For the Resilient By Design: Bay Area Challenge, One Architecture & Urbanism (ONE) partnered with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Sherwood Design Engineers (Sherwood) to develop a resilience plan for Islais Creek, an historic watershed in Southeast San Francisco. This is an historically industrial area once home to a verdant, marshy watershed since channelized and home to heavy industry and logistics which support the entire city of San Francisco.
The team’s final design, Islais Hyper-Creek, merges ecology and industry along a daylighted creek, allowing for a naturalized and restored series of waterfront public spaces with densified and consolidated industrial and PDR space at its edges. A series of parks and public amenities populate the edges of the creek through a series of six proposed pilot projects.
Throughout the year of the project’s development, BIG + ONE + Sherwood held over 80 stakeholder and community engagement meetings to better understand local dynamics, relationship to the waterfront, and areas of desired improvement aside from infrastructural resilience. Chief among the concerns highlighted by locals were access to jobs and workforce development, affordability in an increasingly stressed housing market, environmental justice, and parks / open space.
Through bridging an important relationship with the Port of San Francisco, ONE is seeking new ways to advance pilot projects, including resilient floating architecture at Warm Water Cove. By densifying existing industrial and logistical activities, softening shorelines and daylighting a section of the creek currently decked over, the BIG + ONE + Sherwood team sought to reorient the city’s relationship to its historic waterfronts as a vital element in its recreational and industrial economy.
The six pilots arrived at by the design team respond to these concerns and more, proposing the creation of accessible open space with integrated green-blue infrastructure, a food district, vastly improved transportation systems, waterfront access, waste processing, stacked and decked residential and commercial space, and other phaseable short-term solutions to climate and urban risks.
Status: Competition Entry
Location: San Francisco, CA, US
Additional Credits: The BIG + ONE + SHERWOOD Team is co-led by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), One Architecture + Urbanism (ONE), and Sherwood Design Engineers (Sherwood). The team also includes leading experts from Moffat & Nichol, Nelson Nygaard, Strategic Economics, and The Dutra Group. Together, they bring international experience from Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Bay Area by designing innovative solutions for climate vulnerabilities.
