Downtown San Jose’s Museum Place complex will feature big office tower, Tech Museum expansion

SAN JOSE — A striking office tower where more than 4,000 people could work has been proposed for downtown San Jose, part of the crucial Museum Place development that would also dramatically expand The Tech Museum of Innovation.

The high-rise office complex would total 850,000 square feet, a substantial increase from the original proposal for the site of 250,000 square feet, according to planning documents submitted by Museum Place Owner, a group led by realty entrepreneur Gary Dillabough.

“The idea is to really make this a world-class development, and to make this a world-class office tower that would appeal to a high-tech tenant,” Dillabough said Thursday.

The original proposal for Museum Place had called for an office building, hotel and residences, along with ground-floor retail and the Tech Museum expansion.

With the new plans, submitted to San Jose officials this week, the hotel rooms and residences are gone, replaced by the new office tower. The Tech expansion and the ground floor retail remain in the works.

The new tower could be 19 stories high, Dillabough said. However, if federal height limits related to San Jose airport jetliner flights are eased, the tower could be 20 or 21 stories.

“This is about place-making and building something that can be seen from miles away,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use and planning consultancy.

Being able to construct an office tower that is as high as feasible would bolster efforts to transform downtown San Jose with a more memorable skyline.

“For a healthy downtown, verticality is really important,” Dillabough said. “We are looking at 19 floors, but we would like to go higher another floor or two.”

The development is a short distance from the site where San Jose-based Adobe Systems is planning to expand its three-building downtown headquarters campus by constructing an adjacent tower that could double the company’s workforce.

Across the street, Jay Paul in August paid $284 million for the huge Cityview Plaza office, retail and restaurant complex, a site that several experts believe will be bulldozed and replaced by a modern tech campus, possibly totaling 1 million square feet.

Next to Museum Place, veteran developer J.P. DiNapoli Cos. is planning a 19-story office tower totaling 740,000 square feet.

A few blocks to the west, Google plans a transit-oriented development of offices, homes, stores, restaurants and parks where 15,000 to 20,000 of the tech giant’s employees would work.

Including the Google development and the Adobe expansion, as many as 36,000 employees could be added to downtown San Jose, if all of these office buildings are constructed and filled with workers. In a head-spinning comparison, SPUR estimated in 2014 that downtown San Jose had about 39,500 office workers.

“Having taller buildings would help Google justify all the investments they are making in this area,” Dillabough said.

The current plans for the Tech Museum expansion call for a 63,000-square-foot addition. Dillabough also intends to develop 20,000 square feet of retail and restaurants that would help create a vibrant pedestrian-friendly walking area along the increasingly important Park Avenue.

“The ground floor commercial facing Park Avenue will be one of the most interesting components of the project,” Dillabough said.

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