Top buildings of the decade and their effect on urban S.F.
Choosing the word that sums up the evolution of San Francisco’s urban landscape these past 10 years is easy: profound. After that things get real difficult, real fast. Architectural trends can seem irrelevant in a region where the demand for housing is so strong and so many familiar haunts have been transformed. But if we ignore how our surroundings are treated, the physical qualities that make this place memorable could be undermined.
With that in mind, here’s my take on the city’s urban design high points since 2010. San Francisco is being remade before our eyes. Pausing to take stock can help raise standards in the decade to come.
1 181 Fremont Opened: 2018 Description: 54story tower
Architect: Heller Manus
Architects
The obvious visual change over the last decade is the skyline — those few towers that stood south of Mission Street a decade ago now are tucked amid constructed ridges and peaks that planners mapped out long before the building boom.
While the literal high point is Salesforce Tower, and other recent highrises are more nuanced, 181 Fremont is the people’s choice. No wonder. As this 800foot spike of housing atop offices jabs upward, braced by structural beams that form a visual cage, it hints at the oldschool swagger that made skyscrapers fun in the first place.
2 Windsor at Dogpatch
Opened: 2017
Description: Six stories of housing and a public passage
Architect: Fougeron Architecture and Fletcher Studio
Address: 2660 Third St.
Profound change of another sort is found in areas like Showplace Square and Dogpatch — large but relatively lowrise housing complexes that in some cases are as long as a tower is tall.
This sophisticated yet playful newcomer is the most engaging, both for the pillshaped wing clad in a nautical blue, which other architects already are copying, and for Ropewalk, the raffish midblock passage. At once a bridge and a bioswale, it’s the rare developersponsored walkway that makes you want to linger.
3 8 Octavia
Opened: 2015
Description: Eight stories of housing above retail
Architect: Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects
Hayes Valley, meanwhile, is where you’ll find an abundance of recent, adventurous housing at neighborhood scale, such as this fitting portal by the always provocative Stanley Saitowitz. An eightstory wedge of concrete and glass pillowed in aluminum blinds with an icyblue sheen, 8 Octavia shows that contemporary architecture can be blunt and urbane at the same time. Not a bad combination at all.
4 1645 Pacific
Opened: 2014
Description: Six stories of housing above retail
Architect: BAR Architects
As an antidote to the infill norm — stocky boxes that wrap their product in a cookiecutter modern skin — I present 1645 Pacific.
“What it comes down to is, I love ornamentation,” one of the developers shrugged when we visited this art nouveau extravaganza where, among other things, sculptural aloe leaves cloak mammoth urns atop a single, opulent white bay. Heartfelt rather than kitschy, we need more of this — new buildings that show real affection for the city around them.
5 Bill Sorro Community
Opened: 2017
Description: Nine stories of housing above retail
Architect: Kennerly Architecture & Planning
Address: 1009 Howard St.
San Francisco also needs more affordable housing, at all scales and in every neighborhood. What does get built, fortunately, often uplifts its surroundings as well as the lives of its residents.
That’s the case at eversketchy Sixth and Howard streets, where a grandly scaled stack of apartments clad in deep masonry rises above a ground floor that includes a lively Nepali restaurant. Of all the worthy lowincome housing complexes built in recent years, this one exudes the most confidence that better days might be ahead.
6 Pier 70
Opened: 2018
Description: Restoration of eight former industrial buildings
Architect: Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects and Preservation Architecture
The preservation success story of the current boom is the ongoing restoration of Pier 70, a longderelict industrial zone that began life as a steel works centered on a cluster of enormous masonry machine shops built as long ago as 1886.
Those buildings are now back in service, with relics like 50ton bridge cranes still visible inside. The catch is that the two largest tenants are Uber and Juul — disquieting reminders that feelgood stories never are as simple as they seem.