peanut gallery
01-19-2008, 06:57 AM
Eight local architecture firms are taking part in a competition to envision what SF might look like 100 years from now. They will be giving their presentations on Sunday at the Ferry Building and their models will be on display until Monday. Unfortunately, I can't be in the city either of those days. Is anyone planning to be near the waterfront Sunday or Monday?
From the Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/BAM2UGDLB.DTL):
Envisioning the San Francisco of 2108
John King, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 18, 2008
As far as their business goes, the 18 employees of Pfau Architecture should be focused this week on design jobs that include a private house in Stinson Beach and a classroom building for City College of San Francisco.
Instead, the firm put its clients on hold to tackle something larger: a vision of what San Francisco could look like 100 years from now.
"We usually spend all our time immersed in things like public approvals and code details," said Peter Pfau. "It's fun to have the chance to turn on the creative juices, untrammeled by reality."
Pfau's firm is one of the participants in a competition organized by the History Channel. Grandly titled "City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge," the aim is to show how, amid the looming threat of hazards like global warming, creative vision and new technologies might be used to transform familiar landscapes.
The teams received a 23-page brief with the contest rules last Saturday, giving them seven days to find inspiration, flesh out the details and then package them with visual flair for a design jury. And the visuals are key to the contest: On Sunday, each team will have three hours to assemble its model of San Francisco 2108 in a public event at the Ferry Building that will be filmed for possible use on the History Channel or its Web site.
The winner gets $10,000 and the chance to have its vision face off with rivals from Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The firms also receive $2,000 each to defray expenses for the competition.
The money involved won't begin to recoup time that could have been devoted to billable clients. Nor is it likely to cover the costs of fashioning a 3 1/2-by-7-foot model of the renewed city that - think visuals - "must have at least one structural element that cantilevers out a minimum of two feet beyond its support."
But leaders of several teams this week shrugged off the bottom-line impact. Not only are they drawn to the specifics of the History Channel challenge, but they find that competitions in general can be a way to sharpen their other work.
"In order to keep the spirit of innovation going, we try to take part in one competition a year," said Lisa Gelfand of Gelfand Partners Architects, a 25-person firm that specializes in public buildings such as schools. "We try to choose competitions that blow off the walls of architecture a bit. That's an important thing to do."
While Pfau's firm and three others were invited to participate in the challenge, Gelfand's firm is one of three that were added after submitting their design portfolios.
"It feels really great to be able to have our say about how San Francisco should be in 100 years," said Gelfand, whose firm has renovated several local buildings for low-income housing. "A lot of our work is devoted to broadening the diversity of who the city serves ... The only way for this to remain a great city is for it to be a diverse place."
The competition brief is broad enough to tackle residential diversity or anything else that concerns the contestants, for that matter. Among the issues that teams are asked to address are infrastructure, transportation, commerce, housing, security ("what new architectural solutions will safeguard us from future harm?" asks the brief) and the environment.
"The future is a smorgasbord, that's all I can say," shrugged Casey Jones of Jones/Kroloff, the competition's adviser. "Any of these factors can be a linchpin for deciding where society goes."
This is the second year for the contest, which in 2006 included Chicago and Los Angeles. To Jones, San Francisco's a natural as "among the most iconic cities in the United States." And even though the particulars of the different visions might not come to pass, he sees a value that ripples beyond the participants.
"Competitions can be a catalyst to stimulate wider thinking," Jones said, referring to such events as the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922, which exposed the general public to modern skyscraper design. "When you put ideas in front of people, you create the opportunity for change."
First, though, the ideas have to take shape.
At Pfau Architecture, more than a dozen staffers gathered Wednesday morning in a book-lined meeting room to go through sketches and data tied to their proposal. The first half hour, though, involved a discussion of the logistics surrounding a model to convey their scheme.
"Someone was researching the Plexiglas fabrication technique," Pfau principal Dwight Long interjected at one point. "Can you report on that?"
"We need to talk about costs," commented architect Kerstin Fischer.
Pfau laughed. "At this point it's whatever is fastest."
Long jumped back in: "Unless it's $100,000."
While firms such as Gelfand's and Pfau's are large enough to do the work on their own, IwamotoScott Architecture is calling in outside help. The entire staff consists of just four people, so Craig Scott and Lisa Iwamoto enlisted a handful of their students to take part.
"A week before we received the brief, we started getting maps and talking to people and finding out things about San Francisco," said Scott, an associate professor at California College of the Arts. And since the couple's office doubles as their personal loft, the dining area was converted to a work area with tables and computers.
So why tolerate the disruption?
"It's nice to step out of the day-to-day," said Iwamoto, an associate professor at UC Berkeley. "Architects by nature are visionary, thinking of the future. So it's hard to say no when you're offered the chance to do it."
Online resources
For more information on the competition:
www.history.com/cityofthefuture
What: City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge. Eight teams will assemble models of what they think San Francisco could look like in 100 years.
When: Event begins at 10 a.m. Sunday. Presentations to the competition jury begin at 1:15 p.m. Models remain on display on Monday.
Where: Second floor of the Ferry Building, San Francisco.
Who: The competition includes six design firms: Anderson Anderson Architecture, Fougeron Architecture, Gelfand Partners Architects, IwamotoScott Architecture, Kuth Ranieri Architects and Pfau Architecture. There also are two teams made up mainly of students and educators, SLOMobility and IF architecture.
From the Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/BAM2UGDLB.DTL):
Envisioning the San Francisco of 2108
John King, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 18, 2008
As far as their business goes, the 18 employees of Pfau Architecture should be focused this week on design jobs that include a private house in Stinson Beach and a classroom building for City College of San Francisco.
Instead, the firm put its clients on hold to tackle something larger: a vision of what San Francisco could look like 100 years from now.
"We usually spend all our time immersed in things like public approvals and code details," said Peter Pfau. "It's fun to have the chance to turn on the creative juices, untrammeled by reality."
Pfau's firm is one of the participants in a competition organized by the History Channel. Grandly titled "City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge," the aim is to show how, amid the looming threat of hazards like global warming, creative vision and new technologies might be used to transform familiar landscapes.
The teams received a 23-page brief with the contest rules last Saturday, giving them seven days to find inspiration, flesh out the details and then package them with visual flair for a design jury. And the visuals are key to the contest: On Sunday, each team will have three hours to assemble its model of San Francisco 2108 in a public event at the Ferry Building that will be filmed for possible use on the History Channel or its Web site.
The winner gets $10,000 and the chance to have its vision face off with rivals from Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The firms also receive $2,000 each to defray expenses for the competition.
The money involved won't begin to recoup time that could have been devoted to billable clients. Nor is it likely to cover the costs of fashioning a 3 1/2-by-7-foot model of the renewed city that - think visuals - "must have at least one structural element that cantilevers out a minimum of two feet beyond its support."
But leaders of several teams this week shrugged off the bottom-line impact. Not only are they drawn to the specifics of the History Channel challenge, but they find that competitions in general can be a way to sharpen their other work.
"In order to keep the spirit of innovation going, we try to take part in one competition a year," said Lisa Gelfand of Gelfand Partners Architects, a 25-person firm that specializes in public buildings such as schools. "We try to choose competitions that blow off the walls of architecture a bit. That's an important thing to do."
While Pfau's firm and three others were invited to participate in the challenge, Gelfand's firm is one of three that were added after submitting their design portfolios.
"It feels really great to be able to have our say about how San Francisco should be in 100 years," said Gelfand, whose firm has renovated several local buildings for low-income housing. "A lot of our work is devoted to broadening the diversity of who the city serves ... The only way for this to remain a great city is for it to be a diverse place."
The competition brief is broad enough to tackle residential diversity or anything else that concerns the contestants, for that matter. Among the issues that teams are asked to address are infrastructure, transportation, commerce, housing, security ("what new architectural solutions will safeguard us from future harm?" asks the brief) and the environment.
"The future is a smorgasbord, that's all I can say," shrugged Casey Jones of Jones/Kroloff, the competition's adviser. "Any of these factors can be a linchpin for deciding where society goes."
This is the second year for the contest, which in 2006 included Chicago and Los Angeles. To Jones, San Francisco's a natural as "among the most iconic cities in the United States." And even though the particulars of the different visions might not come to pass, he sees a value that ripples beyond the participants.
"Competitions can be a catalyst to stimulate wider thinking," Jones said, referring to such events as the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922, which exposed the general public to modern skyscraper design. "When you put ideas in front of people, you create the opportunity for change."
First, though, the ideas have to take shape.
At Pfau Architecture, more than a dozen staffers gathered Wednesday morning in a book-lined meeting room to go through sketches and data tied to their proposal. The first half hour, though, involved a discussion of the logistics surrounding a model to convey their scheme.
"Someone was researching the Plexiglas fabrication technique," Pfau principal Dwight Long interjected at one point. "Can you report on that?"
"We need to talk about costs," commented architect Kerstin Fischer.
Pfau laughed. "At this point it's whatever is fastest."
Long jumped back in: "Unless it's $100,000."
While firms such as Gelfand's and Pfau's are large enough to do the work on their own, IwamotoScott Architecture is calling in outside help. The entire staff consists of just four people, so Craig Scott and Lisa Iwamoto enlisted a handful of their students to take part.
"A week before we received the brief, we started getting maps and talking to people and finding out things about San Francisco," said Scott, an associate professor at California College of the Arts. And since the couple's office doubles as their personal loft, the dining area was converted to a work area with tables and computers.
So why tolerate the disruption?
"It's nice to step out of the day-to-day," said Iwamoto, an associate professor at UC Berkeley. "Architects by nature are visionary, thinking of the future. So it's hard to say no when you're offered the chance to do it."
Online resources
For more information on the competition:
www.history.com/cityofthefuture
What: City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge. Eight teams will assemble models of what they think San Francisco could look like in 100 years.
When: Event begins at 10 a.m. Sunday. Presentations to the competition jury begin at 1:15 p.m. Models remain on display on Monday.
Where: Second floor of the Ferry Building, San Francisco.
Who: The competition includes six design firms: Anderson Anderson Architecture, Fougeron Architecture, Gelfand Partners Architects, IwamotoScott Architecture, Kuth Ranieri Architects and Pfau Architecture. There also are two teams made up mainly of students and educators, SLOMobility and IF architecture.
