San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Boxy housing units surprisingly stylish
Modular buildings promising but can be costly
The new housing at Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in Oakland is a stylish demonstration of the design potential of a muchballyhooed building method. It’s also a cautionary tale.
That complex is the Logan, which fills a prime corner of the lively Temescal district with 204 apartments that were assembled onsite from 572 prefabricated modules. They’re stacked atop a tall podium that will include a Whole Foods Market, and clad in sleek metal panels of silver and black.
The cautionary aspect? Modular construction has been touted for years as a way to trim development costs and get more housing built in the Bay Area. But by time the Logan opened late in 2020, the development firm had closed its factory and put all future projects on hold.
“We went into this thinking, ‘How hard can it be? It’s just Lego,’ ” said Randy Miller, founder of Oakland’s RAD Urban, describing the lessons learned as one of the Bay Area’s modular pioneers. “Turns out, it’s pretty hard.”
While the potential of modular housing has attracted considerable attention in the past decade, the first large batch of residential buildings using the method is only now being completed. Sometimes the savings meet expectations; often,
“We went into this thinking, ‘How hard can it be? It’s just Lego.’ Turns out, it’s pretty hard.” Randy Miller, founder of Oakland’s RAD Urban
they don’t. What’s promising is that one danger of the approach — that it could spawn a landscape of overbearing boxes at multistory scale — hasn’t been the case so far. The stocky newcomers aren’t great architecture. But they’re good urbanism, and that counts too.
On the edge of Oakland’s Uptown district, for instance, the Marriottowned Moxy boutique hotel opened this month with 172 small rooms atop a glassy concrete base at the corner of Telegraph and West Grand avenues. While the form is as simple as can be — two sevenstory rectangles with one pulled back from Telegraph to allow space for a snug outdoor lounge atop the podium — bricklike gray tiles add an oldfashioned texture to the contemporary look. On Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, meanwhile, 22 student apartments are nestled between a selfstorage facility and a vacant parking lot. The view across the asphalt reveals a flat blank wall that could be a deep billboard. But the front facade is amiable and warm, with engineered wooden panels framing nine square windows. This is infill pure and simple, and it will hold its own in years to come.
Both projects were designed by Lowney Architecture, an Oakland firm that has designed six modular projects in the Bay Area that now are completed.
“It can be less expensive, but it’s not a slam dunk,” Lowney said of modular construction. “You have to know in advance what you’re doing, and design that in from the start.”
At 2711 Shattuck, Lowney and developer Patrick Kennedy set out to keep things “clean and simple, as easy to construct as possible,” Lowney said.
The ease factor is the core of modular construction’s appeal. Not only is each shell assembled on a factory line, but the interiors also are fitted out with such basics as bathrooms, kitchens and floorings. The module are then trucked to the site and lowered into place — a process that took only four days at the Shattuck project.
Though most modules are rectangles, a sixstory apartment complex now under construction at the El Cerrito del Norte BART Station pushes the envelope. Literally.
On the stillscaffolded side facing San Pablo Avenue, modules taper slightly so that when stacked en masse, they form a gentle basketlike weave from floor to floor. Lowney is the architect for developer Rick Holliday, who manufactured the modules in Vallejo at Factory OS, which he opened in 2018.
“The more efficient you are with the guts of the building, the more you can do outside,” Holliday said.
Another Holliday project nearing completion is the Union, which will open this spring near the West Oakland BART Station. It stacks 110 apartments into a pair of sixstory rectangles, one long and one squat.
The design is by David Baker, whose 53person studio last year was selected the state’s top firm by the California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. His approach to modular projects is to keep things simple but add a few bold accents.
In this case, the two wings are set at an angle to each other, with a glassedin corridor between them. The north and west facades add another twist: They’re clad in folds of oxidized steel, a tight screen that serves to shade windows and keep out rain while costing little more than a standard skin.
“We like to make lemonade out of lemons,” said Baker.
In Temescal, RAD Urban’s Logan is anything but simple. The form is jagged on two sides, while heights descend from six to four stories on the east. Along Telegraph, the structure parts in the middle to create a deep entry courtyard that meets a tall retail arcade that cuts through the building from 51st Street to a landscaped passage — also part of the project — that leads to familyfriendly Little Frog Park.
The metallic sheen and sheer size might put some people off, but these elements help to make the Logan a genuinely inviting addition to Telegraph’s melange of shops and restaurants. So does the entry court with its vegetated walls designed by Habitat Horticulture. As street trees mature, and the storefronts fill, the brash newcomer will settle in.
The complex inhouse design added to the costs, no question. But Miller said that the main impact on the budget came from unexpected costs in preparing the site, which hid longforgotten building foundations and an incorrectly mapped underground creek.
“Without a doubt, based on lessons learned, we could do the same project today for much, much less,” Miller said this month.
As the Logan neared completion, RAD Urban shut its Lathrop factory and sold off a downtown Oakland site that included the entitlements to build a 29story residential tower.
“We’re regrouping and reevaluating,” is how Miller described his company’s current status. “I’m not done with modular ... (but) it has been an incredibly challenging journey.”
From experience, Lowney knows the feeling.
“If you haven’t lost a lot of money in modular, then you don’t have experience in modular,” he said.