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NEIGHBORLY MIX OF HOUSING AND RETAIL

By Alan Hess

There's a notion that architecture must be timeless to be good. That might have worked on the Parthenon or the pyramids, but today the best architecture is ever-changeable. In this day and culture, architecture sometimes evolves almost as fast as software. Commercial architecture has a special touch for this fast-paced evolution. Avalon on The Alameda, a combination housing and retail development that's been around for a little more than a year, shows just how fast a commercial architectural type can evolve and mature to respond to the people using it.

This impulse to evolve design isn't always positive. Sometimes it leads to gratuitous change—as in the intensely air-conditioned play cubes filled with child-size hamster habitats that we see grafted onto many fast-food restaurants these days. They're different and new, but their glaring illumination and brain-rattling acoustics don't improve the quality of fast-food space for young parents and grandparents who spend so much time there.

But if commercial property owners don't redesign in response to their customers' needs and concerns, the results can be equally oppressive and ugly. Take the gas pump at any self-serve gas station. Not a single oil company has tried to figure out how to make a hose that doesn't twist like an anaconda. The arrangement of the "on" buttons and grade selections and credit card swipe are an illegible jumble.

In contrast, Avalon on The Alameda shows how dramatically this recent architectural type combining housing and retail has improved over the past several years. Born of the demands for increased density in this booming region, the first clumsy efforts to graft housing onto shopping in one building resulted in misbegotten design the Stevens Creek Villas on Stevens Creek Boulevard at Lawrence Expressway. It awkwardly perched 39 two-story townhouses on top of a flat-roofed shopping center. Equally clumsy was the shopping-apartment combo on El Camino Real and Flora Vista in Sunnyvale where a hulking apartment building squashes the standard shopping center below.



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