I really don't like the outside design at all. Not only does it strike me as boring it also looks like AAA in Miami. With that being said, the location as well as the design feature that allows the fans to look in is tremendous and second to none. Can't wait to see it built.

This just came to me, the current x pattern design of Oracle Arena kind of echoes the x pattern of the Bay Bridge. I think it would've been cool if they were to incorporate something like that in a contemporary way towards the new Warriors arena but that just might seem a little redundant. Nonetheless, I think the design of the new arena is a bit conservative, a location like this presents an opportunity to come up with something that should come close to rivaling the Sydney Opera House but that would require a lot of risk taking and that's asking a lot for an architecturally conservative city like San Francisco. I think the new renderings for the future Atlanta Falcons Stadium would be a good example, but I'm just glad the city is even embracing building an arena so i won't complain. Fortunately (or unfortunately) not a lot of arenas in the league have pushed the envelope so this one looks as nice as any other NBA arena right now, although I agree that it looks an awful lot like American Airlines Arena (in a similar setting as well) so that takes away a lot of originality points, but overall in context, it's a very good design and a great addition to the city.

Incredible arena design. It looks like the NBA is stepping up and pushing for better arenas as the sport grows, after the Nets' masterpiece. AT&T Park is not going to be happy being upstaged so dramatically. To go from an ugly concrete parking lot to this arena that will serve the city is the most amazing transformation anybody could have hoped for for this location.

How is this "upstaging" AT&T? They are completely different venues and I think they will complement each other well. At the end of the day this will be a great NBA facility and AT&T will still be right there with PNC for the best ballpark in MLB.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/nba/nba/.ele...0505-2-925.jpg

This is going to be more a concert/ entertainment venue than a basketball arena- Warriors plan on using it only 50 days out of the year with 200 days for other events.

^Even 50 games implies a very deep playoff run each year (hope so, but you know :))

I think it will be pretty awesome if they can actually make use of it 200 days a year. That seems pretty aggressive - the Staples Center is usually listed as the arena used the most days of the year, usually around 250. But that's with two home NBA teams, a home WNBA team and a home NHL team.

Filling 150 days a year with concerts, etc is going to be pretty tough.

I think it's phenomenal. Futuristic without being gaudy (I love the Sydney Opera House, but it would be so easy to build a cheesy piece of crap in reaching for that kind of iconic design). The "portal" looking out onto the bridge is breathtaking and the public spaces are going to make it stand above most comparable arenas. Can't wait to take a ferry from the north bay directly to a game.

I'm curious about just how transparent the glass shell is intended to be. In several renders, it looks almost like it's shrouded in aluminum, but my gut tells me (and would prefer it if) it's going to be clearer than that. Between the glass and the Bay Light-style LED displays, this thing is going to look otherwordly, with people standing on starlit beams of glass.

Also, ByTheBay's notion of incorporating some version of the X-bracing found on Oracle and the Bay Bridge makes me think of the update of Pauley Pavillion on UCLA's campus -- they took the original inverted-pyramid exterior design (which also had X-braces coincidentally) and incorporated it into the interior of a new concourse. Love it when new and renovated buildings tip their hats to their predecessors. That kind of bracing doesn't really seem to be part of Snohetta's aesthetic, but I wouldn't object at all.

Anyway, I'm glad the developers have taken the community's input into consideration, rather than trying to stonewall the "NIMBYs" in the neighborhood. People do live and work there, and their concerns are genuine, so it's nice to see a real dialogue between parties. If this gets built (and the America's Cup Pavilion doesn't turn out terribly), this stretch of SOMA is going to be one of the premiere sporting and event destinations in the world.

http://gossipy.co/sportsnews/new-gol...re-pretty-neat


http://cdn2.sbnation.com/imported_as...s-Boards-2.jpg



http://urbaninitiativ3.com/updated-r...-new-sf-arena/

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http://urbaninitiativ3.com/wp-conten...3_SFarena2.jpg

Governor Brown signed AB 1273 today, which authorizes the State Lands Commission to approve the arena project instead of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, in an effort to streamline its approval.

• Text of the Bill
• Legislative Analysis of the Bill

i could kiss the governor.

It's good to see that the state is getting serious about this arena, especially with most of it being outside financed rather than raking over the tax payers.

On a side note, I noticed the people in the rendering seemed to be familiar. Not sure why they used Kendra in their rendering. Is that a normal practice, or just unprofessional?


http://urbaninitiativ3.com/updated-r...new-sf-arena/:

http://urbaninitiativ3.com/wp-conten..._SFarena11.jpg

http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/TCaZk...on/PcIRLgkzU2u


http://www4.pictures.zimbio.com/pc/K...IRLgkzU2ul.jpg

^^^Is that Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Baskett?

8 Washington critics take aim at Warriors arena

Arena measure will be on S.F. ballot, but when?

As long as people actually go out and vote, I'm not worried about the warriors arena getting killed. Polls have already shown that the majority of San Franciscans want the arena.

The waterfront should be preserved for affordable housing for teachers, artists and others, Agnos said, and if Lee won't budge from what he calls his "legacy project," the same group that defeated the 8 Washington condos will sponsor a ballot measure to defeat the Warriors arena, too, he said.

I had to stop and pause to make sure this wasn't an Onion style satire piece. This is unreal. I have to stop following SF development, as much as I love urban planning and architecture, we have to be the ONLY city in America that actively and aggressively fights world class projects like the Warriors Arena.

And its not even "the city" that fights these projects, but rather a minority of mostly wealthy NIMBYs who think they're entitled to manipulate the city for their own benefit, and who use fantasy scenarios (teachers, artists, affordable housing!), scare tactics, and lies to con others into backing them...because they know they'd get little support if they admitted it was about preserving their views and property values, and admitted that opposing development will actually make it harder for the poor/middle class to live here (it's great for property owners though!). And of course there's the other minority that simply thinks anything above 4 stories is ugly and bad, and/or think that we live in make-believe land, where literally every single new housing unit must be affordable, even when it's on prime, ultra-expensive waterfront land. And some people will also vote against what the city itself is backing, just because "the government is bad and corrupt".

Meanwhile, the majority of more reasonable city residents who are either supportive or ambivalent to increased development pay less attention to any of it to begin with, don't pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on scary lie-filled propaganda/ballot measures, etc, don't vote, and then we all get stuck with the horrible result.

But, in regards to the Warriors arena, I think that in SF there are enough basketball fans and people who would like a new arena for things like concerts, that once the they hear some people are trying to kill said arena, they'll get off their asses for once and vote to save it.

S.F. is the only city that has a basketball culture dating to Bill Russell's glorious 55 game win streak at U.S.F. Basketball is dear to San Franciscans.

The Warriors arena will go to the ballot box, and it will pass. There's no need to fret.

Heard something on 95.7 The Game this morning that a new edition/plan for the Warriors Arena is coming out today...anybody heard anything about this?

Full article: http://www.sfgate.com/warriors/artic...#photo-5450488
Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Giant renderings linked below:

http://i.cdn.turner.com/nba/nba/.ele...112-aerial.jpg
http://i.cdn.turner.com/nba/nba/.ele...okingsouth.jpg
http://i.cdn.turner.com/nba/nba/.ele...-overgreen.jpg

Here's the press release: http://www.nba.com/warriors/news/20131112/sf

More renderings from Socketsite. I really love this design - It needs to happen!

http://www.socketsite.com/Warriors%2...%203.0%201.jpg

http://www.socketsite.com/Warriors%2...%203.0%203.jpg

http://www.socketsite.com/Warriors%2...%203.0%204.jpg

http://www.socketsite.com/Warriors%2...%203.0%202.jpg

Source: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2..._warriors.html
NBA presentation: http://www.nba.com/warriors/sf?venue

Basketball is the Bay's greatest inspiration for architecture! Look what we're creating here on our waterfront!!:)

This is such an inspiring and avant garde project. I'm very worried it will run into trouble in the box office. Political marketing is so good at confusing t]voters who show up to vote but don't research what they are casting a vote on.

We just have to band together and publicly promote this project even more strongly.

This is my thought also, if the NIMBYs can band together, so can the Pro development groups. It is not good to be complacent when it comes to voting. Everyone should exercise their right.

I can not understand how people could oppose such a project it blows my mind. I found the anti-warriors arena Facebook plus website and it is painful.

ballot bust?
 

not sure this is the place for this, but...

another little wrinkle in the height-limit ballot saga: may be illegal to wrest authority from the city and let local voters decide in these waterfront cases.

reasoning: the City is supposed to make decisions over the waterfront on behalf of the entire state, because the latter entity ultimately holds such lands in public trust. the local population does not get sole say.

if I get their counter-argument, the measure proponents say that the local population would be carrying out the public trust protection duty themselves, so still legal.

another angle on the argument against: you can't take away power from the BoS (which the measure would do) without amending the City charter.

^I hope those interpretations turn out to be correct because I fear this project dies if that ballot measure is approved. It won't kill it directly, but it will mean this has to be approved at the polls, and I don't think that ends well for the Warriors.

I dunno. Multiple recent polls show that over 60% of SF residents are in favor of the arena getting built at pier 30/32. Of course there's still plenty of time for the NIMBY propaganda machine to go into overdrive and suck more supporters in, and there's the problem of most people not bothering to vote in SF (while the NIMBYs always vote)...but then there's also the whole thing about local voters restricting height limits on public/state waterfront land being potentially illegal--and again, over 60% of the city does support it as is. So I think there's a decent chance it will be built.

But maybe the Warriors will find a good spot in Oakland and end up building a new arena there instead of dealing with all this crap in SF. And now I'm having deja-vu...I swear i had a dream years ago where that exact thing happened. :uhh:

I don't think the polling is indicative of how a ballot measure would turn out. The waterfront project near Embarcadero probably had majority support if you took a poll of SF residents, but lost by a margin when people were asked to affirmatively vote on the issue.

The problem is while most ppl think these projects are generally desirable, only a small % of them actually care enough to come out and vote. The attitude is one of "good if it happens, but doesn't really affect me if it doesn't, so why bother voting." By comparison, a much larger % of those who oppose projects feel strongly enough to go out of their way to vote down the project. The attitude here is "sucks for me if it happens, so it I will vote it down for sure."

I'm still thinking the Warriors arena and it's opposition may be high profile enough to get enough people to actually vote for it though. AT&T park had tons of opposition too, and for all the same reasons, yet it ended up passing.

"The cost to rebuild two linked piers has risen dramatically since the Golden State Warriors announced the team wanted to build an 18,000-seat waterfront arena in San Francisco, and the franchise will likely miss its target fall 2017 opening date.

Team officials have not publicly conceded that the arena won't be ready for the start of the 2017 NBA season but acknowledge the projected cost just to fix the crumbling piers, currently used as a parking lot with magnificent views of the Bay Bridge, is now $180 million. That's roughly double the original figure the team estimated when it announced in May 2012 that it wanted to move from Oakland.

The new figure represents just the cost to make the 13-acre site suitable for an arena complex that would include stores, restaurants, a practice facility and a parking garage with terraced public plazas and greenery covering much of the structure. The $180 million figure is $10 million more than the previous high projection from last summer and comes after months of design work and outside review of costs for rebuilding Piers 30-32.

Team officials say they remain committed to the site and the higher price won't mean more public money going into the $1 billion project."

http://www.sfgate.com/warriors/artic...le-5191031.php

...

Uh oh. Also, just curious, are SFGate commentators representative of the majority of San Franciscans? Because it seems like most of them oppose the arena.

No, not really. Like any news site comments section, it tends to mostly be whiners, people with too much time on their hands, crazy people, idiots, etc making the comments. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of conservative types who gravitate towards SFgate as well, just to see what "crazy SF" is up to, and to talk shit. And of course NIMBYs come out in force in comments sections too, because people are always more ready to complain about something than to praise it. A lot of San Franciscans outright dismiss the chronicle as garbage. It's basically a glorified tabloid at this point, with some snippets of news which is in large part just copy-pasted from the AP...often for local stories even :haha:

Mutiple recent polls say that about 60% of SF residents are in favor of the new arena, so the comments really aren't representative of SF as a whole.

Well, they represent the majority opinion of a large segment of San Franciscans, yes. Most of whom live nowhere near the proposed development, yet view San Francisco as a quaint little fishing village that needs to be preserved.

I actually do understand and to some degree empathize with the shift San Francisco has made, and that many moved here for countercultural reasons and thus view the "Manhattanization" (a term I find tremendously foolish, by the way) of the city as a threat to their existence and lifestyles. Not to mention that even though they are rent controlled, the cost of living has skyrocketed to an unreasonable point for everybody (including people making six figures), and they see this as further proof that the soul is being sucked from their city (regardless of the fact that it was their own anti-growth ballots and movements that partially put those rents where they are). So while their mobilization makes me almost nauseous because of the sheer denial, fear mongering, and lunacy, I do understand where it is coming from and empathize with their frustrations and fears.

However, Summer of Love/Gay Rights Movement/90s stagnancy aside, we have to logically face where the city is now. Despite the movements that brought them to the city, nobody would look at these facts on paper and view San Francisco as some small little town that is anti-density, business, and growth:

- One of only five American cities to be designated as a Global Alpha City (the other four being NYC, Chicago, LA, and Washigton DC).
- Second highest population density in America (although I understand we aren't even at Bronx levels)
- Top 5 in the country for highrises above 35 meters (and per capita, we're #2 behind NYC), Top 5 in the country for buildings above 100m, #6 in the country for buildings above 150m. If you adjust the second two for per capita, we would rank higher once again but I haven't run them specifically to see where we are.
- Sixth most visited city in the US for tourism, 44th in the world.
- The hub for a region that boasts the headquarters of Wells Fargo, Visa, Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Gap, Levi's, a federal reserve branch, Chevron, and which founded Bank of America. And those are just some of the heavy hitters.
- Center of a metropolitan region that, by some measurements, is over 8M people large.
- Culturally, one of the few American cities that can boast world class ballet/opera/symphony, all of the "big 4" sports teams regionally, 20+ Michelin starred restaurants, a park bigger than Central Park, a full roster of world class museums, dozens of internationally renowned landmarks from Alcatraz to the Golden Gate to Lombard to the cable cars, the list goes on.

The fact is that this little fishing village of 820,000 casts a very long shadow, not just domestically, but internationally. That is the reality.

So when you see these people fighting tooth and nail to keep the city the way they envision it, I respect where they are coming from, but their vision of the city is ideologically skewed and nowhere represents the reality. The issue is that the way the political system is set-up heavily caters to this demographic, which then produces policies and procedures that cater to the counter-cultural, anti corporate, fishing village full of quaint bakeries and 3-story buildings that doesn't actually even exist, and ignores the growing and increasingly international/powerful city that does exist.

They are protesting tech and finance as if this is new...the Bay Area has been the tech hub and the "Wall Street of the West" for DECADES.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of lunacy, greed, and ridiculousness on the development side, but I am continually exhausted by people who vote based on ideology, not reality. I am not even in tech, but would love to see those companies mobilize their employees to vote pro-development for both candidates and ballot measures, because that is the only way I can see the tide turning against the extremely well mobilize anti-growth group. Ed Lee may not be perfect, but with the class-war brewing in SF, you can bet the next mayor will be anti-development and "progressive" in the regressive SF definition of the word, so this is the window.

[/End Rant].

^well said!

It's frustrating how people tend to see what they want to see, rather than see what the reality is. It helps us to unwittingly and constantly do things that are against our own best interests. Human beings :shrug:

From the very beginning I was pretty baffled at the low estimates that the Warriors had for the pier reconstruction. Not surprised that they've now raised them, and I hope that it doesn't seriously endanger the plans.

just to get these on here, 2 socketsite blurbs:

- Warriors officially declare delay at least until 2018 season

- supporters of measure to put heights along waterfront to the voters delivered many more signatures than needed to get it on the ballot

I wonder if the ballot measure should be more of a general discussion because doesn't it potentially affect development anywhere in the city? Or is it just along their very loose definition of "waterfront"?

This proposed ballot measure specifically targets the Waterfront and does not affect the interior development. There are plenty of regulations already In place for development projects.

Warriors, Giants open to teaming up on arena near AT&T Park

I don't think moving to Mission Rock will help overcome the ballot measure. It will still be on the waterfront and still be taller than 48' and thus still subject to voter approval. Frankly, I think that ballot measure (assuming it passes) will eventually kill the Giants' whole plan for Mission Rock -- with or without the Warriors -- as most of it is supposed to be taller than 48'.

Sorry to be a downer, but I just don't see anything getting approved at the ballot once that goes into effect.

Will NEVER happen across from AT&T Park. I have said since Day 1 that the NIMBY's who are saying, "Put it in Mission Bay!", "Put it in Civic Center!" etc are just blowing smoke. The second it gets formally proposed for those sites, they will be just as vicious, if not more so.

It would be infuriating if it wasn't so expected. An iconic structure for SF will not get built out of fear mongering, class warfare, and a "I have mine, forget yours" mentality.

Wow, I think you're out of touch with a large segment of society here! While what you said could apply to some other projects (notably the Mexican Museum tower fight), I find that it's middle class renters who oppose highrises along the waterfront and often other development in general. I personally couldn't get any of my long time friends to vote against Prop M last fall. More than any place, the waterfront is considered sacred territory and it will never be developed with more highrises any time in the foreseeable future. I could see a successful exception for a new Warriors arena at Mission Rock, but not for the taller buildings the Giants are proposing. You can thank the lingering affects of the Fontana for that, as well as not wanting to look like Miami, Rio, or other cities with waterfront towers.

A similar thing is happening here in Sacramento with the new Kings arena downtown. NIMBYs tried to get it on the ballot for this June and it was blocked. I'm not sure why as I haven't been following too closely. You hear he same arguments here as in SF about traffic, too much density, et al. Anyway demolition is set for June. I hope SF can have as good of luck.

Why couldn't the Warriors just buy one of the Transbay blocks or any other lot with high density to help finance the arena, instead of having to develop the lot across the street?

If you angled it right, a new arena across the cove from AT&T Park could still look off the bay and even have the bridge in the background. One thing I would like to see changed if the site changes is a new exterior design. The current proposal is flat out boring. The outside is a carbon copy of American Airline Arena while the inside is a carbon copy of Sacramento's new arena. Surely, with a project like this the Warriors can do much better.

Have they thought about Pier 50 again?

OK so what are the other options for a new arena in San Francisco? I think there's several. What about Pier 70? Or somewhere in the Candlestick/Hunters Point area? Treasure Island?

I don't think there are too many other options. One thing to remember is this arena is not only for basketball but for conventions and other events. So, they need to be relatively near Hotels and good transportation. Candlestick would not fit this criteria and TI has issues with solid contamination, settling issues and virtually no transport. Pier 70 is already spoken for development.

I will never understand the issue with this arena. It is within walking distance of a Muni light rail route, the future Central Subway, Caltrain, BART, the future Transbay Terminal with buses to everywhere, the SF Ferry Building with ferries to everywhere else. It has better transportation that 90% of stadiums in the US (especially the new one in South Bay), and yet all I hear are these arguments about traffic. I mean, if the traffic does turn out to be that bad (which I kind of doubt) it will just give an incentive for people not to drive to the stadium the next time. They certainly have a multitude of options most cities would kill for. Do all the people who live around the area drive cars? If I lived in South Beach I certainly wouldn't care about "my" roads getting congested because I'd probably never drive on them anyways. Downtown SF is the focal point of the SF Bay Area, it will be congested with traffic stadium or no stadium, so wouldn't it be better to have an awesome sports and concert venue than a decaying pier?

I think so! "They" made the same argument about Pac Bell Park in the day and it has been nothing but beneficial for the neighborhood, the City, and the entire Bay Area. :tup: