Uber delivers best new public space
Headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay creates an oasis with pedestrian pathways, artstudded park
No tech firm embodies the dubious virtues of “disruption” more than Uber, the 2009 startup now valued at $102 billion that relies on “independent” drivers who clog city streets while trying to make a decent living.
But its new headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay shows that sometimes, disruption can be a good thing.
Uber’s 6 and 11story buildings on Third Street are understated but suave, with layers of detail on view behind the sleek glass walls. The artstudded park and pedestrian way between them already is a lush oasis within this neighborhood that didn’t exist 20 years ago. And even though the structures are private, the landscape is wide open to passersby — another example of how San Francisco continues to offer new attractions, no matter how bleak the past year’s news might have been.
Uber’s new home, developed by the company in conjunction with Alexandria Real Estate Equities, offers a vantage point on how aspirations for Mission Bay have grown since redevelopment plans for the former railyard were approved in 1998.
To the west is housing for UCSF-Mission Bay, the medical campus that jumpstarted the longdormant area. To the east, a pair of office buildings from the early 2000s would look at home in a suburban office park. On the block to the south, the Golden State Warriors opened their gleaming orb, Chase Center, in 2019.
What Uber brings to the mix is lowkey sophistication — not what you’d expect from a firm with a rapacious image whose founder, Travis Kalanick, once urged people to “be comfortable with confrontation.”
The main attraction is the plaza that begins on Third Street with a path leading into the block amid oak and tulip trees, plentiful shrubs and long slabs of sandstone that double as seating. If that earthy lure weren’t enough to pull you in, other attractions beckon — not only the gardenlike landscape but a scatter of playfully hallucinogenic, painted bronze blobs and a 33foothigh swirl of muscular forms clad in metal scales, like a really hip Transformer.
The 11 curvy blobs are by Berkeley artist Masako Miki, while the immense “Orbital” is by San Francisco’s FutureForms. They’re a nice counterpoint. Miki’s pieces could be halfremembered snippets of trippy dreams, while “Orbital” is so big you can walk through its legs and peer upward through an opening in the domed summit.
Some spaces are bucolic, such as the shrubsoftened nook that includes a grassy berm on the northeast corner of the space. Others features are assertive — like the metal bridge behind the berm that ramps up to a secondlevel outdoor terrace that is part of the public realm within the privately owned, threequarteracre space.
As for the sandstone slabs, plaza designer Surfacedesign has them play multiple roles — seating, retaining walls and sculptural presences. Yet they seem almost haphazard, as if they’re geologic evidence of an earthquake eons ago.
In an odd way, the space reminds me of the romantic naturalism of Levi’s Plaza that landscape legend Lawrence Halprin conjured up in the 1970s at the base of Telegraph Hill. Though the designs are profoundly different — Halprin claimed his shaded park with its meandering stream was meant to evoke a Sierra meadow in Gold Rush days — each is transportive in the best way. You can find a nook and tune out the commercial forces around you.
And the buildings?
Clad in dark glass with bronze accents, tailored in rigorous right angles, they might seem aloof and cold. But there’s a sophistication to the simple forms that adds warmth.
Unlike most new glass buildings, these two don’t have a simple, uniform skin. Some panes are laminated to keep out sunlight. Others are clear enough that you can see the metal staircases inside, or the teak slats that cover interior walls, or the multistory white cubes that contain meeting rooms and seem to hover in space.
It’s a transparency reminiscent of the aged industrial buildings found at nearby Pier 70.
Like those older buildings, this pair has natural ventilation — but with a 21st century twist. Portions of the skin are designed to open, with paired panels folding out like an accordion. This is all automated, linked to a weather station atop one building, and it allows for a natural ventilation found in few large office buildings erected since World War II.
The designer, New York’s Shop Architects, also included one bit of practical flash — diagonal bridges that connect the two buildings at the fourth and sixth floors. It’s a dynamic feature that creates a portal for the walkway from Third Street, especially since the underside of each bridge is mirrored.
All this makes for a much different environment than the crowdfriendly flash of Chase Center, another recent project with big ambitions. The intimate scale beckons you to linger, rather than arrive for an event and then depart.
It’s too early to know whether the plaza will be embraced as part of the necklace of public spaces that are being added near the waterfront south of the Embarcadero. They include the Bay Trail along China Basin, and the deservedly popular Crane Cove Park that opened last year in Dogpatch.
There’s still a ghostly feel to this part of Mission Bay, given that buildings are only now stirring back to life as the coronavirus pandemic wanes. But the Giants and Warriors again are playing in front of fans, a good sign.
If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by for a look at Mission Bay’s most beguiling snippet of green. And don’t be surprised if it becomes a place you revisit to show your friends.