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Posted Apr 8, 2007, 11:11 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: New York City
Posts: 1,911
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You mean this one? BTinSF isn't the only one with connections... 
Master of detail
As Renzo Piano's first San Francisco project nears completion and a second takes shape, the architect's range of vision for the city becomes clear
San Francisco Business Times - April 6, 2007by J.K. Dineen
His shoes caked with mud, Renzo Piano scrambled across the roof of the Academy of Sciences building under construction in Golden Gate Park. He was looking for the perfect vantage point from which to show how the building's undulating green roof played off the curves of Twin Peaks and Mount Sutro. He was nearly running.
"Look at the waves here, the relationship with those hills," said Piano, pointing out at Mount Sutro. "You spend five years figuring out what a building is -- thousands of sketches, drawings. Models and mock-ups. Once you finally get here, it's mostly about scale, and the little things."
Piano is above all known as a master of detail. Among the half-dozen most celebrated architects of his generation, the Pritzker Prize-winning Piano, who designed Centre Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers) and Kansai International Airport in Osaka, has never designed a Bay Area project and is hardly a household name here. But with the $430 million Academy of Sciences a year away from completion, and an audacious five-tower scheme slated for First and Mission streets, Piano may end up having as much impact on the city as any architect in decades.
The disparate projects represent the two sides of San Francisco, and the two sides of Piano. One is a public building about nature set in the cool fog near the Sunset district. The other a collection of commercial towers in the south financial district that Piano described as a "public corner about urbanity."
"It gives you an idea of Renzo's range," said San Francisco Planning Director Dean Macris. "This is a guy who can pick and choose his projects."
A building in a park
Piano has done a dozen museums in Paris, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and two in Switzerland. But not one of them prepared him for the Academy of Sciences, he said. The building has a 197,000-square-foot living roof with 1.7 million plants. The coral reef tank will be 12,000 square feet and hold 212,000 gallons of water. In the multi-layer "rain forests of the world" exhibit, visitors will descend in a glass elevator from the top of a 90-foot dome, passing though the habitats of the Amazon, Borneo, Madagascar, and Costa Rica. Piano said the building is more complicated than the Kansai International Airport, which is one and a quarter miles long.
While there are other museums in parks, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Madrid's Museo del Prado, they tend to sit on a major boulevard on the park's edge. They don't generally communicate with the park, Piano said.
"Museums are not usually transparent, they are opaque. They are closed. They are like a kingdom of darkness. You are trapped inside. You don't see where you are," he said. "Of course, here we are in the middle of a beautiful park, this Golden Gate Park, you want to see out and know where you are."
From the beginning, Piano was bent on producing the most environmentally sound building money could buy. Besides the living roof, which will reduce storm runoff by 2 million gallons of water a year, the building uses 95 percent recycled steel. More than 60,000 photovoltaic cells on the roof will supply 5 percent of the building's power needs. Reclaimed water will flush the toilets; saltwater for the aquarium will be piped in from the ocean.
"It's a building where the idea of sustainability is particularly strong," said Piano. "It's an organic part of the building. It's not superimposed. You would have to be a bit stupid not to do it. You are making a science museum that is about nature and respect for nature. It was almost a kind of moral duty to be sustainable. If you love nature you have to show that you love nature and are inspired by nature."
Mocking up projects
Growing up in a family of builders, Piano has always been an architect who gets deeply involved in the building process. He calls his firm's offices in Paris and Genoa, Italy "workshops" rather than studios.
Hiring Piano means agreeing to allow his team to build, or have built, a series of "mock-ups" -- models, sometimes at full size, to test key systems and aspects of the building. Together, these can add millions of dollars to a project's bottom line. For the Academy of Sciences building, nearly every component was tested first with a mock up: the acrylic aquarium tanks, the glass curtainwall, the stainless steel rods that will hold up the elaborate spider web that will hang in the atrium.
Gordon Chong, whose firm Chong Partners is working with Piano on both San Francisco projects, said the mock-up process is something he had never witnessed before and it has been a revelation. It's a method Chong Partners is trying to adopt for their own projects as well, but it can be a tough sell to clients.
"We had mock-ups made in Genoa, in Germany, in Salt Lake City, in Hayward -- just about anywhere there was a manufacturer," Chong said. "I don't know whether it's the European tradition of craftsmanship, but all the details are exquisitely figured out."
First and Mission
If the Academy of Sciences is about exploring nature and the universe, Piano's five-tower project at First and Mission streets is "about creating a sense of urbanity," Piano said. Unveiled at the end of 2006, Piano's design calls for a pair of 1,200-foot towers, two more of 900 feet and another 600 feet high. The towers, which will be part of an upzoning around the Transbay Terminal and Tower, will be thin and wrapped in terracotta to evoke bamboo shoots. Developed by Solit Interests Group, the proposed buildings would house 470 hotel rooms, 600 condos, and 550,000 square feet of office. The zoning changes that would allow the skyscrapers have yet to be implemented and already face opposition from some slow-growth advocates.
For an architect who is proposing San Francisco's tallest buildings, Piano does not come across as a strident advocate for height. He says he is not interested in breaking records. He recently walked away from a 1,000-foot project at Winthrop Square in Boston because the developer was pushing for a level of density that would have forced larger floorplates, and a clumsier structure.
"When you make tall buildings you have be careful not to fall in the trap of making aggressive, powerful, arrogant buildings," he said. "(Tall buildings) can be obsessive symbols of power. Somebody talks about phallic symbols and it is true. Sometimes tall buildings don't tell very interesting stories."
In contrast, Piano sees San Francisco as a "city about romanticism and light." Piano said he is planning to keep some of the three- and four-story buildings along First Street.
"Modern architecture and construction tends to want to destroy what is already there, but I think it's a mistake because the growth and transformation of cities is about layers, so it's a pity not to keep some element of memory," he said. "Those little buildings at First and Mission are part of the story."
He also said he is not wedded to the 1,200-foot height.
"It may not be that tall," said Piano. "We are not interested in that specifically. It is more subtle than that. They should be quite tall because they become more subtle and elegant and beautiful like that, and the city, from time to time, needs some bold, iconic buildings. There is nothing wrong about that. But I don't think this is the only story. We can do a building that is tall and iconic, but at the same time very tolerant, very light, very transparent. There is nothing wrong about that."
Transbay attracts stars
Piano is part of a small cadre of top architects that includes Santiago Calatrava, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, and deYoung design tream of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Along with Cesar Pelli and the firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Foster, Rogers, and Calatrava are all part of the competition to design the new Transbay Terminal and Tower.
Macris, a non-voting member of the panel that will pick the Transbay team, called Piano "the least ego-challenged" superstar architect.
"Renzo is very much enamored of the idea that San Francisco's grain has a building rhythm to it expressed in 25- to 50-foot lot frontage. He would like these buildings to continue that deal to keep the buildings looking separate."
Macris said he and Piano walked the south financial district and envisioned what the new area around Transbay might feel like.
"We imagined the train station and the area around it as the public statement for this generation, this generation's contribution to the central district of the city, not unlike what Union Square or Civic Center was for other generations," said Macris.
Piano said he wants to create a unique "public corner" across from the train station.
"It's a private scheme," Piano said, "but with very strong public implications."
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Someone at this forum (mthd perhaps?) once stated that when all is said and done, San Fran will be lucky to get one thousand-footer out of the TransBay plan. As disappointing as that is, the more I think about it, the more realistic this seems. If even one of Piano's towers can top TransAmerica, it would be a step in the right direction, and perhaps the TransBay Tower itself will be that 1000+ building that SF so richly deserves.
). I wonder what he conciders to be "quite tall" though.
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