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Foster + Partners has shared an update to its recently announced retrofit of William Pereira’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid Center in San Francisco. New renderings appear to show fresh and open office spaces upgraded for workers’ comfort and workplace flexibility in addition to an on-site... View full entry
Owner Michael Shvo and his partners have hired world-renowned architect Norman Foster to redesign the iconic tower’s interiors and plan to invest $250 million to renovate the 1972 building and expand its Redwood Park. The owners also plan to roughly double the size of neighboring 545 Sansome St. and add a new facade to create a modern office building at the cost of around $150 million. — The San Francisco Chronicle
Work is expected to begin within the week and take around a year to be completed. The project will include the expansion of Redwood Park and, potentially, the adjacent 545 Sansome Street, which will be rebranded as 3 Transamerica pending approval by the city. Previously on Archinect: San... View full entry
14 years after voters approved a nearly $10 billion bond to start building the rail system that would whisk riders from Los Angeles to San Francisco at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, many California residents have long since lost track of what is being built where, and when or if it will ever be completed.
“We’re teetering on the edge,” said Ashley Swearengin, a former mayor of Fresno who now leads the Central Valley Community Foundation. “We could get it right.”
— The New York Times
The budget for the California high-speed rail project has now swelled to more than double its originally proposed cost of $40 billion from fourteen years ago. Construction on a 31-mile segment of the project has already begun near Fresno in the Central Valley. The fight now is over... View full entry
World famous as the center of the tech industry, the San Francisco Bay Area is also home to a myriad of exciting architecture and design firms. And they're in need of creative talent right now as the huge number of listings in the region on Archinect Jobs shows. If you're searching for... View full entry
It’s doing it (again). San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is on the move once more, this time in an entirely different dimension as the 13-year-old building is sliding while it sinks and tilts. Now the tower is said to be moving to the east, specifically. The firm in charge of stabilizing the... View full entry
The cost to build California’s ambitious but long delayed high-speed rail line has once again risen, with rail officials now estimating it could take up to $105 billion to finish the line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The project’s price tag has steadily risen since voters first approved nearly $10 billion in bond money for it in 2008, when the total cost was pegged at $40 billion.
— KOVR Sacramento
The additional need for money stems from necessary sound barrier upgrades and repositioning of the train away from the Central Valley’s Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, according to project officials. The state is confident it can raise the necessary funds from the new federal infrastructure... View full entry
The second most valuable company in the world, Amazon has been gobbling up space throughout the southeast corner of the city, taking advantage of zoning meant to preserve blue-collar jobs in a market in which housing and office space have typically generated higher revenues. — The San Francisco Chronicle
Amazon bought a 510,000-square-foot former sanitation motor pool parcel in the Showplace Square section of the city for $200 million in December of 2020. It has since proposed an expansion of the site’s footprint into an over 725,000-square-foot distribution hub for 400 workers that neighboring... View full entry
People living in San Francisco may be given the opportunity to vote on a proposal to tax vacant homes in the city. The proposal, filed with city officials this month, seeks to address a chronic shortage of housing in San Francisco by encouraging landlords to either rent or sell vacant units... View full entry
Within the architecture industry, there are individuals who work tirelessly to not only design impactful buildings but who aim to represent the people, places, and community that their work serves. Prescott Reavis was more than just a Black architect. He was an advocate, a mentor, and a formidable... View full entry
[...] Millennium Tower – a luxury condominium where star athletes and retired Google employees bought multimillion-dollar apartments before they realized it was sinking – is continuing to sink and tilt to the side by about 3in (7.5 cm) a year, according to the engineer responsible for fixing the troubled building. — The Guardian
At that rate, the building’s elevators and sewage systems would cease to function within a few years according to engineer Ron Hamburger’s report to the city’s municipal Board of Supervisors last week. He also told the 11-member body that the movement was inevitable, adding that, based on... View full entry
UCSF has released images of their proposed Helen Diller Medical Center, designed by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with HDR Architecture. The 15-story hospital will be constructed on UCSF’s Parnassus Heights campus, with 336 inpatient beds, diagnostic and treatment services, clinical... View full entry
Even as smaller projects are stuck in limbo due to market uncertainties and astronomical construction costs, the city’s colossal multi-phased projects like those at Treasure Island, Mission Rock, Pier 70 and Power Station will steam full speed ahead. Streets are being laid out, sidewalks poured, trees planted, streetlights installed and buildings are sprouting from the ground. — The San Francisco Chronicle
The city is currently in the process of transforming Treasure Island, the artificial holm named after the Robert Louis Stevenson novel and created for the 1939 World’s Fair, into an 8,000-unit residential neighborhood with below-market housing and retail amenities that is anticipated to host a... View full entry
The maddening hum of safety slats on the pedestrian handrails of the Golden Gate Bridge will finally be silenced under a recently released proposal by the Bridge District.
The fix — devised and tested by bridge engineers in consultation with aerodynamic and acoustic experts — calls for attaching U-shaped clips containing a thin rubber sleeve to all 12,000 vertical slats on the railings.
— The San Francisco Chronicle
The haunting acoustic hum is the direct result of a $12 million wind retrofit project authored by the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. A few enterprising locals have made the most of the deafening din, although the majority of drivers in the Bay Area were vocally against it... View full entry
More and more, amid the pastels and the gold-leaf embellishments, you see a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a cold war-era nuclear warhead or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight, this phenomenon reads to some residents as an erasure of the Latino community or of the lingering counterculture. — The Guardian
Gentrification has authored a wholesale change to the city brought on by what New York’s outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio once referred to as a “crisis of desirability.” Like the Big Apple, many highly-paid workers have begun returning to their former spendy enclaves, bucking a trend that... View full entry
The cost of up to $1.7 million for building and installing the cabins, along with the dining and other facilities, will be paid for by the nonprofits DignityMoves and Tipping Point Community. The cabins will remain for 18 months, when the lease the city signed for using the parking lots as outdoor shelter spaces runs out. — The San Francisco Chronicle
The 64-square-foot cabins are produced by LifeMoves, a Silicon Valley-based company responsible for the installation of a similar development in nearby Mountain View in 2016. Neighboring Oakland has operated its own cabin site since 2017, albeit with mixed results for residents who have found... View full entry