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Posted May 29, 2007, 3:47 AM
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BANNED
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: San Francisco & Tucson
Posts: 24,088
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And an old John King commentary I missed but that expresses the concerns of many of us:
Quote:
Here's hoping 1,900 new units don't add up to one big monster
John King
Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Only architects as sculpturally inventive as the ones at Arquitectonica could take an overstuffed political deal like 1177 Market St. and come up with a design that has the potential to be an energetic, counterintuitive triumph.
Now the question is whether Angelo Sangiacomo and his family have the resources and will to bring the potential to life -- and whether city officials will nudge them to do so in the first place.
How large are the stakes? Consider this: Sangiacomo wants to pile 1,900 apartments onto 4 acres at Eighth and Market streets in San Francisco. That's as many housing units as were added to the entire city in all but two of the past 15 years.
It's also nearly 500 more than Sangiacomo proposed in 2003 for the land now covered by the Trinity Plaza apartment complex. Back then, the project was pilloried by housing activists opposed to the loss of Trinity Plaza's 360 rent-controlled apartments. There were candlelight vigils and threats of ballot initiatives.
At Thursday's meeting of the City Planning Commission, though, size barely entered into the discussion -- because a deal was worked out. Sangiacomo, Supervisor Chris Daly and Randy Shaw of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic agreed that when Trinity Plaza is torn down, it would be replaced so the first phase includes 360 new units governed by rent control. The project, meanwhile, would grow from 1,410 to 1,900 units -- an increase in scale of more than one-third.
Now, people who decried the change embrace the change.
"I stand before you in complete confidence that this is going to be a great project," Ken Warner of the Trinity Plaza Tenants Association told the commission. "We're thrilled that Mr. Sangiacomo has taken such a step."
Lost in all the predictable back-patting -- and the equally predictable mau-mauing that we'll get to later -- is the fact that a chunk of the city near Civic Center is about to get 475 new units per acre. And because of voter-imposed shadow restrictions from the 1980s, the height limits are snug. The project starts at 150 feet at the corner of Eighth and Market streets and peaks at 232 feet at the site's southeast corner along Mission Street.
The simple truth is that the project is too dense. But the way Arquitectonica has dealt with the density is ingenious: the Miami firm has stacked the units atop each other like an assembly of children's rectangular blocks, no two of which are alike.
There are three buildings in the design that was approved Thursday, yet they read like a collision of shapes and colors. Some portions of the outer walls are clad in sandstone-colored masonry, others in silver painted metal panels, others in glass.
The 17-story building that lines Market Street has an 8-story-high portal punched into it that is lined with shops and leads to a public courtyard. Along Eighth Street, a 6-story-high and 5-apartment-wide piece is missing -- but topped by a 2-story-high bar of apartments laid across it north to south.
It's as if several blocks of the city had been pressed together and stripped of details, so that right-angled layer overlaps right-angled layer.
"We set out to design something that is modern and abstract but at the same time deals with the issues of breaking up the scale of a project of this magnitude," explained Bernardo Fort-Brescia, who founded Arquitectonica in 1977 with his wife, Laurinda Spear, and has experimented with cubistic modernism ever since.
And even though the result is like nothing San Francisco -- or pretty much any other city, for that matter -- has ever seen, the approach is blessed by San Francisco's increasingly open-minded planning department.
"We feel the design achieves a really great interplay among forms, among solid and voids," said Craig Nikitas, a senior planner. "It's a complement as well as a contrast to the existing setting" of this stretch of Market Street, a hodgepodge that ranges from the Orpheum Theater to undistinguished office slabs.
For most of the 4-hour hearing, though, architecture and urban design were barely on the agenda.
Instead, speakers attacked the proposal's 250 commercial parking spaces: the site now has 450, but under brand-new city ordinances the parking shouldn't be there at all. There also were vociferous protests that only 12 percent of 1177 Market's 1,540 non-rent-control apartments will be rented out at below-market levels, instead of the 15 percent required in a law about to be enacted -- though the 360 rent control units bring the number of subsidized apartments to 34 percent of the project.
It's classic San Francisco: eleventh hour posturing over largely symbolic issues.
When the project goes to the Board of Supervisors for a final vote, here's what I hope happens: somebody pays attention to the city of the future as well as the politics of the present.
In a perfect world, this proposal would go onto the architectural equivalent of a treadmill and sweat off 10 percent of its mass, so that things weren't quite so monolithic, along Eighth Street in particular. But if that's not going to happen, what's needed is quality control of the highest sort.
Although Arquitectonica's theatricality wouldn't work in a wide-open setting, this stretch of Market and Mission streets already is cluttered. Passers-by will see bits and pieces rather than the whole.
However, the layering of colors and shapes will only work if the end result truly feels like an urbanistic collage. If the project is built on the cheap, if we get flimsy stucco in a few quickly fading hues, the result will be blight on a grim, vast scale.
That's what politicians and watchdogs need to focus on now: making sure the developer and architects deliver what they promise. It may not be as fun as cutting deals, but it will help determine the livability of downtown San Francisco for generations to come.
Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King, an occasional Tom Wolfe reader, at jking@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...DGQVKBO1T1.DTL
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