3Com adds urban ambience to Santa Clara campus
San Jose Mercury News - Published Sunday, April 18, 1999
ADOBE MOVED to Park Street in San Jose to enjoy the downtown ambience. 3Com,
on the other hand, is building its own urban ambience in an unexpected place: Great
America Parkway at Highway 237.
It's taken 10 years so far, but the opening of a major new addition shows 3Com has the
right idea. Density and diversity, restaurants and health clubs are all united in a design of
great practicality and imagination.
A major new addition to the campus, designed by Studios Architecture of San Francisco,
adds 50 percent to the size of the campus, and houses 3Com's Palm division and a new
data center.
Unlike Electronic Arts' cool, elegant new headquarters in Redwood City, this campus is
a crazy quilt of angles and curves. It is more medieval, says Studios architect Erik
Sueberkrop, than the orderly rectilinear grids of downtown San Jose, or the Stanford
campus: an irregular wall at the perimeter protects a central court. Its lanes are winding,
following the shape of the property, its courtyards are strange polygons, reflecting new
additions and structures added over time -- much like a historic city.
Yet the wall pushed up against Great America Parkway on one side is not intimidating. It
breaks open at several points, and an undulating roofline rolls along like a wave. It is an
emphatic new urban edge and gateway to what used to be Santa Clara's back door. Like
Studio's Silicon Graphics campus in Mountain View, 3Com's site is tied into a larger
regional system of recreational paths that will grow in the future as adjacent property fills
in.
Choice is key to the design and is reflected in the free-form layout. Walk through the
campus at noon and the place is bustling. A half dozen restaurants throughout the
campus offer employees a range of dining experiences, from Chinese to deli, from juice
bar to Starbucks, from vending machine to sit-down, white tablecloth dining. Where else
but a downtown would you get such a choice of dining experiences?3Com finds the
variety keeps employees on site and increases productivity.
The design leverages the density of 3Com's daytime population with a variety of
activities -- not only offices, training centers, assembly line and customer orientation
displays, but also several restaurants, a health club, a basketball court, and grass,
flowers and ponds.
But there's more than a bottom-line motive to this design. It also reflects a pragmatic
egalitarianism that draws employees together in a common purpose -- as a city draws
residents together. Both the high-end restaurant and the vending machine lunch room are
treated with equal respect, looking out onto an attractive pond.
This is a self-confident campus that doesn't have to rely on status design. Any good
downtown has the same thriving diversity.
At the center of the new campus is another restaurant, a large cafeteria-style food service
and dining room with glass walls. It is an inviting and centralized public place. It also is
marked from afar by a spectacular roof structure: A tall steel tuning fork angles high into
the air, acting as a landmark as you approach from the old campus. Cables from this
structure reach out to hold two cantilevered steel I-beams that support the restaurant's
roof. It is a breathtaking piece of stylish Googie architecture, the ultramodern drive-in
style of the American roadside of the 1950s. And it works perfectly to define the center
of the campus.
Like the original 3Com campus, the materials and structures are standard, inexpensive
and nothing fancy -- glass curtain walls, metal roofing, Dryvit exterior panel systems.
The extra value is added in the design that places it well above the average Golden
Triangle campus. 3Com's business is communication, via electronic networks sending
data, images and voices instantly anywhere in the world. But as Abe Darwish, vice
president of 3Com's Real Estate and Site services, notes, human contact is at a premium
in this modern world of instant e-mail. Exchange, interaction, dialogue, even recreation
are part of the balance of a productive company -- or a city. 3Com's corporate campus is
skillfully configured to support both real and virtual interaction.
The site -- long and narrow, crammed between Great America Parkway and a drainage
channel -- is difficult. A serpentine path distinguished by black and white stripes threads
through the old campus and now extends across a bow truss bridge and down the center
of the new addition. Every building in the campus can be entered from this spine. Three
buildings of the new campus addition are open, and another seven-story structure at the
corner of Great American Parkway and 237 is scheduled to be started this fall.
The interior space includes standard-issue cubicles, but Studios adds a sense of
openness via windows and high ceilings (on top floors) so it's easy to catch a glimpse of
the East Bay foothills. Corridors through the large floor plates are clearly marked by
colorful landmarks -- a coffee bar, a lounge, an informal meeting area -- and sinuous
lines carved out of the ordinary, everyday acoustic tile overhead. The order set-up is
visual. You see a meeting room, an exit, a Xerox room, and you walk toward it. It is
design determined by the visual and tactile experience of the place.
3Com's aesthetic is poles apart from the reserved minimalism of the Electronic Arts
headquarters. In ways, it is more exciting as it explores new territory to define a new age
and a new industry. 3Com is looser, though still practical. Its akimbo forms and
structural gymnastics are exuberant, fresh, a bit gaudy, a bit fractile, and not a bit afraid
of breaking the boundaries of good taste. Partly inspired by the flyaway,
Alice-in-Wonderland expressionism of deconstructivism, they also are anchored in the
celebration of exuberant engineering with a strong dose of whirling, weightless video
graphics.
The 3Com buildings are a bit geeky, but so is the electronics industry that is
transforming our culture. Stand in the middle of the campus at noon and you are
surrounded by engineers and marketers, talking shop and enjoying focaccia, toning up at
the health club, playing basketball or soaking up the Santa Clara sun. Second-story
bridges connect building to building. The intersecting bridges, paths and corridors filled
with people look vaguely like a scene from ''Futurama.'' In short, it's a microcosm of
life in Silicon Valley in 1999. 3Com's campus has come as close as anything to
capturing that energy in architecture.
This small downtown is being built as a result of a demand. It's not a case of building it
and hoping they will come. That makes all the difference.
I'm hoping San Jose's civic center has half this energy and populism.
o~~~ O |
