Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m excited, excited in a way
that can only be derived from knowing that a brand-new and
significant piece of public architecture is about to be born. Lord
knows we’ve had no end of bold and breathtaking designs littering
the landscape around here for decades.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m excited, excited in a way that can only be derived from knowing that a brand-new and significant piece of public architecture is about to be born. Lord knows we’ve had no end of bold and breathtaking designs littering the landscape around here for decades.
There’s the McEnery Convention Center doing it’s spectacular impersonation of a packing crate for a gargantuan hot dog bun. There’s the County Administration building, known affectionately as the Tower of Rust, whose appearance of forlorn decay was actually an intentional design element for reasons which the Department of Homeland Security has classified lest terrorist groups steal our plans for dopey buildings. And more locally there is the South County Facility of the Superior Court in San Martin, the only known example of genuinely pleasing and fully functional public construction in living memory, until of course it became a luxury condo for toxic mold shortly after it was completed and now lies as abandoned and ignored as a Bush campaign pledge.
Now, we are told, the go-ahead has been given to start construction of a new and allegedly real San Jose International Airport, a terminal that will augment or – dare we hope – replace the misbegotten assemblage of minimalist structures so nondescript that they pass from memory even while one is looking at them. Granted, designing an improvement is not a daunting challenge, as a series of mobile homes, if arranged in a sufficiently creative pattern, would be a big step up. Nonetheless, a beginning is a delicate time, one fraught with potential, and as one local commentator put it, San Jose should build itself an airport terminal that ”shouts Silicon Valley.”
I couldn’t agree more. Here we have the proverbial blank slate and an opportunity to make an architectural statement that says to a world stuffed with clever, eye-catching monuments, ”Behold Silicon Valley. Look on our works, oh ye mighty, and despair.” I even have the perfect design.
No buildings at all. Now take a minute to catch your breath and let that soak in. Yes, indeedy; nuke the clueless piles of building materials that are currently messing up the landscape and build, from scratch, a marvelous new set of terminals – are you ready – underneath the runways! Now, doesn’t that just maniacally scream Silicon Valley? No visible airport at all! You park your car in an underground garage, then you pass through an underground terminal to your gate, and when you’re ready to board you take a jetway/elevator up to ground level and connect to your airplane, which appears to be just sitting in the middle of an empty field. Nothing but runways and taxi strips can be seen – can you imagine? People coming to San Jose would look out their plane windows and see nothing below but paved surfaces and parked planes. It’s the perfect metaphor for what Silicon Valley is famous for: Complicated stuff hidden inside computers that you can’t see and have no idea how it works. People will say, ”Where is it, I can’t see anything happening, this makes no sense,” just like we all do every day with the diabolically secretive computers that run our lives.
If there is a representative image of Silicon Valley, it has to be something invisible, designed by an esoteric priesthood no one understands, humming with activity, and everybody just has to trust that it works like it should. So what better example could we have for a bold and unique airport?
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone got to San Jose and found that there was nothing there.
