“Thirty75 Tech” Office Building

By Luca Maria Francesco Fabris - 15 December 2023
BEGA has participated in the project

At times, good architecture can also come about as a result of market speculation. This happens when client and architect pursue the same goal: quantitative quality, which although viewed differently by each party, benefits both the future occupant and the community at large. While return-on-investment is all about quantity for developers and real estate owners, this does not have to be to the detriment of quality. Which is where the prowess of architects and their advisors come into play with project design excellence able to sustain the demands of quantity and its corollary, repetition. In short, the client-designer relationship must be of the win-win type, to borrow a term from game theory – a probabilistic relationship based on a series of factors, some of which can, and are, modified. The result may be innovative, outside-the-box architecture, born of research and intelligence – and why not, a sound dose of capitalism.

The office block we present in these pages is one of these miracles. Completed last year at Santa Clara, California, this tertiary-sector building is the work of Verse Design, the practice headed by architects Courtenay Bauer and Paul Tang. The key lay in optimizing the opportunities offered by the plot located in an area completely devoted to innovation and technology. A study of local building and real-estate ownership regulations revealed that in contrast to the developer’s initial investment plan, a more experimental project using technology capable of serving a more complex structure would be granted building permission for a considerably larger usable area of the plot. It was also immediately apparent that the extra cost entailed would be easily offset by the increased rental income from more tenants. The project therefore went ahead, combining a series of energy-saving measures for a larger overall massing with extensive projections over a minimal building footprint. The first challenge was to design a...