Transbay Blog

A long-awaited cultural building has finally joined the ranks of the ever-growing collection of museums in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena District — a new home for the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The Museum was originally founded in 1984, but ten years ago, the Museum chose architect Daniel Libeskind to design a new structure to house the Museum in South of Market’s clustered quarter of museums. Libeskind is renowned for his work on museums across the world, including the Jewish Museums in Copenhagen and Berlin. Other work that Libeskind has done includes the recent expansion of the Denver Art Museum and the master plan for redevelopment of the World Trade Center Memorial site in Lower Manhattan.

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Courtesy Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects, Inc.

For several years, the City of San Francisco has worked to develop the Market & Octavia Neighborhood Plan, studying neighborhoods centered on the pivotal intersection of Market and Octavia, bookended by Church Street on the west and Van Ness Avenue on the east. The plan was one part of the Better Neighborhoods 2002 effort — a sadly ironic name, because a mere 365 days is nowhere near sufficient to start and finish such a large-scale planning process, particularly in San Francisco. In some areas covered by the Market-Octavia plan, one has the impression of being in an unclassifiable neighborhood that is nonetheless quite close to favorite, well-established locales. The plan encompasses an area historically known as “the Hub”, so named for the Muni turnaround located there, and the neighborhoods contained within the plan area continue to evolve and come into their own, coining names like Deco Ghetto to reflect both an emerging identity and broader acknowledgment of that identity. Other parts of the plan area, including Hayes Valley, already enjoy established commercial districts but have been given a new chance to blossom since the retreat of the Central Freeway to the south side of Market Street.

It is also in this area that the slanted South of Market street grid curves and reorients into an arrangement that reflects the cardinal directions, adjusting to form the Mission/Castro grid. This is a departure from the pattern firmly established all the way from the Ferry Building, resulting in a suspension of the security resting in the predictable pattern of downtown streets. But some clever planning could take advantage of this insecurity and transform it into a distinctly urban sort of excitement, in which even the unsuspecting pedestrian would be smoothly guided by intuitively navigable streets designed for humans, rather than for the sole function of moving automobiles efficiently.

Market-Octavia is exactly the plan that aims to knit these disconnected neighborhoods together into a more unified and walkable set of districts that San Francisco could rightly be proud to call its own. The plan reflects thoughtful cooperation between community members and city planners. This vision was not forcefully hoisted upon neighborhood residents; rather, the goal was to achieve a consensus. It simultaneously blends a respect for the eminently livable residential scale of San Francisco’s most beloved neighborhoods, while advocating for a forward-thinking vision of elegant density graced by moving examples of contemporary design, like the Octavia Gateway pictured above — a building that provides a splendid answer to the problem posed by the narrow, awkward parcel of land on which it would sit, at the northeast corner of Market and Octavia.

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I just realized I should have posted about this before September 1. Sorry I’m a little late… but better late than never, right?

The American Institute of Architects is doing an awesome month-long schedule of lectures and events called “Architecture and the City”, all devoted to various issues in urban design and architecture, mostly in San Francisco, but some cover over parts of the Bay Area. Here’s a short summary, excerpted from the website:

Celebrating San Francisco’s unique built environment and design community, Architecture and the City is the first series of its kind in the Bay Area to feature architectural tours, film screenings, exhibitions, design lectures and more. Now in its fourth year, the month-long celebration engages members of the public, design enthusiasts and architects and designers with a deeper appreciation for San Francisco’s rich architectural and design community.

Sessions include walking and biking tours and lectures; some events are free, but others have admission fees. Some cool upcoming ones that caught my eye include:

• Design of the new Federal Building at 7th and Mission (September 20)
• “Walk to the Fire Line”, a tour of pre- and post-1906 architecture along Van Ness (September 22)
• Tours of particularly green homes in the Bay Area (September 23)
• A discussion of urban design, open spaces, zoning, and planning associated with the transformation of the Transbay District (September 26)

I’m not yet sure if I’ll be able to make any of the sessions, but if I do, I’ll definitely write about it on here. In any case, these sorts of events are a lot of fun for city planning geeks, so definitely check them out if you get a chance! Click here to access the website; there, you can download a PDF, which describes the events happening all month long.