The 11th annual Architecture and the City festival officially began its month-long celebration during its opening night party this past weekend in San Francisco, California. The yearly San Francisco festival is described as the largest architectural event of its kind in the U.S. With "Home: My San Francisco" as this year's theme, the festival invites the public to join the fun with a variety of events and activities throughout the city. — bustler.net

A new pair of towers proposed for downtown San Francisco would include the city's second-tallest building - and perhaps its most startling public space, an open-air plaza set beneath the main tower's elevated first floor.

The project straddles the northwest corner of First and Mission streets, with a 605-foot tower on Mission and a broad 910-foot high-rise on First. By comparison, the Salesforce Tower under construction on the southeast corner will top off at 1,070 feet. — sfchronicle.com

"I have absolutely no doubt that Kaiser Permanente's new hospital in Oakland is a big step up from its predecessor in terms of the facilities offered to patients and their loved ones.

But in terms of how it looks and feels outside - even by the dismal standard of recent American hospital design - the stocky compound that opened last week is enough to make you sick." — San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco today has the second-highest median income in the United States, but, even using that peg, middle-income San Franciscans can afford less than a sixth of the homes available in town. Every city on the up-and-up must contend with a gap between rich and poor. Yet few have also, like San Francisco, managed to immiserate a relatively well-heeled middle class. — the New Yorker

About $570 million, or 94 percent, has been raised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its 235,000-square-foot (21,800-square-meter) expansion and to add $245 million to the museum’s endowment. The $305 million wing designed by the Snohetta architecture firm is rising behind SFMOMA’s current home, opened two decades ago in the technology-heavy South of Market area, or SOMA. — bloomberg.com

In so-called hot cities [...] battles are raging over height limits and urban density, all on the basis of two premises: 1) that building all these towers will increase the supply of housing and therefore reduce its costs; 2) that increasing density is the green, sustainable thing to do and that towers are the best way to do it.

I am not sure that either is true. — theguardian.com

The housing dynamic in San Francisco raises the capital intensity of consumption. That contributes to an increase in the capital share of income and to the stock of wealth in the economy. Zoning restrictions are a tool of the oligarchy, effectively. I'm only one-fourth kidding. — The Economist

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...]

In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area. — Marin Independent Journal

For 76 years, the gray steel eastern span of the Bay Bridge was cursed and reviled but mostly just taken for granted. [...]

At least two groups of artists and architects have mounted campaigns to spare some of the steel from the recyclers so that they can transform it into artworks that might include a home, a public gathering space and an Airbnb rental space - with a view of the new Bay Bridge. — sfgate.com

San Francisco is practically the reductio ad absurdum of gentrification: It’s already land limited on three sides by water, and the massive rise of the tech industry over the last few decades has dramatically increased both the population of the area and its wealth. [...]

But the blame shouldn’t go to the tech companies or their employees moving to San Francisco, however despicable some might be. Blame San Francisco for being pleasant, and its policymakers for being foolish — Quartz

Before the buses became a symbol for San Francisco’s gentrification woes, they were just a fleet of several hundred private coaches that whisked some seventeen thousand workers around San Francisco and to and from the Silicon Valley campuses of such companies as Apple, Google, and Genentech. [...]

San Francisco is deep into a second tech boom—and, with it, many less affluent workers are getting priced out of the city. — newyorker.com

The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists? — nytimes.com

The winners have been revealed for the Architecture at Zero 2013 competition. Architecture, engineering, and planning students and professionals worldwide were invited to submit their designs of a zero-net energy, mixed-use, and affordable residential building for the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco, CA. — bustler.net