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He designed the Shard in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but for his latest project, Italian architect Renzo Piano has taken his impressive legacy to the unsuspecting city of San Ramon in order to build a suburban shopping center. Completed for a reported cost of $300 million, City... View full entry
All of which makes for a nuanced tower, conscientious and self-assured even as it reorients the skyline and redefines San Francisco’s visual image. But there’s also an air of detachment, as if the creators were so busy being tasteful they forgot that big buildings can be fun.
In the works for a decade, and with plenty of work left to do, the 1.42 million-square-foot tower at First and Mission streets opened quietly Monday.
— San Francisco Chronicle
John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, reviews Pelli Clarke Pelli's brand new Salesforce Tower which recently welcomed its first occupants. "And while it won’t ever gain visual swagger," King writes, "you might come to like it more than you expect." At 1,070 feet... View full entry
Fougeron Architecture, who recently completed the 400 Grove mixed-use in Hayes Valley, has left their mark again in the Bay Area in designing the new Kapor Center for Social Impact headquarters in downtown Oakland. The Kapor Center needed a new collaborative workspace to carry out their mission... View full entry
Facebook announced today that it has partnered with OMA to design the masterplan for Willow Campus, a mixed-use neighborhood adjacent to their existing headquarters in Menlo Park. "The first official step will be the filing of our plan with Menlo Park in July 2017. We will begin more formal... View full entry
Come July, the Pelli Clarke Pelli-designed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco is set to break two records: tallest building in the city and the most expensive. At 1,070-feet tall, the building cost its developer, Boston Properties, a whopping $1.1 billion. Actually, the Salesforce Tower isn’t... View full entry
Prompted by the success of a similar competition it ran in New York several years ago, The Rockefeller Foundation has launched a completely Ben-Carson-HUD-free contest that challenges architects and urban planners to "imagine climate change solutions" for the San Francisco Bay Area. Opening for... View full entry
Studio Gang has beat out Allied Works and Michael Maltzan to win a commission to design an expanded art and design campus for the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. The decision follows a two-year search and planning process.Currently, the CCA campus is split between two sites... View full entry
Hot on the heels of their lauded new National Museum of African American History, Adjaye Associates has been awarded a major new commission: the 760-acre masterplan for the second phase of the San Francisco Shipyard redevelopment.The Shipyard will house some 12,000 homes and apartments, a million... View full entry
Facing a legal and public-relations nightmare with its sinking and leaning Millennium Tower, the San Francisco highrise’s developer is redesigning the foundation of its newest luxury condo project up Mission Street — with the idea of going all the way down to bedrock. [...]
the 58-story Millennium Tower at 301 Mission St. [has] sunk 16 inches and is leaning 2 inches to the northwest. That condo high-rise sits on a concrete slab with piles driven 60 to 80 feet deep, well short of bedrock.
— SF Chronicle
In contrast, the 706 Mission St. tower was designed without any piles. Instead, it was to be held up by a four-story basement garage sitting on a bowl-shaped concrete slab, 12 feet thick at the center and 5 feet thick at the edges. The Millennium Tower is already sinking even though it was built... View full entry
Next month, media organizations in the Bay Area are planning to put aside their rivalries and competitive instincts for a day of coordinated coverage on the homeless crisis in the city. [...]
“We want the full force of the Fourth Estate to bear down on this problem” [...]
“You will not be able to log onto Facebook, turn on the radio, watch TV, read a newspaper, log onto Twitter without seeing a story about the causes and solutions to homelessness”
— nytimes.com
A fascinating effort in "solutions-oriented journalism", coordinating efforts across 30 media organizations to fully devote one day of coverage to the Bay Area's homelessness problem. While some organizations will report on the issue as they otherwise might, others will propose direct hypotheses... View full entry
Sea level forecasts by a coalition of scientists show that the Silicon Valley bases for Facebook, Google and Cisco are at risk of being cut off or even flooded, even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe sea level increases.
Without significant adaptation, Facebook’s new campus appears most at risk.
— the Guardian
San Francisco to mandate solar panels for new constructionsWhile the Frank Gehry-designed campus was elevated to prevent flooding, even a 1.6 ft rise – on the low end of predictions – will "inundate" the campus. Google is a little better off but will also be swamped if the Antarctic ice sheet... View full entry
Larry Gagosian’s new 4500 square foot space, designed by Kulapat Yantrasast, is set to open up on May 18, 2016, on 657 Howard Street, right across the street from SFMoMA. The inaugural exhibition there will focus on the relationships between modern and contemporary sculpture and drawing, featuring work from Picasso and Joe Bradley, among others. — Art Forum
Interested in other content from the intersections of architecture and the art world? Check out these recent posts:Albright-Knox Gallery announces short list of firms for $80m expansion: Snøhetta, BIG, OMA, wHY, Allied WorksAs the Met moves into the old Whitney, can it shrug off the iconic... View full entry
Last week the city council in Mountain View, California, took a significant step toward addressing Silicon Valley's housing affordability crisis. The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase
[...]
— Vox
"The big question is whether this represents an isolated victory for housing advocates or whether it's the start of a trend toward denser development in Silicon Valley more broadly."For more on the housing woes of the world's tech capital, check out these links:Can Silicon Valley save the Bay... View full entry
The subject of a thousand think pieces and endless dinner table conversations, the considerable changes unleashed on the Bay Area by the tech industry over the past few decades are pretty undeniable. An influx of money – and its attendant culture – has remade San Francisco and the valley to... View full entry
Comedy troupe Cultivated Wit takes a humorous jab at megaprojects, outlandish crowdsourcing, and how much San Franciscans loathe Burning Man in a cheeky mock campaign that would support the construction of a 300-mile wall around the Bay Area to keep Burners out, forever. And all at a reasonable... View full entry
