Sunflower Design Studios

Design, history, and interactive 3D on the web.

Five Domes, a Single Survivor: The Century Theaters of San Jose

Reading time: about 8 minutes, plus time with the 3D viewer.

TL;DR

Orbit the dome in 3D

Drag to orbit. Scroll to zoom. Right-drag to pan. Toggle Ribs, Section, and Dusk, and drag the timeline from 1964 to 2026.

Century 21 dome exterior, San Jose, 2008
Century 21 exterior, San Jose, 2008, by BWChicago, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Picture the opening night

Picture November 24, 1964. A spaceship seems to have landed beside the Winchester Mystery House. The dome rises 55 feet over Olsen Drive, 155 feet across, skinned in asphalt over wood sheathing on 20 steel ribs. A 24-foot steel finial caps the crown. The finial doubles as a work platform: theater employees rappelled from the finial to service the track lighting ringing the dome.

Step inside. Nine hundred fifty seats face a vast curved screen. The opening film, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," unspools in 70mm. The marquee promises Cinerama, the widescreen answer to television. The promise bends a little in practice: the original three-projector Cinerama system retired before opening night, and Century 21 showed single-lens 70mm under the Cinerama name. The screen later gave way to a flat model, and the flat screen stayed.

Name the builders. Raymond Syufy, founder of Syufy Enterprises, commissioned the dome. Vincent G. Raney, a San Francisco architect, drew the dome. Raney went on to design the theaters of the Century chain through the early 1990s. Century 21 served as the model for the rest: the mothership, the first dome of the chain.

Note the architecture. The dome belongs to Googie, the futuristic roadside style of the late 1950s and 1960s. The style matched the moment: suburbs, cars, space age, screens bigger than living rooms.

Count the constellation

Success bred domes. Count five by the end of the decade:

Add a further first: Century introduced stadium seating in San Jose in 1968, rows stepping upward so seats in back clear the row ahead. The idea spread to multiplexes after.

Mark the last picture show

Mark January 2014. Century 24 closed, and demolition followed the same month.

Mark March 31, 2014. The last films played at Century 21, 22, and 23. The 50-year ground lease, signed in the early 1960s with the family behind the Winchester Mystery House property, ended and went unrenewed. The Retro Dome, the community arts group inside the old Century 25, lost the lease too, and the Century 25 dome came down in 2014.

Fifty years of premieres ended in a single spring: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and generations of opening nights, all under the same curved roofs.

Save the dome

Follow the campaign. Preservationists organized as the lease ran out. The campaign, called SAVE the DOMES, pushed the city to act before demolition permits landed.

Count the protections Century 21 earned in 2014:

The protections saved a single dome. Century 22 and 23 carried less historical weight in the city's assessment, and the wreckers took the pair in 2019.

Watch the sign come home

Look up. The Century 21-22-23 pole sign stacks three panels: teal for 21, blue for 22, red for 23, with three spheres riding the top of the pole. The sign spent years in storage after the closure.

In October 2022, the sign returned to public view beside the repainted dome. Federal Realty funded the return. Arrow Sign of Oakland, the original maker, restored the sign. The spheres glow again at dusk, and the stacked panels read the same as opening week.

Walk the Santana West campus

Walk the ground around the dome today. Federal Realty, owner of Santana Row across the street, builds Santana West on the 13.4-acre site: about 934,750 square feet of office space and 29,000 square feet of retail, drawn by STUDIOS.

The first tower stands: 370,000 square feet, eight stories, topped out in March 2021, 89 percent leased as of October 2025. Tenants include PwC, Etched, Securiti.ai, and Newmark. The tower brings a fitness center, a cafe, a golf simulator, a conference center, and pickleball courts.

The dome anchors the campus plan as the amenity centerpiece. TEF Design, a San Francisco firm, drew the rehabilitation concept in 2022. The scope runs deep:

Read the date with care. The 2023 project announcements projected completion in 2025. The projection missed. As of August 2026, no construction had started on the rehabilitation, and the dome still sat empty. The preservation council lists Century 21 on the Endangered 8 list for 2025, "awaiting a promised adaptive reuse."

Hear the counter-proposal. In August 2026, Mercury News columnist Sal Pizarro argued for reviving Century 21 as a first-class IMAX theater, pointing to sold-out large-format screenings across the Bay Area and to landmark cinema revivals in Hollywood. The debate continues: IMAX and concerts versus fitness center and offices, vacancy in the middle.

Trace the lost four

Trace the four lost domes to the present day:

A single dome remains from five. The survivor carries the whole story now.

Visit the survivor

Visit 3161 Olsen Drive. The Winchester Mystery House stands next door, and Santana Row sits across the street. Park, walk the lot, and look up at the dome from the Winchester Boulevard side.

Time the visit for dusk. The restored sign lights, the spheres glow, and the 1964 view returns: a spaceship, landed, waiting for the next reel.

How the 3D viewer works

The viewer rebuilds Century 21 to scale in the browser, using Three.js, the same library behind the Sunflower 3D demos. No video, no plugin, no server round trip: the page ships the model as code, and the browser renders the model.

Build the model from measurements, not from memory:

Wire the interactions:

Ship the viewer as static files: a single HTML page, a single JavaScript module, Three.js from the same vendored copy used by the Sunflower hub demos, no build step, no server code. The page loads fast, works offline after first load, and costs nearly nothing to host on Bunny. The pattern serves future Sunflower stories: measure the subject, model the subject, publish the model.

Accessibility notes: the viewer carries keyboard controls for orbit and zoom, a text alternative describing the dome in words, and a reduced-motion mode, stopping the automatic turntable rotation. The timeline slider works from the keyboard, and the toggles are real buttons with labels.

Photographs

Century 21 exterior, second view, San Jose, 2008
Century 21 exterior, San Jose, 2008, by BWChicago, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Century 22 with its two satellite domes, San Jose, 2008
Century 22 with satellite domes, San Jose, 2008, by BWChicago, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The only openly licensed photo showing the two small 1971 satellite domes.
Century 23 exterior, San Jose, 2008
Century 23 exterior, San Jose, 2008, by BWChicago, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Century 21-22-23 marquee, San Jose, 2008
Century 21-22-23 marquee, San Jose, 2008, by BWChicago, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Shows the original sign before storage and restoration; the restored sign returned in October 2022.
Century Theater Domes, San Jose, 2017
Century Theater Domes, San Jose, 2017, by Fastily, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from the 6000 by 4000 original.
Century 21 dome logo
Century 21 dome logo, by Mliu92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Century 22 dome logo
Century 22 dome logo, by Mliu92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Century 23 dome logo
Century 23 dome logo, by Mliu92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources

Image credits

Draft prepared November 9, 2026, ticket #F7ZY. Facts verified against the sources listed above; conflicts and gaps sit in research-notes.md. The Century 24 apartment proposal dates to November 2026 reporting and needs a re-check before publication. The rehabilitation status needs a re-check before publication: the August 2026 reporting says no construction had started.

Pronoun check, November 9, 2026: the draft passes the mechanical grep with three documented exceptions, three proper names, not authorial voice: (1) "It's" inside the film title "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"; (2) "one" inside the verbatim source URLs for the SF YIMBY and Newmark pages ("for-one-santana-west", "at-one-santana-west"), where "One Santana West" is the building's proper name; (3) "us" inside the Docomomo domain name "docomomo-us.org". No other hits on the core or extended pronoun lists.