story tower that would be the tallest structure on San Jose's skyline. It is one of the country's most ambitious city hall projects in some time, and unlike San Jose's current building, this one will be located where city halls have traditionally gone: downtown. "It's a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity to do something like this," says Ralph Qualls, San Jose's public works director. "We want to do something that's worthy of San Jose's growth and status in the whole world."
San Jose is not the only high-tech city that is thinking along these lines. Seattle has a new city hall on the drawing boards. In fact, Seattle contracted with Peter Bohlin, the same architect who designed the techno-mansion of Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates. Austin, Texas, which is emerging as a mecca for technology industries, is also planning to construct a new municipal center. Officials there have brought on board a well-known architect, Antoine Predock, who is being asked to come up with a "uniquely Austin" design that might rival the state capitol as an icon for the city. "Austin is now in transition, from a college town where state government is a dominant part of the economy, into a focal point in the worldwide and creative economy," says Mayor Kirk Watson. "It's fitting and proper that we build a new city hall now."
That such projects are happening in these places at this time is no coincidence. For starters, it reflects the 30-year lifespan typically associated with public buildings. Especially in the West, where so many were erected in the 1950s, such structures are due--or overdue-- for renovation or replacement. It's also a testament to the dynamism of the "new economy" that each city lies at the center of. These buildings are meant to reflect the spirit of the cities that are leading the country into the 21st century. For municipalities that hope to follow in their footsteps, the new buildings provide a glimpse of what city halls will look like--and how they will function--in the Information Age.
Forget the heavy bronze doors and Corinthian columns. The provocative and unabashedly non-traditional designs express their civic nature in other ways. Not surprisingly, however, critics of the ultra-modern are wondering whether today's cutting-edge architecture will be tomorrow's laughing stocks. It's a fair question, given that each city has seen its once-vaunted municipal building end up on the scrap heap of popular taste.
At the same time, these city halls face an even more profound uncertainty. Could the very technologies that are coming out of San Jose, Seattle and Austin make the notion of a big, centralized city hall obsolete? The cities are gambling that e-mail, the Internet and telecommuting won't turn their civic icons into dinosaurs. "Technology here tends to explode so fast that it's hard to know where we'll be in the next moment," says Frank Fiscalini, San Jose's vice mayor and a longtime proponent of the new city hall. "The building has to be adaptable, both to the way that technology evolves and the way people will work in the future."
For San Jose, a major challenge has been trying to figure out what the capital of Silicon Valley should look like. "We have an opportunity to create a physical manifestation of Silicon Valley--but we're not quite sure what that is yet," says Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association. "We're struggling to put a physical face on this thing that happens over phone lines, in fiber and through the air."
City officials wanted a landmark, something that would be easily recognizable as San Jose's. They told the architect their loftiest goals, and let him fill in the details. "We talked about when the president is in town, where will we roll out the red carpet?" says Joe Guerra, the mayor's policy director. "When NBC is lining up a shot for the evening news, what will they choose for their backdrop?"
For a civic symbol, Meier chose an old stand-by: the dome. However, he didn't put it on top of the building. Rather, he plunked down a stand-alone dome in a sweeping public plaza. Clad in glass and steel, this rotunda will serve as both a grand entrance to the building, and as a place for public gatherings, private dinners, and State of the City speeches. Together with a 19-story office tower for city employees, the structure will be the most recognizable building in San Jose.
It was also important that city hall seem inviting. San Jose officials want it to be more than a place where citizens go to take care of errands such as paying their water bill. The plaza surrounding the rotunda is meant to be a comfortable space that will attract people day and night for events and concerts. The rotunda's sliding glass doors are expected to stay open most of the time, allowing people to move freely from outdoors into the massive indoor space.
Inside, the building will also be easier to navigate when citizens do have business to tend to. The first floor will have a one-stop service center, where people can come right in off the street and easily pay bills, attain licenses and apply for permits. Access for the disabled will be greatly enhanced over the current city hall. And the council chambers will be wired with the latest audio-visual equipment.
To many longtime residents, the new municipal center is seen as a sort of redemption. Ever since city employees moved into the current building in 1958, San Jose has been living with a ghost. The building they vacated was one of old San Jose's great landmarks, a majestic brick structure that had stood in a park at the very heart of town since the 1880s. A 1901 account called the red-brick building "elegant," and likened it to a "palace built during the period of the Renaissance." By the 1950s, however, the city had outgrown its home, and it became too costly to fix up. Months after the city government moved into its new quarters, the old city hall was demolished.
Its replacement, planted in a grassy campus surrounded by acres of parking lots, was heralded by a local newspaper as "San Jose's pride." But time and changing tastes were not kind to the new city hall, and it quickly grew out of favor. Meanwhile, the symbolism of the city leaving for the suburbs dealt downtown a crushing blow. Businesses and residents followed the exodus, and by the mid-'60s, people were already calling the city's move a mistake. Ever since, there has been talk of bringing city hall back to the city's old civic and commercial core.
After decades of talk, San Jose is finally doing it. But the impetus had as much to do with real estate as image. The 1958 city hall was designed for 600 employees, but the city's work force now numbers three times that. San Jose is leasing office space all around town, but with the tech economy booming, those leases have become very expensive. The city is dishing out about $6 million this year on office rents.
In 1996, voters approved the construction of a new city hall downtown. City leaders framed the choice as a simple question of buying versus renting. But some felt an almost spiritual excitement about moving back to the city center. It was not only an opportunity to replace the civic landmark that was lost when the wrecking ball took care of the old city hall. It was also a chance to help revitalize the very downtown that city hall's departure helped to decimate a generation ago.
Like San Jose, Seattle has been operating for years out of an outmoded city hall that has not kept pace with the city's stature in the world. Design-wise, the 1962 Municipal Building is a drab, nondescript box, which some say looks like a budget motel. Functionally, the building is too small and not up to snuff with seismic safeguards. Renovating it would have cost the city more than tearing it down and building anew.
An opportunity for a quick fix presented itself several years ago when a glut formed in Seattle's office market. Building prices sank, and the city jumped at the chance to buy a 62-story tower downtown. But as officials considered converting the tower into a city hall, the question arose: Is a speculative office tower an appropriate icon? They decided not. The tower could be used for office space, but Seattle really needed a separate place to make a civic statement. "An imposing high-rise structure was not the right symbol for city government," says Janet Pelz, a project spokesperson. "It didn't provide the kind of welcoming and open arms that make an invitation for the public to come on in."
That decision, however, only left more questions. For one thing, what is the right symbol for city government? And what is an appropriate amount to pay for that symbol? When Seattle last built a city hall, all anybody cared about was the cost--so form lost out completely to function. This time, city officials acknowledge that if they want a building of distinction, it's going to cost a little extra. Yet, just because lots of those new-economy billionaires call Seattle home, it doesn't mean that the city should build itself a Taj Mahal, either. "I believe deeply in the need for expressive civic architecture that is enduring," says Peter Steinbrueck, a Seattle councilman who is also an architect. "But it shouldn't give the impression of extravagance or overembellishment."
Bohlin's design reflects this balance. It is not as daring as Meier's plans for San Jose, but it is a vast improvement over the current facility. Drawings show a seven-story tower for city staff, clad in light-colored stone. An airy atrium connects the tower to the council chamber, which is crowned by two waving titanium sheets. Bohlin says it has an "open-minded" civic quality. The use of stone and columns echo traditional government buildings, he notes, while the curved shapes of the council chamber will be "welcoming like two hands."
Although Seattle has emerged as a major player in the global economy, its city hall also will remind citizens of their physical location in the Northwest. Wood will be used liberally in the interiors. Glass- curtain walls will offer views of water and mountains. And Seattle's culture of environmental consciousness is reflected in the city's demand for a "green" building that uses recycled materials and as much natural lighting as possible.
On the outside is a one-and-a-half block public plaza offering beautiful views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. Not only is this good news for office workers on their lunch breaks, but it's also attractive to political activists. Seattle has a dearth of open space downtown, leaving few suitable places for protesters to rally. In the wake of last fall's riots surrounding the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, city officials are eager to offer the civic plaza as a natural staging area. The park will be large enough to handle big crowds, but contained enough to make policing demonstrations manageable.
Technology, of course, is another key to the design. The building will be fully wired with fiber-optic lines for high-speed Internet access. At council meetings, overflow crowds will be kept in the loop, thanks to an auxiliary room wired with a live television feed, cameras and microphones. A cybercafe may go into a space located on the ground floor. In any case, the goal is to allow for a certain amount of technological flexibility. "We're at the center of the technology revolution here, with Microsoft here and software companies cropping up all the time, but it gets expensive to incorporate constantly changing technologies," Steinbrueck says. "It's not yet clear to what extent people will telecommute and how much we'll rely on electronic communication as opposed to actually being there."
In a place such as Seattle, where it seems everyone is constantly chatting on their cell phones, there is also a social concern associated with all this technology. Although the Internet is connecting people with each other in new ways, Bohlin is sensitive to the fact that it sometimes leaves people feeling isolated. His design incorporates lots of spaces--large and small, inside and out--where people might want to gather. "People are pulling back into their computerized world," Bohlin says. "We're looking for ways to get people to interact."
Austin has been thinking about building a new city hall for a quarter- century. Since 1974, the city council has been meeting in a "temporary" chamber that grew more permanent each time that a funding plan came up short. That dingy, windowless cave said as much about Austin's small-town mindset, however, as it did about tight budgets. "Its tawdriness embodies a time when the city was smaller and less sophisticated," the Austin American-Statesman wrote recently.
These days, a humming technology industry has transformed Austin into a cosmopolitan city of 600,000. Fittingly, it was the arrival of a huge software company that finally broke the city hall logjam. Computer Sciences Corp. is building a financial headquarters on three blocks of city-owned land downtown. A new city hall will be built on a fourth block using lease money from the blockbuster deal.
While the city hall part of the project is still early in the design phase (schematic drawings are not yet available), local officials are pretty clear about what they want: A building that is uniquely Austin and--as in San Jose and Seattle--a magnet that attracts people downtown for lots of different reasons.
One draw is the location. Austin's city hall will face Town Lake, which is a hub for thousands of people who use a popular athletic trail there. A public plaza will connect the city hall to the park, providing a civic bridge between the city's recreational and commercial quarters. "The plaza will draw people there to celebrate the natural beauty of Austin right there on the lake," says Mayor Watson. "You could literally walk, bike or run along the trail, and then meet friends at city hall."
In addition, the plan is for the back side of city hall to incorporate some retail or restaurant space. That idea has sparked some controversy among council members, who are not entirely comfortable with the idea of mixing civic and commercial space. "City hall ought to be city hall," says Gus Garcia, a longtime councilman who retired from office a few months ago. "This is the hall where people come to do business with the city, not to buy hamburgers."
But proponents of the storefront plan say it is absolutely essential to help create a vibrant pedestrian zone downtown. Retail is included throughout the six-block redevelopment area, and if those storefronts end at city hall, it might stop people from strolling on, past more shops and restaurants farther up the street. "City hall will not have a big flashing `Eat at Joe's' sign," Watson says. "There needs to be an appropriate dignity about what the building of the people will be-- yet it needs to play a role in the broader renaissance of this quadrant."
Unlike San Jose, whose building will serve as a huge central depot for most city employees, Austin's city hall will be relatively small and serve mostly ceremonial and public functions of local government. Council members and the mayor will work and meet there, as will some of their support staff. But most employees will continue to operate out of other space around town.
It is unlikely, then, that Austin will produce a building as monumental as San Jose's or Seattle's. But regardless of size, there's no doubt that all three cities will take great pride in their new city halls. This age-old sentiment will go a long way toward preserving a role for impressive civic buildings, even in the epoch of e- government. "We'll never be without a need for employee space for government workers," says Seattle Councilman Steinbrueck. "And we'll never be without the cultural need for a city hall that is expressive. There's something lost if we abandon that."
