The Endangered 8: 2025
San José's Most Threatened Architectural and Cultural Landmarks
Learn More and Take Action!
Take a virtual tour of the IBM4/Temple Laundry site
Watch the 1958 IBM film The Search at San Jose (11:38)
Learn more about RAMAC
Check out this 1958 IBM booklet highlighting the Cottle Road Campus, with photographs by Ansel Adams!
Watch a PBS documentary clip and rare silent footage of Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the Cottle Road Campus and Building 11.
Learn more about architect John S. Bolles and artists Ruth Cravath, Bella Feldman, and Lucienne Bloch, whose work still survives on the Building 11 site.
See the Cottle campus featured in Architectural Forum, June 1958
View 1963 photos of the Cottle campus and its modern art collection (Bob Shomler, photographer)
View the IBM Cottle Road Campus Historic Resource Evaluation and Building 11 DPR form (Carey & Company with Basin Research Associates, 2004).
San Jose's IBM Heritage
Location:
Citywide
Date:
1940s-1970s
Architect:
Various
Threat:
Neglect, Redevelopment
When IBM opened its first West Coast factory in San José in 1943, few could have imagined the profound impact the company would have on the city in the coming decades, nor the impact its San José innovations would have on the world. But tangible connections to this important local legacy are increasingly fraught. IBM Plant 4, which printed punch cards in a converted industrial laundry building from 1943 to 1960, will be substantially demolished if an approved housing development proceeds as planned. Long-vacant Building 11 (5677 Lexington Ave) is all that remains of IBM’s groundbreaking Cottle Road campus, and its once-towering Hydro Gyro sculpture (1957, Robert B. Howard) sits fallow and disassembled in the nearby Western Digital office park. But not all is at risk: 99 Notre Dame Ave, the City Landmark building where IBM developed RAMAC, the world’s first disk drive, is now slated to house a new non-profit arts incubator space featuring offices, galleries, workshops, and rehearsal studios– an exciting future for this long-vacant downtown site.