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SAN FRANCISCO — John Arrillaga Sr., the true property developer who bodily reworked Silicon Valley into tech workplace parks from orchards and have become a serious donor to Stanford College, died on Monday in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 84.
His daughter, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, introduced his dying in a put up on Medium. His household declined to quote the trigger.
Beginning within the Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Arrillaga developed Silicon Valley’s bucolic farmland right into a sprawling community of company campuses. On the time, the semiconductor business was taking off within the Santa Clara Valley, with firms like Intel rising as shortly as they may discover buildings to develop into.
To satisfy that demand, Mr. Arrillaga and his enterprise companion, Richard Peery, purchased up hundreds of acres of farmland round California cities together with Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose. Even earlier than they secured tenants, they created developments of low-slung concrete buildings that had been low cost and straightforward to construct.
They in the end constructed greater than 20 million sq. toes of business actual property. Lots of these developments housed tech firms, amongst them Intel, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Google.
Mr. Arrillaga and Mr. Peery grew to become billionaires as the worth of the properties soared. Forbes pegged Mr. Arrillaga’s web price at $2.5 billion.
Because the tech business grew and Silicon Valley’s inhabitants multiplied, some residents started voicing opposition to growth. A number of of Mr. Arrillaga’s tasks bumped into obstacles: Residents protested the peak of proposed 100-foot workplace towers in Palo Alto and disagreed with the situation of a brand new library in Menlo Park.
Later in life, Mr. Arrillaga additionally bodily reworked Stanford, which he had attended on a basketball scholarship. He donated cash for greater than 200 tasks and buildings on the college, together with not less than 9 buildings and rooms bearing his household’s identify and 57 scholarships. In 2013, he pledged $151 million to the college, the most important reward to Stanford from a single residing donor.
He was born on April 3, 1937, in Inglewood, Calif. His father, Gabriel, was knowledgeable soccer participant who later grew to become a laborer in a Los Angeles produce market. His mom, Freda, was a nurse.
Mr. Arrillaga enrolled at Stanford in 1955 and studied geography there. At 6 toes 4 inches tall, he captained the basketball group whereas juggling jobs to cowl his bills.
After graduating in 1960, he briefly performed skilled basketball — he was on the roster of the San Francisco Warriors for six weeks, in accordance with Fortune journal, though there isn’t a document of his having gotten right into a recreation — earlier than going into industrial actual property.
He and Mr. Peery began the true property agency Peery Arrillaga in 1966, a partnership that lasted 5 a long time. In 2006, they bought round half of their 12 million-square-foot portfolio for $1.1 billion to an actual property funding division of Deutsche Financial institution.
In 1968, Mr. Arrillaga married Frances Marion Cook dinner, a sixth grade trainer and fellow Stanford graduate. They’d two kids. She died of lung most cancers in 1995. In 2003, he married Gioia Fasi, a former lawyer from Honolulu.
Along with his daughter, his spouse survives him alongside together with his son, John Jr.; two sisters, Alice Arrillaga Kalomas and Mary Arrillaga Danna; a brother, William Arrillaga; and 4 grandsons.
Mr. Arrillaga’s ties to the tech business grew to become even nearer in 2006 when his daughter, who’s a lecturer on the Stanford Graduate Faculty of Enterprise, married Marc Andreessen, a enterprise capitalist and a founding father of Netscape.
Mr. Arrillaga started making small donations to Stanford simply after graduating. By the early 2000s, his donations to the college, primarily to its athletics division, had soared to greater than $80 million. In 2006, he gave $100 million to Stanford, which was the most important sum by a single donor till he eclipsed that together with his 2013 donation.
For 30 years, Mr. Arrillaga rebuilt and gave cash to just about all of Stanford’s athletic amenities, together with Maples Pavilion in 2004 and Stanford Stadium in 2005 and 2006. The Arrillaga identify is so ubiquitous on campus — discovered on the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Heart, the Arrillaga Household Eating Commons and each campus gyms — that college students nicknamed the gyms “Nearrillaga” and “Farrillaga” to inform them aside.
Mr. Arrillaga, who prevented media protection and shunned interviews, developed a repute for consideration to element in his building tasks.
Whereas rebuilding Stanford’s soccer stadium, “he chosen each single palm tree, labored out the most effective kind for each structural aspect and created his personal designs for the seating,” Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote in her Medium put up.
She added that he was recognized for “personally selecting up each single piece of trash he noticed and rearranging single stones in fountains throughout the campus.”
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Supply- nytimes