Photo post: downtown Sunnyvale apartments

[weofodthignen]

The set of new apartment towers that replaced the Town and Country shops on one side of downtown Sunnyvale have had a few years to settle, now. The common spaces were slow to open, as they often are, and there were online complaints about noise from the nearby station, but I assume people have made their peace now with it being neither Midtown Manhattan nor Beverly Hills. Until COVID, most of the commercial spaces were tenanted, though the bars and gyms have been hard hit. Advertising suggested several people might want to share the apartments, and I think that's the case with many of them, but they are relatively dog friendly and I imagine they can be nice for young families, too. Unfortunately the architecture, though better than the stuff in downtown San Jose, is stark and having different-colored slabs on different blocks and little oak trees and old-fashioned-style lampposts along the streets doesn't do enough to offset the impression of canyons of doom.

This is the main official effort to humanize the development: a palm garden above street level.






A typical facade; the second window from the top in the protruding section has a Christmas tree up, with white lights.




Maybe Christmas lights, maybe year-round.




Another way to offset those pointlessly brutal ladder trellises/brises-soleil on the townhouses. The little trees stuffed into the planters may be official, or residents may have input.




Attempts to garden on the sad little balconies, 1 and 2




... 3, 4, and 5.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Brutalism is an architectural style that should've been strangled at birth.

[weofodthignen]

I agree, and this isn't even that. Just peculiarly soulless despite their efforts to use greenery to alleviate the solid walls of buildings. See the effort to train vines up the side of metal grilles here; but one appears to have died. I'm not sure whether those grilles are functional, providing cooling for something; I suspect they're just the designer's idea of how to relieve an ugly blank wall. But downtown San Jose is full of even bigger 'fuck yous' to the street; there seems to be a thought that a little bit of colour makes everything ok. (In San Jose the street trees are legally required.)

[siliconshaman]

I think if I had to define that style, it's post-modernist brutalism-lite or corporate soullessness.

'Fuck-you' works though.