According to the
article, they're changing not merely the tower design, but the entire project's scope:
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"We’re looking for a pragmatic design that is buildable, but with artistic and civic creativity,” said Michael Yarne of Build Inc., a local developer. Build Inc. and GTIS Partners of New York recently purchased the site from the prior developers. It also has the doughnut shop next door under contract, a small building that occupies the northwest corner of the intersection.
According to Yarne, the changes sought by the new developers go beyond the addition of a tower. The larger desire is to move the existing Muni subway stop at Market on the west side of Van Ness — squalid even by neighborhood standards — one block north to Oak Street. There, it would serve as the focus of a new public plaza extending to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which moved to the first block of Oak Street in 2006.
These larger ambitions help explain the presence of Snøhetta. The firm is best known for buildings like the waterfront opera house in Oslo, but it has a cadre of landscape architects with a project list that includes the ongoing makeover of New York’s Times Square. Snøhetta also heads one of the five design teams in the ideas competition for 13 acres of the Presidio between Crissy Field and the parade grounds of the Army post-turned-national park.
“We want to combine an iconic high-rise with really intimate place-making,” Yarne said. “This should be a great public space with a tower flowing up from it.”
The tower conceived by Meier came and went several times in the past five years. It was held up in part by the prior developer’s financial strains and the larger recession, but also by wind conditions at the corner that make the addition of any tower there difficult. Because of this, the Meier design had been altered in the past year or so to include a canopy that would drape above Oak Street.
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