Archive for the ‘Skyline’ Category
Checking In On Downtown Oakland Projects: 3-21-2008
I recently had occasion to check out some of the new projects under construction in downtown Oakland, so this post will provide a pictorial update of the construction reported in this post from last October. This post will be mostly photos; for more context and details on the projects, please check out that earlier post.
First, the inimitable Cathedral of Christ the Light at Grand and Harrison:
Below, the left picture shows that the large Uptown project is coming along nicely. The right picture shows the 78-unit Jade at 1511 Jefferson (completed last year), with Uptown construction in the distance:
901 Jefferson (left) has been unveiled since the last update and is well on its way to completion. Meanwhile, the Ellington near Jack London Square (right) chugs along:
Evolving Skyline: 2-12-2008
One of my favorite features of San Francisco’s downtown street map, two grids meeting at a diagonal, is that looking down just about any street yields a view not only of a streetwall, but also of a cross-sectional sliver of the skyline, offset at an angle. Now that Rincon Hill and South of Market are quite literally on the rise, these cross-sectional views from streets north of Market are being accentuated in new ways, as blank spaces of sky above older mid-rise buildings are captured and brought within the urban form:
555 Mission (from Geary and Jones)
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301 Mission (from Jackson Square)
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Thirty-three story office tower 555 Mission topped off a couple months ago. The 645-foot Millennium Tower at 301 Mission, to be the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi River, just topped off last week. These may be the newest examples, but they represent only the beginning of the wave that will wash over South of Market in the next couple of decades, reinventing the identity of a neighborhood once better-known for its parking lots and ramps leading on and off the Bay Bridge.
Manhattanization? Some continue to cling to a knee-jerk disdain of high rises, but as we work to embrace ever-smarter growth, this concept seems increasingly embittered and outdated. But rest assured: San Francisco will never be Manhattan, and Rincon Hill is more directly inspired by Vancouver in any case. Then again, partial emulation of one of this country’s most successful urban locales is not really such a bad thing either. Whatever label you want to attach, the densifying city can be a beautiful sight.
A Fight Over the Secret Garden
The Oakland Tribune reports today about a public scoping meeting that will take place at Oakland City Hall, tonight at the 6:00 pm Planning Commission meeting. The goal of the meeting is to receive public commentary about a project in planning, a new tower at 222 19th Street known as Emerald Views. Soaring to 457 feet, this 42-story residential tower could become the new peak of the Oakland skyline, surpassing the 404-foot Ordway Building, currently the tallest tower in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco. The tower is very slender, with just about ten units per floor and a footprint of 12,200 square feet — quite small for a building of this height. It would add 370 residential units to a highly transit-oriented location just a few blocks from 19th Street BART and the comprehensive bus service on Broadway — and it would supply a new influx of people to the developing Uptown neighborhood, an area that is experiencing quite a bit of residential construction. Also, 993 square feet would be made available at the ground level for a cafe or restaurant.
Opponents have stipulated that the tower is out of place and does not fit its context. The Tribune article quotes James Vann from the Coalition of Advocates for Lake Merritt, who remarks:
“The proximity to the lake is one thing,” he said. “I’m more in favor of the bowl concept of development around the lake, where buildings closer to the lake are lower in stories and then you rise as you move away from the lake.”
Construction Progress: 9-25-2007
Time for another construction update! The last construction progress post mainly focused on buildings that were recently completed or are very near completion, so this post will cover many large projects that are not as far along yet. As usual for these posts, you can click through each picture to see a larger version. The full-sized versions are hosted on my Flickr account.
631 Folsom, a.k.a. BLŪ, is a 21-story building in Rincon Hill with narrow floor plates — just half a dozen units on each floor, for a total of 120 units, along with ground floor retail. The image on the left is the rendering, and the image on the right depicts the current state of construction:
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Left image courtesy Handel Architects.
One of the future shining beacons downtown (at least, until the Transbay Tower is built) is 301 Mission, better known as the Millennium Tower. The Millennium is a 645-foot condominium tower designed by Handel Architects, located at the northern end of the Transbay Terminal. Here are two images of this tower. The image on the left is a rendering, and on the right is a construction picture:
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Left image courtesy Handel Architects.
Hines-Pelli Design is the Official Transbay Winner
To the surprise of no one, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority announced today that the design submitted by Pelli Clarke Pelli architect and the Hines development team to the Transbay competition has officially won the competition. The TJPA retained a jury that studied the designs, and last week the jury unanimously selected the Hines-Pelli design as their favorite of the three, making it quite unlikely that the TJPA would counter that recommendation, particularly when the jury just “happened” to select the design which is potentially most lucrative.
I’ve already written up my impressions of the whole competition and of the Pelli design here and here, so I don’t have much more to say just right now. Nothing is set in stone yet, and this proposal will now enter the muddy processing for planning and approving new projects in San Francisco, which hopefully will be carried out with taste, purpose, care, and vision. It will be exciting to follow the planning and construction of this project for the next several years.
Jury Selects the Pelli Transbay Design
The word is finally out: of the three designs submitted to the competition deciding which architect/developer team will build the new Transbay Transit Center and its associated signature tower, the jury has selected the Pelli Clarke Pelli design. The Pelli design was ranked as the best choice by every juror. The next favorite design was the Forest City/Richard Rogers proposal, and in third place, the Rockefeller/Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design.
Was this decision based carefully on design considerations, or was it all just a matter of money? Perhaps not coincidentally, the jury’s votes lined up in descending order of developer sales offers. Hines, the developer of the recommended Pelli design, offered to pay $350 million for the land. Forest City offered $145 million to develop the Richard Rogers design, and the jury chose that design as its second place choice. Of course, the SOM design took third place, and Rockefeller only offered $118 million — just a little over 1/3 the Hines offer. I don’t mean to suggest that the jury did not carefully consider the design, but money is, of course, a central concern. After all, the primary purpose of the tower is to have an additional source of revenue that will be allocated towards funding the Transbay Transit Center.
However, this is not the end of the story, nor does it imply that the Pelli design as it currently stands will necessarily be built. The opinion of this jury has been submitted to the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, who will study the recommendation and discuss it with the city. The project must also still receive the stamp of approval of the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission. In other words, now the real process for planning a development in San Francisco begins.
Construction Progress: 9-10-2007
This is the first in a new series of posts that will depict the construction progress of new projects in the Bay Area. In general, I’ll stick to high-rise or major mid-rise developments, as well as more unique projects — for example, museums, theaters, or otherwise notable cultural buildings. Why would I ever want to do such a thing? Well, for one, I know for certain that I’m not the only person excited by the evolution and intensification of the Bay Area skyline and streetscape. More fundamentally, though, I simply love to see empty, abandoned, blighted lots (or parcels of land that are poorly utilized as surface level parking) given new life in the form of a building, thus adding density, energy and vibrancy to the neighborhood. Keeping track of these construction projects is simply another way to enjoy and anticipate the revitalization of the urban spaces of which these new buildings will be an integral part.
Most of this first post will be devoted to recently completed or largely complete projects, at least on the exterior. Later this week or early next week, I plan to write another post in this series, with photos of projects that are still not anywhere near completion, but which I’ll of course follow more later as they go up. The Construction Progress posts will most likely not follow any sort of regular schedule. Rather, they will appear a bit more irregularly, whenever I remember a couple projects that really ought to be documented.
Note: Unless otherwise noted, I personally snapped all the photos that appear in this post (or indeed, anywhere in this blog). Just a reminder: full-sized photos are hosted on my Flickr account. To see any of these pictures in full detail, just click through, and the link will take you to the relevant Flickr page. I will probably also include additional photos on Flickr that are not explicitly included in the blog post. My photography skills are amateur (at best), so the purpose of these photos is not to indulge in any advanced photographic experiments, but simply to document the rising of these new developments.
The only project in this particular post located comfortably outside of downtown is the Fillmore Heritage tower:
Located in the Western Addition at the corner of Fillmore and Eddy Streets (not far from but still definitely not located on the highly gentrified Pacific Heights stretch of Fillmore Street), this 13-story tower is part of a continuing experiment of putting market rate housing in rough-and-tumble neighborhoods known better for housing projects and gang turf wars. Notably, this tower contains in its ground floor a new branch of Yoshi’s Jazz Club. The word “heritage” in the name of the building is a nod to the Fillmore District’s history as a centerpiece of the Bay Area jazz scene in the years before redevelopment projects wrecked the Western Addition. Still, there is something fiercely ironic about this new jazz club making its home in a condo tower.
3D Model Video of 181 Fremont and Transbay
UPDATE (September 7, 2007): For some reason, the YouTube clip mentioned in this post, and another similar clip by the same user, have both been removed from YouTube, just a short couple of days after they were first posted. It’s a shame they have been removed so soon, but I can only hope it is because a new video is in the works. In any case, I’ve removed the clip embedded in this post. I’ll certainly be on the lookout for a similar replacement clip, either by the same user or a different user. If you do find a good substitute clip, please post the URL in the comments so that I can add it to this post. For now, here’s just the text of this post, unfortunately less effective without the YouTube clip visual:
While aimlessly surfing the Internet, I ran into the following YouTube clip. It’s short, but it depicts a 3D model of downtown San Francisco, with several of the towers proposed for Transbay and Rincon Hill inserted into the correct locations:
[Video clip removed, hopefully a similar replacement clip will be posted soon.]
The height of the signature Transbay Tower has not yet been determined (proposals go as tall as 1,375 feet), but for the purposes of this clip, it was given a height of 1,200 feet. The 900 foot tower on the east side of the Transbay Transit Center and south of the Millennium Tower (currently under construction) is the newly proposed tower at 181 Fremont Street. An aside on the Millennium: when it was first proposed some five years ago, it was indeed quite an exciting project: one of the tallest new buildings for the city, and at over 600 feet tall, a beacon of the South of Market skyline. The Millennium will hopefully still be impressive in its own right, but fast forward a few years from when it was first proposed, and this video clip demonstrates how the Millennium will be dwarfed by the more recent buildings proposed for the Transbay district.
Meanwhile, the clip shows that if it were built to be at around 900 feet, 181 Fremont would still be a very noticeable addition to the skyline, but nonetheless appropriate in the context of the other towers nearby — assuming, of course, that the building is carefully designed so as to minimize shadow and wind impact. The boxes used in the video clip to represent the various proposed buildings are somewhat misleading in terms of assessing the effect the building mass will have on the skyline, but the clip offers a nice way to visualize how these buildings fit into the existing context, in a more interactive way than simply through renderings and sketches. Thanks to kimchalmers for the clip. For more fun animations depicting the future skyline, check out the websites of the three architects competing in the Transbay competition.
New Tower Proposed for 181 Fremont
Yep, that’s right. Yet another tower proposed for the Transbay district in downtown San Francisco. This story is not brand new, as it was actually printed in last Friday’s Business Times, but I refrained from posting about it, in order to keep the Bay Bridge-related transit updates at the top of the page through the weekend.
The tower for 181 Fremont (between Mission and Howard), proposed by SKS Investments, is designed by Heller-Manus, an architectural firm (based right out of Transbay’s ground zero) that is also working on 555 Mission, and many other San Francisco projects. The proposed tower is 900 feet (66 stories) tall, featuring about 140 homes above 500,000 square feet of office space. Although 900 feet may seem short compared to the soaring heights proposed for the signature Transbay Tower, it is still 47 feet taller than the Transamerica Pyramid, and thus is still quite tall for this town. The building would be LEED certified, and the developer is studying use of wind turbines and solar power.
Of course, this is only a proposal, so nothing is set in stone. With so many towers proposed, planned, and under construction in the Transbay/Rincon Hill area, the city still needs to carefully analyze how the tower will affect wind tunnels and cast shadows, in addition to studying the impact the tower’s occupants could have on traffic patterns in the area, the way in which this tower interacts with the street, and other issues. That said, the proposed design is quite slender: the plot of land is 15,500 square feet in area, and while the footprint is 14,000 square feet, the stories higher up would have floor plates closer to 10,000 square feet. The slender design is consistent with the Planning Department’s approach to this area, a plan that is largely modeled on Vancouver. What’s more, the 181 Fremont site is one that has been identified for using the tax revenue from the development to fund the new Transbay Transit Center. Although the area is currently zoned for buildings 300 to 500 feet tall, there is every reason to think that the city would upzone the site, since a taller building would be entirely consistent with the densities planned for the immediate area. The fact that the tower is mixed use is also key — although, with this site right next to the Transit Center, I would like to see even more homes and less office space. Still, it’s another exciting project to keep our eye on.
Image is from SocketSite.
Check Out the Transbay Designs at Yerba Buena Center
On a few earlier posts on this blog, I provided some photos I took of models and posters of the 3 proposed entries in the design competition for the Transbay Transit Center and its accompanying signature tower. There were also links to many more pictures provided by the architects themselves on their websites.
If these photos are not enough to satisfy your curiosity, I highly recommend you take a look at the models and posters yourself, in person. These have been moved from City Hall and are now on display at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at 3rd and Mission Streets, where they will remain for the next two weeks, until September 16.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority is expected to announce the winner of the design competition on September 20, so I’ll be sure to have some more discussion about the designs and the winner when that date rolls around. For now, though, head over to Yerba Buena for a glimpse of San Francisco’s future.
