San Jose City Hall, California

Architect - Richard Meier & Partners

The San Jose Civic Center is a new City Hall in the City of San Jose CA, capital of ‘Silicon Valley’, and home to many technology companies such as Cisco Systems and Adobe. It is the largest city in the Bay Area, with over a million people. Mr. Sellars was the lead principal in Audiovisual and Acoustics for this 600,000 sf project, which has a large technology component. In the graphic below can be seen one of the major components of the project -a 10 storey high all glass rotunda which needs to be able to handle public performances as well as annual speeches by the mayor of San Jose. We explained to the client and the architect that an all glass rotunda and dome above are not conducive to symphonic orchestra performance, but that if enough acoustical absorption was introduced - and very special sound reproduction techniques were undertaken, the space could be made suitable for certain public functions. The Rotunda also contains a large video projection screen, able to compete with daylight, and many plasma and Projection cube display screens for interactive wayfinding and information/video. The City of San Jose already has pervasive ‘electronic government’ with large amounts of the city’s business done over the web, including streaming media of multiple simultaneous events. This will be expanded into all areas of the building, which will accommodate an extensive IP-Video network, as well as HDTV Broadcaster links over fibre. The 350 person council chamber needs to accommodate up to 10 Broadcast camera’s, and 2 large displays for the public. The One-Stop Permit centre will include extensive use of interactive kiosks as well as less interactive video displays for those members fo the people who are too ‘techno-phobic’ to use computer’s. A Central Media Head End and Black Box TV Studio/control Room and Edits suites round out the facilities at this large government project