SAN FRANCISCO | Projects: Under Construction, Approved, and Proposed

[peanut gallery]

I read one estimate that bringing it up to snuff could cost as much as $18M. That seems outrageously high to me. But whatever the amount it's clear a lot of work needs to be done, which only further makes your point.

[Hoodrat]

Originally Posted by BTinSF

Source: http://sf.curbed.com/uploads/2008_09_hibernia-sold.jpg

But to whom and for what use is as yet unknown.

Maybe Patty Hearst can help

[BTinSF]

Friday, September 12, 2008
Developer drives away with big S.F. DMV site
San Francisco Business Times - by J.K. Dineen

San Francisco’s DMV is getting company.

A state agency has selected San Francisco’s Build Inc. to redevelop the Department of Motor Vehicles field office in the Panhandle, a 2.5-acre parcel that could include a mixed-use project with housing and retail, as well as a new DMV regional office.

Under the scenario being hammered out, Build Inc. would enter into a long-term ground lease for the site at 1377 Fell St., currently home to the dilapidated 48-year-old DMV office and an expansive surface parking lot. The developer would construct a new DMV office, which would then be leased back by the state, as well as an apartment and retail project that would fill in one of the largest holes in the fabric of the dense neighborhood by University of San Francisco and bounded by the Western Addition and the Haight.

DMV spokesman Michael Marando confirmed that Build Inc. had won a request- for-proposal process.

“We want to leverage the value we have in state-owned properties in order to gain new DMV facilities and increase new housing and amenities for the community involved,” said Marando.

Loring Sagan, an architect and principal for Build Inc., declined to comment because negotiations are still ongoing, and his firm is still several months away from finalizing a plan. Kevin Rafter, incoming president of the North of the Panhandle Neighborhood Association, said neighbors will closely monitor the design of whatever is built there, as they did with the last two mixed-use projects in the area: Emerald Fund’s 134-unit Fulton Market and Signature Properties’ 70-unit Broderick Place.

“In both cases folks pushed the developer to make design consistent with the Victorian architecture of the neighborhood,” he said.

Rafter said the neighborhood has been attracting more families and, unlike the smaller one- and two-bedroom condos at Broderick Place, it would be nice to see some housing that could accommodate kids.

“There are definitely more families in the neighborhood and as far as I am concerned this is an awesome place for families,” he said.

The developer may also be pressed into providing some parking for the neighborhood. Years ago the parking lot at 1377 Fell St. was open at night to neighborhood parking, but in recent years has been only open during DMV hours.

“Parking is a big deal around here and a big question mark,” he said.

Build Inc. is currently developing the 142-unit Esprit in the Dogpatch, a project that is a combination of new construction and historic rehab. The firm was also selected to design and develop 12 structures on Octavia between Oak and Fell streets, one of the parcels that was freed up when the freeway ramps were replaced with the new Octavia Boulevard. Sagan also started the Blue Bottle Coffee Co., which has a new cafe at Mint Plaza and a famously-crowded kiosk in Hayes Valley.

In 2006, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, in partnership with the California Department of General Services, announced plans to develop two DMV offices, the one in San Francisco and one in San Diego. At the time, Sunne Wright McPeak, who oversees the DMV, said the project “makes too much sense not to pursue.”

“The DMV is participating in helping realign the job-housing balance while it benefits by getting new, expanded facilities to replace offices that no longer meet customer needs,” she said. “We foresee that the new buildings, both in San Francisco and San Diego, would be ‘mixed-use’ — in other words, space would be made available to residential, commercial and retail tenants as well as for enlarged DMV offices that will substantially improve the customer service in both areas for many years to come.”

The Fell Street office in San Francisco handled more than 300,000 driver license and registration transactions last year and is one of the busiest offices in the DMV’s 169 facility system.

jkdineen@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4971

Source: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/...ml?t=printable

[BTinSF]

The remarkable renaissance of Polk St. continues:

1946 Polk (A.K.A. Pacific Terrace)





Source all: http://www.socketsite.com/

[CityKid]

^^^ Is that why they're getting rid of the Linen Outlet?

[CityKid]

These are photos I took on Wednesday. Pardon my colleague's dirty window and my less than perfect timing for some of these.

Here we can see Millenium making its mark on the skyline:


Hello Infinity II and 555 Mission:


Hello Infinity I:

[peanut gallery]

I didn't realize they had started removing the lifts on Infinity II. I haven't walked over to that side of the tower in a few weeks.

[peanut gallery]

SOMA rising: 555 Mission, Millennium and the new tower crane for One Hawthorne:

[peanut gallery]

I've been keeping an eye out for activity on 680 Folsom. Since I found the test panels for the new glass there hasn't been much. But there are signs that something has been going on:


The inside is cleaned out and stripped to the bone:

[CityKid]

3575 Geary Boulevard

Institute on Aging (IOA) and BRIDGE Housing Corporation are working together to develop an innovative new facility that will combine an array of supportive services with affordable apartments for older adults. Located at 3575 Geary Boulevard, the Senior Campus will serve as the main location for IOA’s comprehensive health and social support programs. The state-of-the-art facility will also be home to 150 expertly designed independent living spaces for seniors of modest income and those with special needs. Bridge Housing will own and manage the residential living, and 53 of the units will be reserved for PACE—eligible seniors (Program for All-Inclusive Care).

Photo and information courtesy of www.ioaging.org



No photo update here, but I saw that steel had been delivered to the construction site along with some heavy looking machinery. The site has been vacant for well over a year now since they bulldozed the Coronet Theater sometime in 2007. I watched in anticipation of a groundbreaking while I lived in the Richmond with no such luck. Finally, I passed by on the 38 Geary on Saturday and saw some signs of life. I'll try to take some photos the next time I'm in the neighborhood.

[peanut gallery]

This shot from Socketsite shows the Rincon Hill and Transbay areas that will be developed in the coming years:


Judging from the fog entering the gate, I'd say this was shot Friday.

[rocketman_95046]

^45 Lansing looks very very small for a 450ft tower?

[BTinSF]

That's what the Planning Dept. wanted on Rincon Hill: "slim" towers.

[Reminiscence]

Did anyone happen to attend Opening Day at the California Academy of Sciences? From what I've seen, it looks like a glorious building already derserving of monumental status. I myself would have gladly went but was already buried with work from new classes, sigh.

[SFView]

double post

[SFView]

SOM has created a digital model of San Francisco in 3D. I wish the images and animation were a bit larger to see though. Some of the proposed towers at Rincon Hill are visible, but there doesn't seem much or anything shown for future Transbay. SOM might have deleted their Transbay Tower design from this version of the model.

http://www.som.com/content.cfm/from_the_ground_up

[harsh]

No Bien

Don't expect a Piano in S.F. skyline


John King
Tuesday, September 30, 2008

After a week of saturation press coverage, it's no secret that the California Academy of Sciences has reopened in San Francisco in a masterful new home designed by Renzo Piano.

But if you're waiting for a Bay Area sequel from the Italian architect, here's a tip: Don't hold your breath.
Piano's firm was hired in 2006 to reimagine a large site at First and Mission streets. He responded with the elegantly eye-popping twist of five reedlike towers that would slide upward as high as 1,200 feet amid alleys and low historic structures.
The concept caused a splash when the developers filed a proposal with the city in December 2006. But formal designs were never released because of a neighborhood rezoning that's under way. And this spring, Piano's client put the properties up for sale.
"It's a sad story. ... I loved that project," Piano said last week while visiting the academy. "The mix of functions and volumes, the fragmentation, the slenderness (of each tower)."
Models and sketches still reside in Piano's studio above the Mediterranean Sea in Genoa, Italy - reminders of what wasn't to be.
"All those children, they grow in the studio," he said of his firm's projects, some that get built and some that don't. "Every one has its own story and every one a personality."

A complex vision

If that sounds like a philosophical take on the nuts and bolts of city building, consider Piano's description of the creative process.
During our interview I praised the academy's 63-foot-high glass globe, which encloses a living rain forest thick with humid air and alive with the sounds of tropical birds. In the vision of the complex that the academy released in 2002, it was a bubblelike watercolor; now it's an effortless-looking orb with impossibly large panes of curving glass locked in place by discreet steel claws.
When I asked whether the evolution from sketch to real life was as easy as it looked, Piano smiled.
"You do this," he said, miming a circle in the air, "but you do this 10,000 times. And then one of the little sketches works."
Piano used another analogy: "With each project you put many seeds in the ground. The good ones bloom. The bad ones disappear."
With regards to The Chronicle's coverage of the academy, it's fair to say we didn't underplay the reopening. On the other hand, the national media has made a fuss as well.
The biggest splash came from Metropolis, an excellent design magazine that put the academy on the cover of its September issue - calling it "a building of mythic proportions" in the first of three lengthy articles grouped under the heading "Green Architecture's Grand Experiment."
Not to be outdone, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times last Wednesday tossed around words like "genius" and "greatness" after declaring the new academy to be "a comforting reminder of the civilizing function of great art in a barbaric age."
If all that seems highfalutin, ABC-TV's "Good Morning America" is scheduled to broadcast from the academy this morning. And get this: You'll find a photograph of the academy's native-plant-draped roof in the Sept. 29 issue of ... People. Folks, it doesn't get bigger than that.

Big winners
But who needs big-name outsiders? No fewer than seven San Francisco firms have nabbed 2008 Design Awards from the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.
San Francisco firms were recipients of two honor awards for academic buildings rooted here. Jensen Architects draped two new graduate buildings in aluminum mesh scrim for the San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts, while Leddy Maytum Stacy's addition to the Nueva School complex in Hillsborough includes a green roof atop the K-8 school's student center.
In the urban architecture category, an honor went to the San Francisco office of EDAW for its work on Tokyo Midtown, a 25-acre mixed-use complex in Japan's capital that blends big-city terrains with more intimate, contemplative spaces.
One step down at the merit award level - still no slouch, considering that there were 206 entries in the competition - recognition went to EHDD Architecture and David Baker + Partners. The former placed a stately modern library in the heart of the campus of Valparaiso University in Indiana; the latter is the architect of Curran House, which adds 67 family apartments and a burst of color to the city's Tenderloin neighborhood.
Two local firms also received Urban Design merit awards for projects that, if they get built, will change the Bay Area landscape.
One local luminary is the plan for Treasure Island designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, an environmentally focused vision of towers and housing-lined pedestrian streets around a ferry terminal. The other is the transformation of a San Mateo shopping center into what would be called Station Park Green, a 12-acre neighborhood with 599 housing units next to the Hayward Park Caltrain stop. The designer for Station Park is the firm SMWM.

Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Source:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...DD3N134DAO.DTL

[quashlo]

Originally Posted by Reminiscence

Did anyone happen to attend Opening Day at the California Academy of Sciences? From what I've seen, it looks like a glorious building already derserving of monumental status. I myself would have gladly went but was already buried with work from new classes, sigh.

I was particularly impressed with the rainforest exhibit, an interesting mixture of architecture and nature. It's quite humid and extremely well-designed so that you truly feel like you are somewhere in Borneo or Madagascar. The small underwater tube is also spectacular... The giant fish and natural light streaming through the green water make for an incredible scene. It's clear a lot of work went into that particular exhibit--I spent several hours alone just going through the various levels of the rainforest. The Philippine coral reef exhibit was also amazing, just for the sheer diversity of colors.

From an design point of view, I like it... It's extremely airy and bright, and there's so many different vantage points--catwalks flying all over the place, viewing areas on the sides and roof, and several of the exhibits you can see from different angles or levels (the swamp, rainforest)... From the outside, the building looks small, but I spent a good six hours or so in there, and by the time I left, my feet were killing me. You can definitely visit to enjoy the design of both the exhibits and the building itself.

[Reminiscence]

Originally Posted by quashlo

I was particularly impressed with the rainforest exhibit, an interesting mixture of architecture and nature. It's quite humid and extremely well-designed so that you truly feel like you are somewhere in Borneo or Madagascar. The small underwater tube is also spectacular... The giant fish and natural light streaming through the green water make for an incredible scene. It's clear a lot of work went into that particular exhibit--I spent several hours alone just going through the various levels of the rainforest. The Philippine coral reef exhibit was also amazing, just for the sheer diversity of colors.

From an design point of view, I like it... It's extremely airy and bright, and there's so many different vantage points--catwalks flying all over the place, viewing areas on the sides and roof, and several of the exhibits you can see from different angles or levels (the swamp, rainforest)... From the outside, the building looks small, but I spent a good six hours or so in there, and by the time I left, my feet were killing me. You can definitely visit to enjoy the design of both the exhibits and the building itself.

Ah, thanks for that review, it just makes me want to go even more. If I would have went, I would have gotten there around noon, and its a good thing I didnt go or its likely I would have been turned away by the staff. Naturally, to someone like me majoring in a science field, this would be a delight to me. By the looks of things, I'll probably be in there all day.

[ACSF]

I was walking by Arterra the other day. It is looking quite nice.