San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New S.F. park creates compelling landscape
Powerful design meets challenge of serving multiple publics at once
For the past two seasons, Giants fans gathered at Oracle Park have seen a miniature skyline rise beyond the rightfield bleachers, a trio of structures filling once clear sky.
Now, that work in progress is finally opening to the public — starting with an enticing yet ambitious park along China Basin that deserves a visit, even if baseball puts you to sleep.
The 5-acre spread has a simple name, China Basin Park, with a powerful design that is strong enough to meet the challenge of serving multiple publics at once. Like the buildings that accompany it, some parts work better than others. But the overall landscape is compelling and fresh, attuned to the needs of a 21st century city that has yet to recover from the pandemic.
That contemporary spark is what makes the neighborhood-scaled Mission Rock project stand out, despite the loose ends and rough edges that were all too apparent when the park debuted before the Giants’ home opener on April 5. This is a complex that could be in no other city, and that’s refreshing.
You see this in the quartet of buildings, craggy in shape and clad in tactile masonry rather than the slick panels of metal and/or glass that constitute today’s urban norm. Two are 23-story apartment towers. One is a 13-story office block leased to Visa. The fourth is a long, eight
story structure that can hold offices, lab space or anything else that attracts tenants in present-day San Francisco’s anemic commercial market.
The park, designed by New York’s Scape Studio for Mission Rock’s developers, Tishman Speyer and the Giants, shows this even more.
To the north is the ballpark and the downtown skyline, to the east a knockout panorama with the Bay Bridge in the distance behind sailboat masts. The Bay Trail passes through, enlivening the space throughout the day.
So how do you compete with such attractions? By becoming one yourself.
The new park includes a 1-acre lawn sweeping down toward the bay, fringed with cypress and oak trees that someday will frame but not block the views of the Oakland hills, and a plaza off Third Street that’s an ideal spot to meet friends before going to the game. Perched a few feet above this plaza is another, dotted with benches and shaded by arbutus trees with their strawberry-like fruit.
The list goes on: There’s a fenced-in dog run and a clearing for food trucks. Amphitheater seating forms a sculpturelike retaining wall between the Bay Trail and the lawn’s highest point, 13 feet above where cyclists and strollers flow past. For one stretch along the Bay Trail, there’s a beach-like expanse of sand dotted with fragments of oyster shells.
“We were pushing things up and pushing things down to achieve a seamless set of spaces,” said Kate Orff, Scape’s founder, describing the design’s larger aim as “a sculpting of the land that allows all these aspects to operate together and snap into place.”
The startling thing is, it works.
Come before or after a Giants game, and you’ll see clusters of fans hanging out at the seating wall across from the Willie McCovey statue, while parkgoers relax on reclaimed eucalyptus trunks that serve as the seating for the “beach.” The lawn already attracts parents with strollers; the dog run has its own clientele. The southeast corner contains an entirely different landscape — a thickly planted bioswale that will catch and treat stormwater runoff and, years from now, will seem like a remnant of overlooked nature.
“Our thought was ‘let’s make it into something, not just an engineering solution,’ ” Orff said.
Though her reference is to the stormwater garden, it applies to China Basin Park as a whole.
This is a space intended to
“We were pushing things up and pushing things down to achieve a seamless
set of spaces.”
Kate Orff, founder of Scape Studio
in New York
bustle on game days but also serve as the local park for the first phase of Mission Rock, which includes 537 apartments, the Visa headquarters and walkways lined with restaurants and cafes. The Bay Trail has its own constituency, intent on moving through rather than settling in. Mission Bay, the dense neighborhood that cradles the newcomer to the south and west, adds thousands more potential visitors.
Scape’s assertive design acknowledges these different worlds; the lawn orients to the bay, for instance, while the seating wall and McCovey statue focus on the ballpark. Yet, the park feels unified, rather than a checklist of attractions.
This isn’t to say everything is perfect. The dog run is too small, an afterthought that many dog owners seem to ignore. The boardwalk through the stormwater garden is scaled for crowds that may never find their way to a serene low-key oasis.
The developers — including the Giants, crazily enough — also erred in ditching the 6,000 engraved tiles purchased by fans when a much smaller version of the park was built in 2003. The team backtracked after the Chronicle broke the news, saying it will find space for new tiles with the old and often sentimental inscriptions, but making room for the team’s most loyal fans should have been in the plans from the start.
By the time updated tiles return, we’ll have a better sense of how Mission Rock functions as a whole.
Only one building now has occupants, the striking brickred apartment designed by the Dutch firm MVRDV with a chiseled form that explains why it is named the Canyon. Visa employees start reporting to work next month. The green tile-clad Verde apartment tower welcomes its first residents in June.
I’ve heard grumbling from ballpark-goers that the stubby high-rises look out of place — perhaps because there’s no hint of the still seductive nostalgia of the ballpark’s design. Yet this is an urban ballpark: The growth of nearby Mission Bay, and the glassy towers to the north, have just made it feel more like a haven during the past 24 years.
Walk among the buildings, or look up from the park, and the architecture comes to life. The quartet evokes the heft of older downtown buildings, albeit in contemporary forms, while the structural depths on display allow the newcomers to complement each other.
This isn’t by chance: The design process for Mission Rock’s first phase was led by Studio Gang, the Chicago firm that worked with Tishman Speyer on the eye-catching Mira tower along the Embarcadero. Here, Studio Gang helped select the different firms and then led a continuing set of meetings where the different architects could bounce ideas off each other and respond to each design as it evolved.
Studio Gang itself designed Verde, and from afar it’s a letdown — heavy rather than soaring, with a skin that looks dour when not illuminated by sunlight.
But when you visit the site, everything changes. There’s a taut energy to the constant small shifts of scale. Combine this with the soaring intricacy of Canyon, or the blunt presence of Visa’s new home — “we think of this as a big fat rock,” in the words of an architect at Henning Larsen, the building’s designer — and you recognize the urbane friction that makes big-city landscapes come alive.
As I said, Mission Rock is a work in progress.
Given the economy, there’s no telling when the future phases will replace the Giants’ surface parking, or whether the developers will pay for equally adventurous designs.
What we do know is this: Mission Rock right now sparkles in multiple ways. And that’s a gift to San Francisco and the Bay Area that will endure after today’s travails are in the past.