January 28, 2021 - In the heart of Silicon Valley, where the landscape is dominated by self-contained tech campuses and low-density car-oriented urbanism, a major new development is bringing in a team of world-class architects to add a collection of mixed-use projects to downtown San Jose. Concentrating modern workspaces and residences near the growing city’s key amenities and forthcoming regional transportation links, the sustainability-minded development could be the start of an urban revolution in the valley.

Led by the Vancouver-based developer Westbank, the development will feature five new or renovated buildings by Kengo Kuma and Associates, Bjarke Ingels Group, Studio Gang, and James K.M. Cheng Architects. In total, they’ll create about 700 new residences, 5 million square feet of office space, and room for an estimated 40,000 jobs. Westbank CEO Ian Gillespie frames it as a reinvention of Silicon Valley’s urban form.

“When you fly into San Francisco and drive through the valley, you drive past one industrial park after another industrial park after another industrial park,” Gillespie says. Though many of the world’s most influential companies are based there, he says few are really doing much to make their own footprint in the area a positive one. “The largest of them seem to be building tools for communications and at the same time they’re putting everyone in an industrial park and isolating them from the rest of the community,” he says. “I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know where along the lines that people decided that an industrial park was a good way to build a community.”

He’s hoping to counter that trend by building more connected office spaces in the center of San Jose—near San Jose State University, planned BART and high-speed rail stations, and all the existing residential, retail, and cultural spaces in a city that’s expected to grow by 400,000 people by 2035. The five buildings are scattered across the downtown core but focus on providing environmentally friendly architecture that extends onto the street level, with landscaping and pedestrian-centric designs that encourage a more tightly woven urban fabric. Each of the projects will run on electric systems and have net zero carbon emissions, with offsets for both their operational and embodied carbon. Construction has begun on two of the five sites, and the developers recently bought a sixth for what Gillespie hopes will be an ongoing wave of transformative development.

“This is not just about trying to build better performing buildings. That goes without saying, and is a pretty low bar,” Gillespie says. “It’s really around the idea that the entire thing is broken. Starting with the fact that housing is divorced from where people work, from where they work out, from where they hang out, from where they eat, from where they go to school, from how they get to and from, how they meet people.”

What Gillespie is trying to do is insert buildings into the urban environment to fix those things he thinks are broken. In contrast to a more built-up city such as San Francisco, he says, San Jose offered both the space and the potential to make this happen at a large scale. “There is a canvas there where we could really make a meaningful impact relatively quickly,” he says.

The plan is strategically important for downtown San Jose, according to Mayor Sam Liccardo. “If we can pull this off, through all of the extraordinary challenges of this pandemic, it could really transform our city in a blink of an eye, which I would define as about a half a decade,” he says.

Liccardo acknowledges that San Jose is not exactly a hotbed of architectural significance. He says the downtown has a “squatty skyline,” largely due to its proximity to the city’s international airport. “With a few notable exceptions, and those are primarily public buildings, our city is appropriately described as architecturally challenged,” he says. The proposed projects could help change that, both in terms of the city’s skyline and its pedestrian experience. “It will raise the bar for public expectations for what development should do for our urban environment,” Liccardo says.

Gillespie argues that world-class architecture is important to ensuring the project can have a significant impact on the city. He’s pulled in most of these big-name architects for other projects in cities such as Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto, and Tokyo, but this will be Westbank’s first collaboration with Chicago-based Studio Gang.

The firm’s principal, Jeanne Gang, says she was attracted to the project by its ambition but also Gillespie’s focus on social equity and climate issues. The building her firm designed for the development is trying to push some limits on energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable materials. Using mass timber as its main building material, the mid-rise office and retail building has low embodied carbon, and Gang hopes it can serve as proof that mass timber can work at scale. “We really have to make this complete shift towards these newer wood technologies. There’s no option. It’s one of these things that has to be embraced,” she says.

The building features a facade of blocks filled with angled wooden shading, a low-tech but varied way of controlling the amount of direct sunlight coming into the building. Its topographical shape also creates areas for green roofs and planted patio spaces that, though designed before the pandemic, are an even more important feature now. “The idea of indoor-outdoor workspace and more fluidity between inside and outside, especially in a place with a wonderful climate like San Jose, it makes total sense,” says Gang. “It should be mandatory to have outdoor space.”

Amounting to 750,000 square feet, the new building also includes and connects to an existing 1980s office building that Studio Gang is adapting for reuse as a more energy-efficient workspace. This kind of reuse, she says, is an important part of reducing the development’s carbon footprint and helped guide the future-focused design of the new building next door. “It needs to be flexible because there’s always going to be changes,” she says. “We’ve been really honing in on that with the structural system and the quality of the spaces. You could easily imagine this building becoming residential someday.”

This kind of adaptation may become more important as Gillespie’s vision for San Jose takes shape. His initial focus is on adding new and more-urban workspaces to the city to counter Silicon Valley’s industrial park past, but he knows that to truly make the transformation happen, office and residential will have to be better mixed. Future projects, he says, will try to augment the new office buildings he’s building with more residential spaces that can make the downtown core even more of a live-work community. Says Gillespie: “As we dug more and more into the shortcomings and the unique challenges that Silicon Valley has, we came to the realization that if we weren’t adding housing that was equally inspiring and was also net zero, then we’re actually contributing to the problem, not the solution.”

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Sprawl ruined Silicon Valley. Can world-class architecture help fix it?

March 24, 2021 - The Kita is the first luxury multi-family project in Japan entirely designed by Kengo Kuma, the award-winning architect behind the Japan National Stadium, created for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, and the Nezu Museum in Tokyo’s Minato district.

Kuma has worked with Vancouver-based developer Westbank on several projects in Canada and the US. For the Kita, he’s created a “light well” that surrounds the building, with a slatted metal screen as the facade that allows residents to see out, as well as protecting them from the gaze of passers-by. The building has 11 residences, and a one-of-a-kind multi-level penthouse named 'The Kita Tea House'.

The Kita Tea House, features a total of 10,000 square feet of living space spread across three levels, half of which is private outdoor space. It features two private terraces and a roof deck with a 25-foot infinity pool and a tea house, which Kuma will design for the buyer. There are commanding views of the city, the nearby Eternal Forest of the Meiji Shrine and the Meiji Jingu Museum, also designed by Kuma which opened in 2020.

A private design session with Kuma is part of the rare design package. Buyers will be flown to Tokyo to meet the Kuma in his studio, and the residence will be designed to their exact specifications. To make the offering even more distinctive, the Tea House offering includes a Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible that was custom designed by Kuma, his first ever automotive collaboration.

The Kita Tea House by Kengo Kuma, Tokyo, Japan

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April 4, 2021 - Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and Kengo Kuma have bridged the luxury automotive and architectural worlds with the unveiling of a first-of-its-kind Bespoke Rolls-Royce Dawn. The singular motor car will debut as a moving representation of the new luxury residence ‘The Kita’ in central Tokyo, designed by Kengo Kuma upon commission by global luxury property developer Westbank.

  - Bespoke Rolls-Royce Dawn in collaboration with architect Kengo Kuma
  - One-of-a-kind creation bridges luxury automotive and architectural worlds
  - Created for rare Japanese penthouse residence, The Kita Tea House
  - Dawn’s styling reflects residence’s clarity of structure with prevailing sense of calm
  - Architect famed for design of the reborn Japan National Stadium

*“It was an honour to collaborate with Kengo Kuma to create a serene and timeless motor car for a serene and timeless building. From the inception of the marque over 100 years ago, Rolls-Royce has transcended the automotive field, taking the tangible entity of a car and delivering its patrons the intangible: a truly unique experience. As this project demonstrates, through the authentic application of unique designs and materials, we can provide rare sensory experiences that reflect and enhance our owners’ multi-faceted lifestyles.”*

__Gavin Hartley, Head of Bespoke Design, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars__

The Bespoke Dawn was created for the exclusive use of the owner of the unique multi-level penthouse, ‘The Kita Tea House’, which sits atop the newly completed property in the tranquil yet central Kitasando neighbourhood. The penthouse is so named for its rooftop tea house which is framed by views of the Eternal Forest of the Meiji Shrine and Kengo Kuma’s reborn Japan National Stadium.

*“This is the first time I have consulted on a project of this kind and I am proud that I was able to do so for Rolls-Royce, a company with which I share a respect for traditional craftsmanship and a desire to bring out the best in natural materials.” shared Kengo Kuma. “Rolls-Royce has brought the essence of ‘The Kita’ into the car’s aesthetic, allowing the owner of ‘The Kita Tea House’ to take in their surrounding city environment. It is a great honour to see the car finally here at home in Tokyo.”*

As is characteristic of Kengo Kuma’s architecture, ‘The Kita’ challenges the relationship between interior and exterior. The open-top Dawn was therefore a natural canvas for the accompanying motor car, a peaceful and cocooning private space where you are conversely never disconnected from the outside world.

*“The Bespoke Dawn is a beautiful addition to our body of work,” noted Ian Gillespie, founder of Westbank. “Kuma-san’s influence on the Rolls-Royce Dawn is the embodiment of the serenity and beauty he has created in ‘The Kita Tea House’, as an extension of that memory for the individual to enjoy.”*

View the full announcement at [Rolls-Royce Motor Cars PressClub](https://www.press.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/rolls-royce-motor-cars-pressclub/article/detail/T0330431EN/rolls-royce-creates-bespoke-dawn-in-association-with-kengo-kuma "Rolls-Royce Motor Cars PressClub").

__About The Kita Tea House__

Without the same abundance of beautiful, bespoke luxury residences that other global cities enjoy, ‘The Kita’ represents a rare opportunity for its residents to experience a way of life and a one-of-a-kind Penthouse unlike anything else in Japan.

Designed inside and out by Kengo Kuma, ‘The Kita’ reimagines Japanese traditions, seeking new meaning for materials and singing an ode to the natural world. ‘The Kita’ not only reinterprets the traditions of Japanese design, but also brings Tokyo something wholly new.

A selection of residences are available at The Kita. Private viewings available upon appointment. For more information on The Kita, please visit [our body of work](https://westbankcorp.com/body-of-work/the-kita), contact us directly at [+81 (0)3 6721 0531](tel:810367210531) or tokyo@westbankcorp.com.

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