SAN JOSE — Rene Bihan loves landscapes, urban, suburban and everything in-between. He finds ways to create memorable places amid a dazzling development boom in Silicon Valley and the rest of the Bay Area.
The iconic Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, open spaces nestled next to towers rising in downtown San Jose, the PayPal headquarters in north San Jose, Fremont’s future civic center, and the landmark Beijing Financial Street in the capital city of China are just some of the noteworthy projects guided by Bihan, a landscape architect with decades of experience.
Bihan, the head of the San Francisco office of SWA, a landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm, recently sat down with this news organization to talk about the widening development endeavors in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, along with the challenges and opportunities all of this activity brings.
Q: How do your expertise and SWA’s expertise fit into the development surge in the Bay Area?
A: Our practice at SWA is about place-making and the public realm. It could be the true public realm such as the neighborhood parks near San Pedro Square in downtown San Jose. It could be college campuses. It could be companies, private institutions, that are trying to not only create places for people to work but places where people collaborate, places where people can come together to brainstorm and to create a workplace culture.
Q: How important is it for organizations to create a workplace culture?
A: It’s very important. Stanford has a very distinct culture. Google has a very distinct culture that is very different from Apple’s very distinct culture. My job is to make sure that the places that we make reflect the cultures and the people who are going to be using them.
Q: Why is it important to create places for today’s millennial-oriented tech workforces.
A: Life has evolved from the idea of the office building. If you look at Silicon Valley and the rest of the Bay Area, the first generation of office buildings were places you would drive to, park your car, work eight hours, and then you went home. The second version was the idea of people working in multiple buildings and perhaps sharing some common space.
Q: What are the characteristics of the modern workplace?
A: In today’s world, work and life are really intertwined. People work at home. People do personal business at work. We are seeing a lot of companies like Mozilla and other tech companies encourage their employees to spend 5 to 10 percent of their time to take on personal issues that aren’t related to day-to-day work activities.
Q: Where does this non-work activity happen? How does that get designed?
A: This activity has to happen in a communal space. Landscaping, whether indoor or outdoor, is really your best bet to accomplish that.
Q: What do you think of the efforts by Google for its Downtown West transit village near Diridon Station in San Jose, and the involvement of the city?
A: We were working on Diridon Station when Trammell Crow first proposed a project at the site. Google’s project includes the Trammell Crow site and is moving forward in a different form. We also are under contract with the city of San Jose to extend the downtown master plan to include the Diridon Station area plan.
Q: Do you believe SWA’s expertise lends itself to what’s going on in downtown San Jose?
A: This is the kind of work we specialize in. I’m very familiar with this. There’s a term, landscape urbanism, landscape infrastructure. The idea is that landscape work is like a Swiss army knife. You can accomplish many, many different things with the same tool.
Q: Is that what Google and others are trying to do at Diridon Station?
A: What Google is trying to do, to blend the offices with the adjacent neighborhood, fits in with the idea that while a lot of work is being done inside the building, there’s just as much being done outside the building. Steve Jobs was famous for these walking meetings to get outside of the office.
Q: How do these outside spaces create a different workplace vibe?
A: It gives you a different physical and emotional aspect to have the meeting outside of the office. People behave differently outdoors than they do indoors. They are freer to talk, to communicate. Landscape architecture can create workplaces outside a building.
Q: How important is it for these outdoor workplaces to blend in with their neighborhoods?
A: It goes way beyond “Let’s meet at the Guadalupe River and have a meeting.” When you add this layer of the general public, of people who don’t work at Google, to allow them to walk about and mingle, it becomes very real and authentic to have this kind of placemaking.
Q: What is the potential to successfully connect the core areas of downtown San Jose with the Diridon Station area?
A: The blending of the core downtown with the Diridon Station area is the key to the project. But it’s a two-way street. It’s the downtown going over the Guadalupe River to Diridon Station. It’s also the Diridon Station area and the surrounding neighborhoods, which are evolving quite nicely, to connect themselves to the downtown. More services, more cultural events, better retail services, better food, all of that stuff really happens along a two-way street. The chances of success are getting better every day.
Q: What are some projects that you are particularly proud of?
A: Jack London Square in downtown Oakland is part of a family of projects. There were initially only a couple of new buildings going in. You had a very big area and very few buildings. While Ellis Partners owned it, the idea was to scale down the spaces and create nesting places, to go block-to-block to create places.
Q: What are the challenge with Jack London Square’s relationship with the main part of downtown Oakland?
A: Jack London Square is much more disconnected from downtown in Oakland than what will happen with Diridon Station in downtown San Jose. Every 10 minutes, a port train or an Amtrak train, or another train goes by Jack London Square and you have to wait for that traffic to pass.
Q: What other projects do you particularly like?
A: We are doing three parks next to San Pedro Square. The three parks are Pellier Park, North San Pedro, and the third park is Bassett, which actually will fit under Market Street. These are really micro-parks. These parks are really the future of placemaking in cities.
Q: In what way will these downtown San Jose parks be different from what’s traditionally been the case?
A: These parks are going to be the community living rooms for the 3,000 housing units coming to North San Pedro. With the way housing is, if people are going to live in smaller homes, they need better community spaces. The big parks of the last century like Guadalupe River Park were really about beautification. These micro-parks are really about activation.
Q: Besides the PayPal offices on First Street, are there other Silicon Valley campuses on which you’ve worked?
A: The Google project at San Antonio Station in Mountain, which was the old Mayfield Mall, is one in which we were involved. Tech companies want people with different disciplines and different backgrounds to mingle.
Q: Are tech companies and other corporations investing more in landscaping?
A: Companies used to spend $10 a square foot for lawns and trees. Now they spend $100 a square foot. Companies want to create many amenities at these campuses. They are creating urban plazas and urban parks at their campuses. These are places where they can rest, they can make a movie together, they can have a party, they can do a picnic. PayPal in north San Jose is one of a family of projects in Silicon Valley and the Peninsula that are making that transformation.
Q: What other projects come to mind?
A: We worked on the Googleplex in Mountain View. Google employees really love that place. When you go back now, there is a giant dinosaur that they built. They ripped out the shrubs and planted their own community gardens. The Googlers own that place. That is a successful project.
Q: Are these campus places tools for recruiting and retention of employees?
A: It’s a huge part of recruiting. For the people who run these companies, it’s very important that their employees are empowered. They own the culture of the company. Google is that way. Apple is that way. LinkedIn is that way. A lot of lessons have been learned from those larger more suburban projects that are now applied to more urban projects like Diridon Station or San Pedro Park. Seat counts have doubled. That is great for productivity. But people also need relief.
RENE BIHAN
Organization: SWA Landscape Architecture, Planning and Urban Design
Job: Managing Principal of SWA – San Francisco Bay Area studio
Age: 59
Birthplace: Detroit
Residence: San Francisco
Education: Master of landscape architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1994) and Bachelor of landscape architecture, California State Polytechnic University (1988)
Family: Married, three children
FIVE THINGS ABOUT RENE BIHAN
1. He grew up in Detroit rumbling around his dad’s landscape business. At 87, his father’s still working.
2. A favorite teaching assignment was helping 5-year-olds design a park.
3. He learned about the intersection of arts and culture with placemaking while serving on the San Francisco Arts Commission.
4. He loves time with his sons, ages 15, 13, and 3 at the Sugar Bowl ski resort.
5. Started his first business at 14, left Detroit at 18, and started college at 22 after discovering his passion for landscape architecture.
