How Transbay buildings can live up to city’s lofty ambitions
Salesforce Tower dominates our skyline. The vast transit center next door has opened not once but twice. Facebook leases a newly finished glass tower across the street while building crews finish an eyecatching residential highrise less than two blocks away.
But if you think San Francisco’s Transbay district is pretty much done, think again. This is the year the final large development decisions will be made, involving land that was covered by freeway ramps for decades, and they’re crucial in terms of whether this 21st century neighborhood lives up to its potential.
We’ve already seen last month’s Planning Commission approval of an 800foot Howard
Street tower that will include housing and office space, plus a boutique hotel and a bridge that connects the building to the transit center’s vast rooftop park. What lies ahead won’t be as tall, but it involves the largest single chunk of land in the district: the nowclosed block that most recently held the temporary Transbay Terminal.
Filling in this final block “will really tie everything together,” said Joshua Switzky, a program manager with the city’s Planning Department who wrote the district plan, which was approved in 2012. “When everything is built, it will be the center of gravity for the residential neighborhood.”
The block now sits fenced off and quiet, dotted with palm trees behind a chainlink fence. The district plan envisions something more compelling — splitting the block rimmed by Howard, Main, Folsom and Beale streets into three horizontal zones, with a park bookended by housing complexes.
Along Folsom there’d be roughly 250 units in midrise buildings for lowincome residents. The block to the north is zoned to allow a residential tower as part of a complex that would hold both marketrate and affordable units.
Plans for the block are now being reviewed by the city’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure. What gets built will have a profound effect on the skyline — for better or worse.
The development team of Hines and Urban Pacific proposes a 47story highrise at Howard and Main streets, with a 16story wing extending to Beale Street. The complex would hold upward of 700 units, as many as half of them reserved for low and middleincome buyers. It’s an unusually high amount that includes the affordable units required at the Howard Street tower approved last month, another project planned by the team.
The proposed height of 550 feet wouldn’t turn heads if it were set amid the cluster of highrises framing the transit center. But the Main Street location is two short blocks from the Embarcadero, and the tower would be twice the height of anything between it and the bay.
Long story short: As you near the city via the Bay Bridge or ferries, this tower would signal the new skyline almost as much as Salesforce Tower.
Given the highprofile location, the newcomer should aim to be a memorable counterpoint to the glassy sameness of so many recent shafts behind it. And the initial design filed with the city in May is promising, with a steep sculpted rectangle wrapped in a deep grid of coppertoned metal. The top 50 feet facing the bay would notch back roughly 15 feet, a small gesture toward the city’s edge.
“We see this as an important bridge between the glassiness of newer towers and the more masonry look” of the Embarcadero and the older Financial District highrises, said Strachan Forgan of SCB, the architecture firm leading the design team. “We want depth and visual texture, and a more natural appearance.”
That said, the proposed tower is 50 feet higher than the zoning allows. It’s bulkier, especially facing west, and no renderings from the allimportant bay perspective have been released.
The height isn’t a problem. The bulkiness is ominous. Planners reviewing the project also need to ensure that the honeycomblike metallic skin doesn’t get scrapped because of construction budgets.
To see why all why this matters, check out the 46story, 605foot Park Tower at the corner of Beale and Howard streets across from the site.
It’s a blunt highrise of vivid blue glass designed by
Goettsch Partners of Chicago. Facebook is the sole office tenant, and employees began moving in late last year.
Other than the angled crown that shields mechanical clutter on the roof, the big design gesture involves supersized terraces that are three stories tall: There’s a stack cut into the corners of the lower floors facing the transit center’s rooftop park, and a stack that provides outdoor aeries for the upper floors facing east.
We’re talking force, not finesse.
Goettsch is no stranger to highrises: The firm also has offices in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, producing sleek shafts with striking forms.
“If you want to build tall buildings, there’s a global aspect to this job,” Jim Goettsch, the firm’s founder, told me during a tour of Park Tower last year. “We’re like buffalo hunters — we go where the buffaloes are.”
This comment captures what I like about the tower. It is what is, big and brash, with a muscular efficiency that evokes the Windy City’s architectural DNA.
Mostly, though, Park Tower is a tall carton filled with large floors of office space. It’s also a twodimensional letdown when viewed from the bay — which raises the stakes for the tower proposed down the block.
If successful, the newcomer will shine, with Park Tower as a backdrop. Otherwise it will squander a oneofakind location.
On a daytoday basis, of course, the groundlevel landscape is more important to Transbay residents and workers than the architecture above.
Plenty is happening there, as well.
Landscape architects with San Francisco Public Works will spend the next year working with neighbors to design the new park in the middle third of the block that for a decade was devoted to bus commuters. It won’t have the lush drama of the transit center’s rooftop park, but that’s not the idea.
“The rooftop is a destination park and a botanical display, rather than a place for families to come and hang out,” said Andrew Robinson, executive director the East Cut Community Benefit District, a group funded by area property owners. “We’d love a small neighborhood space for people to gather . ... A kids’ play area will be critical.”
Makes sense: 250 lowincome apartments already front the site, and the tightly wound white Mira tower designed by Jeanne Gang will bring 392 marketrate and affordable condominiums across Main Street when it opens this summer. Add the 900 units planned to the north and south, and it will be hard to conceive that all these sites held on and offramps before the Embarcadero Freeway was demolished in 1991.
Housing for a variety of people at a variety of scales, with a park in the middle, “will make people realize this is a holistic neighborhood,” Switzky said.
The neighborhood will also get extensive street improvements funded by fees that Transbay developers have paid as part of their project costs.
Construction crews already are remaking Folsom Street with wider sidewalks. One of the city’s first sets of twoway protected bicycle lanes will be added to Beale Street beginning this summer. Other pedestrianfriendly upgrades aren’t far behind.
Assuming the economy stays strong, all of Transbay could be completed by 2025. That’s a hectic pace, but so far the results are pretty good — which makes it even more crucial that the final pieces build on the momentum.