Tall & Urban News

The Market Towers complex, a new downtown San Jose office high-rise that features four towers designed to coalesce into a single striking complex, will redefine the skyline of the nation’s 10th-largest city (by population), the project’s developer said.

Proposed by The Sobrato Organization, The Market Towers complex could bring 585,000 square feet (54,319 square meters) of office and retail space to downtown San Jose at the corner of South Market and West San Carlos streets, according to the project’s developer.

“This is such a unique product,” said Chase Lyman, Sobrato’s vice president for acquisitions and leasing. “It will really redefine the San Jose skyline.”

When construction is complete, the building, at first glance, is expected to have the appearance of four separate office towers. In reality, Lyman said, they are actually merged together into a single high-rise.

“This is one building,” Lyman said. “The optics will make it almost seem as if it’s four different office towers. The architecture will be timeless.”

The 19-story, 90-meter building will include 568,000 square feet (52,768 square meters) of office space, 16,000 square feet of ground-floor retail (1,486 square meters), and 23,000 square feet (2,136 square meters) of sky garden space, according to the project’s web site.

“We will have massive sky gardens in this project,” Lyman said. In addition, the layout of the four towers and the spaces between them is expected to allow natural light to penetrate to virtually all sections of each floor in the complex.

Despite the optimism conveyed by Sobrato executives regarding the Market Towers complex, it is not certain that the developer will pursue the project without a tenant that has agreed to rent the property ahead of its completion.

“We don’t know if we are going to build this on speculation,” Lyman said.

Nevertheless, if built, Market Towers would serve as a crucial link between the core of downtown, the cluster of hotels in the vicinity, and the up-and-coming South First Area, or SoFA district, of downtown San Jose. A parking lot at present, the future site of Market Towers totals 1.5 acres (0.6 hectares).

Adobe recently launched a dramatic expansion of its three-building headquarters campus in downtown San Jose by beginning construction of a fourth office tower at an adjacent site, while Google has proposed a transit-oriented community of office buildings, homes, shops, restaurants, amenities, and open spaces on the western edges of downtown San Jose near the Diridon train station.

For these and other reasons, downtown San Jose appears poised to turn the corner, in Lyman’s view.

“It’s the stuff everybody has been talking about, the things at the Diridon Station area, all the new residential that’s being developed, you have retail that continues to improve, the transit upgrades, whether Caltrain electrification or future BART,” Lyman said.

All of these changes have fundamentally changed the once-sleepy nature of downtown San Jose, in Lyman’s view.

“This is an urban area now,” Lyman said. “We are really bullish on downtown San Jose.”

For more on this story, go to The Mercury News.