Moscone wing’s flight of fancy
South of Market convention center’s ambitious, enormous addition seeks to engage with surroundings through practical, elegant details
Moscone Center has been a work in progress almost since it opened on Howard Street in 1981, so it’s fitting that as the newest addition opens for business, the structural bones along the entire west side are exposed for all to see.
But the east half of Moscone 4.0 is now complete — a wing that does its best to bring architectural nuance to what could be a numbing show. Thin icing on a massive cake, perhaps, but welcome all the same.
The latest piece of the puzzle is a 200,000-square-foot structure at Third and Howard streets that includes a 55,000-square-foot, column-free ballroom, a glassed-in lobby with 24-foot ceilings, and an elevator landing that floats above the increasingly busy corner. The third floor is devoted to meeting rooms tucked behind a long outdoor terrace that makes the front of the newcomer less monolithic.
The first conference booked for the space is the GSMA Mobile World Congress Americas, which on Tuesday will host 30,000 attendees in every nook of Moscone that isn’t closed because of construction. But the official ribboncutting was on Tuesday, even as workers in yellow vests and hard hats were doing their best to put a finished sheen on the spacious box.
“The paint is barely dry in this room — it’s quite a challenge,” Mohammed Nuru, the city’s director of public
works, conceded in his opening remarks.
Mayor Ed Lee made a similar point, recounting what he learned when he was in Nuru’s post and Moscone West opened in 2003: “You set a deadline that you cannot cross.”
Most of the $551 million expansion, though, isn’t scheduled to be completed until December 2018.
The building that was the focus of the ribboncutting, now 108 feet tall and 255 feet long, will extend west and more than double in length. Across the way on Howard, Moscone North will get a redone lobby with a glassed-in overhead walkway to the new ballroom level. There also will be a landscaped bridge over Howard near Fourth connecting the north and south pieces of Yerba Buena Gardens
In essence, the goal is to make Moscone Center engage the city and its surroundings. The corner not only showcases the escalators, it places them behind ultra-clear glass. There’s a spacious corner terrace as well as the long one above. When the expansion is complete, a “paseo” from Third Street will offer a pedestrian path to the expansive children’s playgrounds on the interior of the block.
“We wanted to turn everything inside out, activate every edge we could any way we could,” said architect Mark Cavagnero, whose firm was associate architect to the lead designer, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. “The original was such a bunker.”
But the first version of Moscone Center was conceived in much different times.
The center is named for Mayor George Moscone, who was shot to death in 1978 along with Supervisor Harvey Milk by former Supervisor Dan White. He was the mayor who won support for the convention center and the larger Yerba Buena redevelopment district.
A large cadre of activists battled the project after the 87-acre area — much of it covered by single room occupancy hotels filled by bluecollar retirees — was declared to be blighted in 1966. Development stalled but dozens of buildings were bulldozed between or along Market, Harrison, Third and Howard streets. Only after Moscone was elected in 1975 did a plan take shape that won at least grudging support from the various interest groups.
That compromise has stood the test of time. There are more than 1,500 units of subsidized housing for the elderly, and Yerba Buena Gardens continues to flourish as a true civic green. Towers hold four-star hotels. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a magnet for international visitors looking for a cultured counterpoint to Fisherman’s Wharf.
As for Moscone Center, it was conceived as a sunken compound on the south side of Howard Street, because opponents wanted it out of sight and out of mind as much as possible. Moscone North debuted in 1993, topped by Yerba Buena Garden’s grassy bowl. Moscone West arrived in 2003 as the first piece fully above ground.
That’s the nature of convention centers. The big ones keep getting bigger.
Also, nothing is sacred. The latest expansion does away with everything from 1981 except the underground exhibition hall. It will reopen as part of the expansion, with a widened link below Howard Street to a subterranean hall in Moscone North.
When the dust settles, the test for those of us who don’t have convention tags around our neck will be whether the architects have succeeded in making Moscone feel like something other than a super-scaled world unto itself.
Judging by the fresh installment, there’s reason for optimism.
The trait shared by the architects at Skidmore’s large San Francisco office and Cavagnero’s small firm is a fastidious but elegant attention to detail, and it manifests itself here in something as basic as the fritting on the center’s main glass wall. Instead of simple dots or bars to deflect heat and bright sunlight, the panels are patterned with a diamond-like fritting that has visual interest yet doesn’t call attention to itself.
The diamonds reappear on the densely perforated aluminum panels that cloak much of the Howard Street facade, looking almost like a herringbone gauze. Above the terraces they reappear again, a roofline canopy of pleated aluminum triangles.
All this sounds fussy. In real life, it’s an understated departure from the convention center norm.
Once inside, delicacy gives way to wide corridors. Large signage. Clear sight-lines, and a white palette that will serve as a background to the ever-changing installations. Make no mistake, this is a big-city convention center. It also has a bigcity air. We’ll see if the final (for now) phase delivers on the promise that we see.