Promise is building in long-slighted spot
Admired architect takes new view of shipyard housing site
Forget those downtown towers clambering toward the heavens. The biggest change to San Francisco’s landscape is taking place 5 miles away — easy to miss unless you know where to look.
Residential landings line new hillside roads. A neighborhood green spills down toward the bay. Balconies with chairs and potted plants look out at concrete being poured and walls being framed. One residential block is adorned with a four-story vegetated wall.
The setting is the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where the first batch of 208 condominiums and apartments forms the figurative beachhead for what eventually will be a 437-acre extension of the Bayview neighborhood. What’s gone up so far has promising elements, including the most inviting park the city has seen in years. There’s also real promise downhill, where one of England’s leading architects is rethinking how the huge project should meet the bay.
That figure is David Adjaye, in the news this month as the designer of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and
Culture, which opens Saturday on the National Mall across from the Washington Monument. The Hunters Point development would be his first work in the United States west of Colorado, and his first planning effort in the Americas.
As for what’s being marketed as San Francisco Shipyard, it’s a fast-changing element in a part of the Bayview that outsiders rarely see, except when they visit the artist studios in old naval buildings below the hillside.
Construction of the first phase began in 2014 and eventually will hold roughly 800 housing units spread across 75 ridgeline acres, including 20 acres of parks. So far, five residential complexes have been completed or are near completion, designed by four architectural firms. Three more are being erected along an oval park that includes a playground.
This is a construction zone, make no mistake. It’s also an intriguing work in process.
Inevitably, blocks of housing blur together when they’re built at roughly the same time and at roughly the same scale. Even so, there’s more variety here than you find in other newer settings, like Mission Bay.
I particularly like Merchant, where the boxy modern wings along Friedell Street frame a residential courtyard open to the street with a four-story vegetated wall at the back, vines slowly snaking up metal netting against a metallic wall. Architect Ian Birchall and his firm have managed to pull off a four-story condo project that looks like a blend between blue-collar SoMa and mid-century Daly City — and in a good way.
On the next block, David Baker Architects adds visual pop to the low-slung scene at Pacific Point Apartments, 60 units of affordable housing, where the centerpiece is a rounded six-story shaft of perforated Cor-Ten steel.
Topography shakes things up as well. Rooflines jog along the slopes. Hillside stairways between the streets are not just shortcuts, but modest hints of Russian Hill or Bernal Heights.
Also, the master plan for the shipyard by the planning firm IBI weaves in neighborhood parks of varying size. All of them so far have been designed by the landscape architecture firm CMG, including the 2-acre Hillpoint Park that includes a large sloping lawn alongside a constructed overlook that offers cliff-like views of the bay.
There’s nothing fancy about the details within the park, such as the angled slabs of concrete that serve as benches or the cottonwood trees along the lawn. But the restraint is welcome, because it leaves room for something that too many contemporary parks lack — a sense of spacious possibility, where you’re part of something larger and at liberty to find your own niche.
The sense of possibility is amped up by Adjaye’s participation in what might come next.
Born in Tanzania to a Ghanaian diplomat, Adjaye opened his office in London in 1994. He’s best known for understated but potent small buildings that often have a civic function, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and much-praised libraries in London and Washington.
The socially charged museum on the Washington mall — clad in angled panels of patterned bronze and inspired by West African crowns — is a highprofile departure. So is the scale of his work on the former shipyard’s acres along the water, most of it on artificial fill as the shipyard expanded between the 1870s and World War II.
“We’ve just started, but we want people to see how we’re forming the direction,” Adjaye told a small group last week at a City Club talk organized by FivePoint. “It’s not all worked out yet, so don’t ask me technical details.”
The approved plan maps out the bay-side acreage in ways that emphasize residential blocks on one side of the central inlet (a former drydock) and an “urban innovation district” on the other. Except for the statuesque crane at the end of the largest pier — the marketing symbol for the overall project — nearly all the structures from before 1950 would be razed.
Adjaye’s preference is the opposite.
“My initial thoughts were, ‘Let’s just hold onto everything and inhabit it once again,’ ” he said after describing the largely abandoned terrain as something that “looks ordinary but is magical . ... It’s a site where labor was performed to help the nation.”
The initial concept by Adjaye adds at least one major plaza amid new buildings and gives a twist to the orderly layout of the current plan. There’d be pedestrian bridges across the filled drydock and a cultural building to tell the stories of this diverse but long-neglected corner of the city.
Nothing has been filed yet with the city. Any changes must fit within the confines of the approved plan’s height limits, and a far-sighted response to the threat posed by sea-level rise will be crucial.
There’s also a political angle, no surprise. Proposition O on November’s ballot would exempt the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point from current citywide limits on the amounts of office space that can be built on an annual basis. If it passes, the developer is likely to focus on trying to attract large tech tenants.
But if the specifics of Adjaye’s planning vision are still vague, the basics are strong. He wants to add an urban spark — fill in the blanks but not wipe the slate clean.
Today, from CMG’s soft green park, you look straight down on the hollowed-out remnants of the shipyard that is Adjaye’s focus. It’s a remarkable setting and a provocative contrast. If San Francisco is lucky, the two sides of the shipyard together might someday form a complex, truly compelling addition to the city’s ever-richer fabric.