Iconic office tower with rooftop gardens proposed for downtown San Jose near Fairmont

SAN JOSE — An iconic office tower to be crowned with rooftop gardens would rise in downtown San Jose, a striking project that bids to dramatically reshape the skyline of the Bay Area’s largest city and could attract a big tech company, according to a new proposal on file with city planners.

The 17-story office tower is designed to give the appearance of four separate towers and up to 2,900 people could work in the office portion of the complex, being planned on the site of a surface parking lot near the Fairmont Hotel, the proposal from veteran developer Sobrato Organization shows.

“This is unique,” said Chase Lyman, vice president of leasing and acquisitions with Cupertino-based Sobrato. “Downtown San Jose has never seen an office project like this before. It will be an iconic headquarters location.”

The office tower would total 581,000 square feet, include 20,000 square feet of ground floor retail, and would feature floor sizes of up to 54,000 square feet. That type of wide-open space is designed to appeal to Silicon Valley tech companies.

“Any day is a good day that a property owner tells us that they’re ready to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into transforming a downtown parking lot into a high-rise home for an innovative employer,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said Thursday in an interview with this news organization.

The project would front on South Market, West San Carlos and South First streets.

“We are going to call this Market Street Towers,” Lyman said. The office complex was designed by Arquitectonica, a famed Miami-based architecture, urban planning and design firm.

Sobrato executives intend to construct the new tower even if the developer hasn’t signed up a tenant for the office and retail complex.

“The plan is to build this project,” Lyman said. “We are not just putting pretty pictures together for the fun of it. We are going to develop it.”

The proposal by a top-flight developer such as Sobrato suggests that momentum has built dramatically for the city’s urban core.

“The wind is truly behind downtown San Jose now,” said Nick Goddard, senior vice president with Colliers International, a commercial realty brokerage. “The clever money is here, more and more investors are coming in.”

Sobrato hopes to entice a wide array of prospective tenants — or a single huge user that could bring thousands of jobs into downtown San Jose.

“What is unique about this block is that this is an acre and a half in size,” Lyman said. “That allows for the big floor plates. It could be a single-company type headquarters. Or there could be multiple users. The building is designed to appeal to a wide range of users, including technology companies.”

Among the unique features of the tower: Two of the sections boast rooftop gardens with multi-level terraces. The gardens could be exclusive to different tenants, or they could be used by a single tenant, according to Lyman.

Downtown San Jose, hollowed out for decades by the flight of retailers to suburban malls such as Westfield Valley Fair and Santana Row, appears to finally be turning a corner in its journey to becoming a destination urban core.

“You have centralized transportation, tremendous entertainment, sports, restaurants, hotels, nightlife, places to live, all of this makes it a fun place to be,”

Google plans a transit-oriented community of offices, restaurants, shops, homes, and open spaces where 15,000 to 20,000 of the search giant’s employees would work near the Diridon train station and SAP Center.

San Jose-based Adobe Systems says it intends to “double down on downtown San Jose” with plans for a dramatic expansion of its three-building headquarters campus by adding fourth office tower at an adjacent parcel.

“We look forward to working with the Sobrato team to bring an attractive addition to downtown San Jose’s skyline,” Mayor Liccardo said.

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