Client: Santa Clara University and David J. Powers and Associates, Inc.
Location: Santa Clara County
Timeframe: 2003–Present
Project Manager: Sarah Peelo

Project Highlights:

• Albion’s well-known expertise in project planning has helped to expedite permitting for the University with the City of Santa Clara.

• Our plans provide clear paths for preserving, protecting, and interpreting the University’s cultural resources for the public.

• With our staff’s knowledge of the historical context and associated local resources, we are able to predict potential impacts to significant archaeological features and artifacts, plan ahead, and mitigate through data recovery in an efficient and cost-effective manner.  

Santa Clara University is built upon a number of cultural resources, including a Native American burial site, a California Spanish Mission, a Mexican Period rural town, and a diverse neighborhood of American immigrant families dating back to the 1850s. Currently, the University seeks to meet the needs of their growing student body and expand their campus through new construction. Given the extensive history of the site, excavation on campus has a high potential to impact significant cultural resources. Therefore, it is necessary to develop plans to mitigate these impacts.

Albion has worked with the City of Santa Clara and the University to develop a Cultural Resource Management planning process that emphasizes preservation of cultural resources through pre-construction testing and mitigation, rather than reactionary responses to Project impacts. This proactive planning process has proven to allow Projects to be completed on time and within budget.

Albion was involved in developing the Master Plan for the University in 2003, authored the updated Master Plan in 2015 (view here >) , and has written multiple project-specific management plans including Palm Drive and Alviso Street Closure Project (2013), Alviso and Franklin Street Partial Vacation Project (2013), Howard S. and Alida S. Charney Hall School of Law Project (2015).

The School of Law Project, which transformed an existing campus parking lot into a professional campus center, exemplifies the importance of our planning approach. Prior to construction, we identified the known resources and helped to develop a building design that preserved in place approximately 85% of the identified resources. We also developed a treatment plan with detailed mitigation measures to recover data from the limited project impacts and plan for public interpretation.