concept & vision

The historical San Jose Light Tower was a second full moon. A circle of light. As that tower bridged an urban crossroads, Full Circle bridges a natural crossroads at Guadalupe River Los Gatos Creek, touching the ground lightly with two small footprints east and west, delicately spanning the park; and sensitively welcoming flowing water and air, living plants and animals, and visiting people.

design & architecture

A simple and unmissable landmark from the birds’ eye view of planes at San Jose International Airport, and a strong visual presence from Route 87, Full Circle’s complex topology also acoustically and visually shelters Guadalupe River Park from those infrastructures. An inhabitable meadow of rooftop plantings learns from the oak and grassland ecologies of the Bay Area. Full Circle integrates nature and human nature, from rookeries for migratory birds, to playful landscapes for returning visitors year-round. Full Circle is an armature, a platform, a trellis for vines. Like networked technology at its most powerful and subtle, Full Circle nurtures growth and connection at the confluence of social and natural systems. A place to gather, and to roam. Full Circle is full of life.

program & use

The spectacular geometry of the cantilevered circle seems almost impossible, but made possible with engineering, like the marvels made in Silicon Valley. The 1500 upcycled shipping containers with which Full Circle is made confirm a circular economy of sustainability. They conceptually connect The Valley to the San Francisco Bay, the Port of Oakland, the Pacific, and to all our planet. Resolving curves to lines, they evoke pixelated geometries of computational displays at their finest grain. Circular openings provide natural daylighting and cross-ventilation, as well as a field of circular light sources that evokes, from the historical legacy of computing, iconic arrays of blinking indicators. This deliberately and radically low-resolution 750-pixel screen can harvest movement patterns from Guadalupe Park, scintillating birds, sparkling waters, floating leaves, and broadcast them toward adjacent roadways. The screen is piezoelectrically people-powered by visitors exploring internal staircases and lookouts, toward a rooftop high line: a circular half-mile trail with vistas towards the mountain ranges that shelter The Valley. Some 11,000 sf of geometrically integrated rooftop photovoltaics powers amenities and systems, to a net-zero result. The overall composition of containers and circular openings, of lines and circles, evoke the binary code of 1’s and 0’s at the heart of our modern world.