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Originally Posted by johnd
In regards the new towers: I am pleased the current renters at Trinity Plaza will have new rent controlled units to live in as part of phase one of the new project; however when completed, the three-tower complex will be one ugly addition to the neighborhood. In effect, this porject is our generation's version of the Fox Tower Plaza, but in tripicate! Sure the old building needed to come down, but in an effort to please eveyone, little focus was spent on the grim open space, the real impact on transportation around Civic Center, the visual impact on neighboring buildings, etc.
In sum, it is very difficult to make 24-stories of punched concrete facades very interesting in a neighborhood that includes the new library, Asian Art Museum and the beautifully restored City Hall. Yet despite the beauty of these and many other structures nearby, one will sadly be drawn to this gargantuan aesthetic blunder of a building, much like one is unfortunately drawn to a wart or other large deformity on an otherwise beautiful face.
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Thin elegant towers a la Rincon Hill will cost what those places cost: millions. You cannot provide housing for middle income people that way. The only way you can do it in San Francisco is with monster midrise housing like Trinity with minimal open space (because open space uses land and that drives up the price of the units) and even then it helps that the land has been owned for decades. I don't entirely agree with Flint that the Arquitectonica design is "fantastic" but I do agree that it is pretty good, all things considered and better than what almost any other architect would have done. I also think that the "visual impact on the neighboring buildings", if you focus on the ones in the adjacent street wall, is pretty good, really.
Finally, when you start talking about transportation around Civic Center, you really seem to go off the tracks. This building is on San Francisco's best-served transit corridor, bar none. If maximum housing density isn't suitable here, it isn't suitable anywhere in San Francisco. And in this case, there's a real plus to the density which is putting more middle class working citizens on the sidewalks of that part of Market St. before it get completely taken over by the homeless and the drug peddlers (many of whom take BART over from the East Bay to ply their wares in UN Plaza).
To me, Fox Plaza is guilty of two main infractions: (1) It replaced a gem which never should have been torn down and (2) The design both turns its back from the sidewalks (with its interior "mall") and badly aggravates the wind problem near its location. Otherwise, what's so bad about it? Trinity Plaza will certainly not replace anything we would want to preserve and I don't think the design will offend in respect of wind. I'm unclear on what ground-floor retail it might offer, so that could be an issue, but I just don't know.