A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but to architect Goodwin “Goody” Steinberg, that’s not good enough.
“When people say, ‘Goody, send me a picture so I can print a picture of one of your buildings,’ that hurts. It’s like me saying, ‘I’m going to get married. Send me a picture of the woman so I can see if I want to marry her or not,'” said Steinberg, 80, who looks back on his role in the sprouting of Silicon Valley in his autobiography, “From the Ground Up: Building Silicon Valley,” co-written with Susan Wolfe.
“Architecture is a very substantive field. It’s not just a pretty picture.”
Designing a temple or church, for example, as opposed to a home or municipal building is like “night and day — as great a contrast as a casino and a courthouse.” And Steinberg should know. He’s designed them all, most notably Los Altos Hills’ Reform Congregation Beth Am, where he is a member.
Steinberg is obsessed with architecture — in the best possible way. When asked where he lives, Steinberg doesn’t simply reply “Palo Alto,” but specifically describes the build of his high-rise condominium and the zoning regulations that allow him an unimpeded view of the Stanford campus and nearby Stanford Shopping Center. But not before describing the two other South Bay homes he previously designed and lived in.
Silicon Valley’s transformation in the past few decades has been even more dramatic than Michael Jackson’s, and in this Steinberg has played no small role. Dozens of well-utilized public and private structures have his name on them.
“Great cities were built over hundreds of years. Churches in the 1500s took 300 years to build,” he said. “Here, we’ve built Silicon Valley in about 35 years.”
In transforming an apricot and cherry orchard into the world’s high-tech headquarters and a huge new population center over the course of a generation, Steinberg feels superior South Bay leadership allowed the area to cope with rapid growth as well as any in the nation. Certainly, he feels, the South Bay handled the challenge better than Texas, Arizona or Florida, and has staved off congestion and left open space in the hills that makes for a high quality of life.
Yet of all the many buildings Steinberg has given life to in the past several decades, none has meant more to him than Beth Am. It was a structure the architect knew he had to build when his young daughter came home in the mid-1950s and proudly announced her plans to attend Sunday school with a friend.
“I started thinking: I’m not very religious but I didn’t want my children growing up Christian. It pushed me to think about my priorities,” he recalled. “I saw Beth Am forming. At that time, these were all families of young people, all starting a business, a gas station business, a retail business. Fifteen years later they were very successful people, but at that time they were just starting, had a little money and were putting together a synagogue.”
Steinberg joined the 150-odd families, and pushed hard for the congregation to invest a significant amount of money in a long-term plan. Instead of just a religious school, he envisioned a campus. Instead of settling in a commercial area of Palo Alto, he pushed for Los Altos Hills.
The architect admits he tried the congregation’s patience when he insisted on building the humble education buildings years before he took up construction of the campus’ focal point, the main building.
Aiming to blend the sanctuary into its pastoral surroundings, Steinberg knew he couldn’t duplicate the plans of many temple builders — knocking off a variation of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El or putting up a ’50s-style, “glass box” synagogue.
Instead, his design is meant to emulate a desert tent, with the 12 supporting beams representing the 12 tribes of Israel. Glass walls take advantage of the site’s natural beauty.
“This is a facility that gave the Jewish community an anchor,” he said. “That’s very important to me.”
Beth Am’s positive reception led to Steinberg designing a number of churches, as well as chapels in Catholic high schools, in addition to synagogues such as Lafayette’s Temple Isaiah and Redwood City’s Beth Jacob.
Coming full circle, Steinberg’s son, Robert, designed several additional buildings on Beth Am’s campus in the 1990s. His other two children have not gone the Sunday school route but have instead become Orthodox.
At 80, Steinberg claims to be “working at a lower speed than the past,” but he’s still charged by his current project, a 1,000-seat church at Mission San Jose.
“Architecture is a complicated process, and to do it, you have to love it,” said Steinberg. “But if you do, there’s nothing more exciting. You can live your whole life and never, never, never get bored.”