MOMENT at San Pedro Squared won the 2018 Golden Nail Award of Distinction for outstanding architecture.  It could also have earned an award for community collaboration.

“I counted 400 emails from 2015-2018 to get the project done,” said Arian Collen, parking manager, who accepted the award on behalf of City of San Jose Department of Transportation (DOT), the owner of the garage where the MOMENT shops are located.

The San Pedro Squared project involved changing parking spaces into retail spaces, which activated the east side of San Pedro Street where the massive Market-San Pedro Square Garage dominates the block.

“Think about what was accomplished,” said Steve Cox, who presented the Golden Nail Award.  “Parking spaces in this downtown are sacred.”  Cox, president of HPC Architecture, chairs the SJDA Downtown Design Committee.

“At DOT, we’re always trying to make downtown better,” Collen said.  “This is a small but important piece of the change.”

Also receiving Golden Nails were the architects of the project:  Brian Corbett and Emilio Todescato of Gensler, which did the initial design, and Chris Hall of Eaton Hall Architecture, which completed the detailing of the plans.

Others integral to the project include SJDA Street Life Manager Jason Su, funders Danny Harris and The Knight Foundation, builders Tico Construction, and retail operators San Jose Made, who named the four-store collective MOMENT.

The writing was on the wall for MOMENT, Collen noted.  “I’ve been reading in the news lately a lot of similar projects about the ‘dead space on the block,’ ‘needs to be stitched,’ and ‘missing teeth.’  It took this team to get the project done.”