Element by Westin Hotel

San Jose, CA

The new five-story Element Hotel in San Jose reflects the brand’s modern, sustainability-focused approach to extended-stay hospitality. To accommodate the clean lines and large, open common spaces envisioned for the 175-room development, the structural design incorporates steel transfer girders and a full-height tie-down system for the shear walls extending through the height of the building. A key challenge of the project was pushing the limits of wood construction while keeping the structure light enough to be supported on a mat slab over ground-improved soils, thereby avoiding the need for a deep foundation system. The hotel is part of the larger redevelopment of the Mission Park business park in Silicon Valley’s Golden Triangle.

Although a wood-over-concrete podium would have been the more conventional solution for a hotel of this size, FTF evaluated multiple structural approaches and determined that the additional concrete weight would have driven a significantly more expensive foundation system, while the long clear spans at the first floor were not required. FTF instead developed a more efficient solution using stacked wood construction with long-span steel framing at the lobby. Multiple foundation strategies were studied in conjunction with soil improvement and shallow foundations, resulting in an estimated $1 million savings over traditional deep foundations on a $30 million project.