Location 5600 Cottle Road
Historic Designation Eligible for the National Register, Eligible for the California Register, Candidate City Landmark
Historic Tally 118.57 out of a possible 134 (67denotes a Candidate City Landmark)
Project Status In litigation (Sixth District Court of Appeals)
Site History IBM Corporation bought the rolling ranchland that would become the IBM research campus in 1955. It hired the prominent Modernist architect John Savage Bolles to design a new kind of industrial campus. Building 25, also known as the Advanced Research Building, was one of the original core buildings of the campus, and served as an architectural model for the rest of the campus. According to the most recent EIR, "The design was a radical departure from the solid wall construction of most industrial and laboratory facilities of the time. It was designed so that each office and laboratory had walls of glass to integrate the landscaping and outdoor art with the working spaces. Building 25 is where historically significant research occurred, including work associated with development of the flying head disk drive, which is considered one of the most significant inventions in information storage technology." It was nominated as "Plant of the Year" in 1958.
In the mid-1990s, IBM began relocating its work to other parts of San Jose and the South Bay. Building 25 fell vacant in 1996. In 2002, Lowe's Home Improvement Corporation purchased an option on this 18.75 acre section of the IBM campus, and planned to build a Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse on the site. Their plans assumed that IBM Building 25 would be demolished; at the time, the building was not on the City's Historic Resources Inventory . However, historic research conducted in the course of preparing an Environmental Impact Report determined that Building 25 was so architecturally and historically significant that it was eligible for federal, state and local designation even despite not yet being quite 50 years old.
The Preservation Action Council suggested that Lowe's could explore alternative designs that would accommodate the continued existence and reuse of Building 25 on the parcel, a viewpoint shared unanimously by the City of San Jose's Historic Landmark Commission. However, there was strong political pressure to bring in a "national retailer" like Lowe's to San Jose, in order to augment the City's sales tax revenues, and planning staff broke the law by allowing Lowe's to define what was and what was not a feasible alternative to their project in the EIR, without presenting substantial evidence of why preserving Building 25 would not be feasible. The Planning Commission and the City Council certified the EIR anyway.
PAC*SJ realized that we had exhausted all administrative remedies, and that if this project were allowed to go through, not only would we lose one of San Jose's most significant buildings, but developers on other projects would also feel able to define preservation alternatives as infeasible without having to show that they were actually infeasible. We took the difficult decision to sue in January 2004.
In August 2004, the case came before Judge Leslie Nichols of the Santa Clara County Superior Court, who ruled in our favor. Lowe's, he wrote, had failed to show that preserving Building 25 was infeasible. He directed them to present evidence that preserving the building would so drastically cut the project's expected profits that the project would be rendered unworkable. Lowe's attempted to use the reasoning in an unrelated case to persuade Judge Nichols to reverse his ruling. They were denied. Rather than comply with Judge Nichols' ruling, they chose to appeal to the Sixth District Court of Appeals. The case is expected to be decided during 2005.
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