Building presence on the world stage
Bay Area architect may win work on federal projects abroad
One of the Bay Area’s most acclaimed architects has the chance to make a mark at a global scale.
That’s Mark Cavagnero, whose best-known local projects include the SF-Jazz Center and the makeover of the Oakland Museum of California. Now his firm is one of 16 selected by the State Department to be in a pool that for five years will be turned to for work abroad, from new embassies to the renovation of structures on military bases.
“It can be anything and everything the State Department does overseas,” said Cavagnero, whose firm near Telegraph Hill has 75 employees. “We really didn’t think we’d made the cut.”
It’s especially impressive given that 136 firms responded to the request for submissions. The winners run the stylistic gamut from Morphosis, the designer of the San Francisco Federal Building, to Robert A.M. Stern Architects, whose Gothic-themed dormitories at Yale University opened last fall.
Also in the sweet 16 are such heavyweights as Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architect of the Berkeley Art Museum, and SHoP, a New York firm that designed the Uber headquarters rising in Mission Bay.
Not that Cavagnero and his peers will be cooking up foreign compounds anytime soon.
Each winner will go through security reviews for full clearance, a process that takes months. When all systems are go, the firms in the pool are on call until projects are assigned — they get the call to tackle what’s needed right then.
In the meantime, Cavagnero and his employees
won’t be idle. The firm has several projects in the works, including a chapel for St. Mary’s College High School in Albany that opens this winter and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences that recently broke ground in Mission Bay.
There’s also his first housing complex, a 12-story building for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to be located half a block south of City Hall on Van Ness Avenue. Inside will be 113 apartments and three student recital halls, as well as 27 low-income units to replace those now on the site.
The city’s Planning Commission will consider the conservatory project soon. Going local: While Cavagnero prepares to go global, a celebrated national firm is establishing a San Francisco beachhead.
I refer to Studio Gang, based in Chicago and led by Jeanne Gang. Known for buildings that combine adventurous designs with imaginative approaches to sustainability, the firm has signed a lease in Dogpatch’s massive but beguiling American Industrial Center.
Gang herself, whose honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, won’t be moving west. The head of the office is Steve Wiesenthal, who served as UCSF’s top architect from 2000 until 2008.
“There’s great excitement about doing more work in a region where there’s a strong interest in buildings that have a social and civic role,” said Wiesenthal, who joined Studio Gang in 2016.
The firm’s first project here is 160 Folsom St., where a large hole in the ground recently sprouted a crane that will be followed by 40 floors of condominiums. It’s also in the early stages of a master plan for California College of the Arts near Mission Bay, with goals that include retooling the growing campus to generate more energy than it consumes.
In addition, Studio Gang has been selected by San Mateo County to design a new administration building in downtown Redwood City near the historic courthouse that now holds the San Mateo County History Museum.
Considering Gang’s knack for shape-shifting urban architecture — her Aqua tower in Chicago could be an eroded concrete cliff — I’ll be fascinated to see her vision for a downtown best known for its arch proclaiming “Climate Best by Government Test.” Evolution: For an eye-popping look at how cities grow, or go astray, stop by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this month.
On display in the secondfloor galleries is “Space Brainz — Yerba Buena 3000.” Jae Shin and Damon Rich put together a youth-friendly and proudly rabble-rousing dissection of the forces that shape the metropolitan terrain. Not just the tussle between, say, the desire for public spaces and the urge by owners or authorities to control them, but how scourges like housing foreclosures can hollow out neighborhoods.
Rich and Shin are partners at Hector, an urban design and “civic arts studio” based in Newark, N.J. Like Gang, Rich is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant” that comes with a $625,000 stipend over five years.
The exhibition closes on Jan. 28, and includes a Jan. 22 gathering of youth and political leaders to debate how Yerba Buena and the city might best evolve in coming years. For more information, go to www.ybca.org.