As Los Altos prepares for changes to its downtown triangle, residents have varying opinions on the features and characteristics important to them.
The downtown visioning process will bring scenarios for growth, and two new office buildings – one nearly complete at First Street and San Antonio Road and another on the drawing board for State and First streets – will bring more workers to the streets.
Attempts to determine what Los Altos residents want to stay and what they want to change have proved ephemeral so far.
Curt Powell, a local contractor and lifelong Los Altos resident who has been attending public study sessions on this subject, hopes to fix that.
“It’s easy when you’re talking about what you don’t like to come across as completely against it. And I’m not by any means,” Powell said. “It involves going deeper into the design process and completely designing something that’s not only for the developer and the tenant, but for the community as well, because we’re going to be the ones who are walking by it all the time. We’re the ones who are going to be patronizing those tenants. So great design is the hardest thing of all – but it’s doable.”
Powell cited the “elegance” of 1950s-era Los Altos buildings, which he admitted is “hard to describe.”
“Elegance combines the ranch-style home with a global consciousness. It’s very unique,” he said. “There is lots of glass and lots of light, which helps with communication between the inside and the outside of the building.”
A unique village
Powell’s hunt for the Los Altos feel has been taken up by others.
The “village feel” often cited in letters to the city council focuses on building height and retail occupancies, not building materials and landscaping, because those are the political issues that come up at council meetings. But according to Powell, there is more to design than politics – which means Los Altos residents can get involved in other ways.
“There’s no reason the people in Los Altos can’t be involved in expressing their feelings about their design for more than three minutes,” he said.
Powell’s father certainly didn’t. Bill Powell was one of the founders of the Los Altos Village Association (LAVA) and served on the Downtown Beautification Committee. A few of his original streetlamps, cube-shaped and modish, still stand downtown. He strung lights up in the trees after seeing it done at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962.
Scott Hunter, the new executive director of LAVA, said both of those innovations continue to add to Los Altos’ ambience.
“The lights that are in the trees are something that adds a sense of place and that people remember,” he said.
Hunter added that LAVA wants to bring colorful banners to match the planter boxes the association maintains in the parking plazas. He also wants to add more artwork in an attempt to bring placemaking to Los Altos.
“To me, placemaking is the little things you might not notice while wandering down the street but will stick in your head,” he said. “Those are the sort of things we might want to look at.”
Hunter said he expects to receive a lot of help in that regard.
“You can pick out anyone on the street and they’re probably active in town,” he added. “Even my doctor’s involved.”
Finding an icon
Hunter said the one thing Los Altos is missing is an icon, a sort of rallying point for the entire city. He contrasted the city to Willow Glen, which has an old theater facade on its promotional materials.
“I’m still personally looking for the icon of downtown,” he said.
The logo of the downtown visioning process incorporates the clock face at Veterans Community Plaza, but few people interviewed had a strong emotional attachment to it.
If anything, the buildings people have the strongest feelings about in Los Altos seem to be the new Safeway and the multi-use development at 400 Main St.
“The community hates the Safeway building and First and Main,” Powell said. “We didn’t realize until they were topped out what a travesty they are. They don’t fit in with Los Altos.”
Hitting the high notes
According to Powell, Los Altos needs someone who really understands Los Altos design. To him, that’s Brad Jacobson, the EHDD architect who designed the Packard Foundation headquarters on Second Street and is contracted to work on the First Street office project that will face Safeway.
Jacobson himself admitted that he has a tough job.
“There’s consensus around the idea that Los Altos has charm, and it is a unique charm that people don’t want to lose,” he said. “But it is elusive as to what defines that charm.”
Jacobson said good landscaping connects a wide array of building styles.
“The tree-lined streets permeate everything in Los Altos, which creates a leveling and a backdrop to the buildings,” he said. “The buildings traditionally tend not to be built right up to the lot line. I think the buildings that have been built like that (up to the lot line) are less successful. You’ll notice at Packard that the building is set back at all the edges and has steps in and out along the sidewalk.”
Jacobson said “openness and transparency” are part of the architectural vocabulary of the 1950s California style. But not all Los Altos development stems from that period.
Jacobson said the city maintains a lot of the optimism of its golden era.
“You definitely get the feeling walking around that it’s a town that boomed coming out of World War II with the birth of Silicon Valley. You can feel that excitement that must have been in the town at that time in the buildings that remain,” he said.
Jacobson used a music metaphor to describe how he sees the city.
“That architecture is kind of the bass line,” he noted. “That’s the bass beat, the drumbeat of the town. And then there’s all this other stuff going on that defines it as Los Altos.”
