the big hole finally reaches the surface !
19 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted Construction
in19 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted Construction
in19 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted Around the neighborhood
in19 Wednesday Nov 2014
18 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted Construction
in15 Saturday Nov 2014
Posted Around the neighborhood
inJohn King of the San Francisco Chronicle gives his take on our new neighbor:
S.F.’s newest office tower shows poise in a time of flash
By John King
November 15, 2014
Amid the craze for contorted drama that passes too much for architecture these days, San Francisco’s newest office tower comes as a decided relief.
It’s 27 stories of silvery gray glass, sliced at each corner to taper upward like an obelisk, smooth as plastic wrap. At one end there’s a small public plaza tucked beneath the tower but open on all sides.
The poised newcomer at 535 Mission St. is barely a nudge as skyscrapers go. Nor is it a masterpiece. Look on it instead as an urbane addition to the vertical scene, a good neighbor on the ground — and a reminder that, architecturally, a little restraint can go a long way.
The saga of how this high-rise came to be is more complex than the design.
Though the opening was held this week — the online real estate research firm Trulia occupies one-third of the space — construction began in 2008. But the economy ran out of steam as piles were being driven into the earth, and the site spent several years in limbo as a fenced-off gravel lot before Boston Properties purchased the project early in 2013 and brought it back to life.
That time lag explains the new tower’s all-glass skin, which was designed by the San Francisco office of the firm HOK at a time when the look was coming into vogue. It’s the same era that produced nearby 555 Mission St., a squat green 33-story box that’s a stone’s throw away, and the two clover-leaf Infinity condominium towers near the Embarcadero.
Fitting in at ground level
What’s surprising now is that instead of being dated, 535 Mission has real relevance for a point in the city’s history when yet another batch of big buildings is in the works.
For starters — literally — the tower fits in well at ground level. The development included the transformation of Shaw Alley, with concrete pavers, long granite benches and flowering pear trees. Fire trucks will be able to pass through, but otherwise this will be a people-only zone open around the clock.
Nor does 535 Mission overwhelm the alley. Quite the contrary: The tall lobby, with its clear glass wall, is pulled back 7 feet from the tower above, so the perceived width of the alley is enlarged. This impression is amplified by the wonderfully site-appropriate public art by Napa’s Gordon Huether, “Applique Da Parete,” which cloaks the inner wall of the lobby with white granite in various sizes and textures. It’s a nice call-and-response to the brick wall of the building from 1906 on the other side of Shaw, home to Salt House restaurant.
As for the tower, it slices inward at each corner along Shaw. This signals the entries to the lobby, yes, but also opens up views to and from the alley.
When work on the space is finished next month, the result should be a fresh example of how the corporate and public realms can coexist. This will become more apparent in 2017, when a major entrance to the new Transbay Transit Center is to open at Shaw’s south end.
Where the base of 535 Mission blends with the surroundings, the tapered form above is a discreet show unto itself — attracting attention not by height, but with a simple set of inward moves that draw the eye.
Essentially this is a long box, straight walls rising on all four sides of the thin site, with the chamfered corners emphasizing verticality. Those diagonals set 535 Mission apart from its more rectilinear neighbors by visually wrapping the new high-rise in open sky, a precious commodity these crane-filled days.
The local forerunner to this approach is the Transamerica Pyramid, now the city’s tallest building. The two are nothing alike in terms of actual design, but each taps into the power of minimalism. By pulling in on themselves, they pull you in too.
This restraint goes against the current trend, where would-be high-profile buildings are designed to grab attention. Asymmetric windows, or forms that pivot and joust, are the rage. A mixed-use complex proposed for Market Street has a design by Danish phenomenon Bjarke Ingels with mid-rise buildings that look like chic glaciers. The 5M project, proposed alongside The Chronicle by the development team of Forest City and Hearst Corp., would adorn towers with stamped concrete, recycled bricks and bars of metal in various colors.
The list could go on, but you get the idea. Cutting edge or needless commotion? You be the judge.
By contrast, 535 Mission shows less still can be more. The unusual but understated form is emphasized by the sleek glass skin, where sometimes, especially near dusk or dawn, each side reads as a single blue or silver pane. The lone flourish is a flare at the summit, but you don’t notice it except from certain angles to the north.
Doesn’t feel garish
Again, this isn’t a masterpiece. The all-glass skin lacks the depth of masonry, the tactile warmth found in older high-rises. Nor is there the exquisite precision of another glass high-rise on the block, Pelli Clarke Pelli’s 560 Mission from 2002.
But 535 Mission is a glass tower that doesn’t feel garish, a corporate shaft that doesn’t feel like it was made in Manhattan. And as more and taller buildings rise nearby, its virtues will only become more apparent.
15 Saturday Nov 2014
Posted Around the neighborhood
inFrom the super-cool BarbaryCoastNews.com:
Exploratorium getting artifacts from buried ships
November 15, 2014 By Geri Koeppel
If you’ve wandered the Barbary Coast at all, you might have seen the bronze plaques and signs telling you of buried ships under the city’s sidewalks and buildings.
It’s well-known lore that hundreds of ships were either left to rot in the Bay during the Gold Rush, were brought ashore and used as buildings, or were re-used for building material.
One entrepreneur, Charles Hare, had a ship breaking yard in what is now SoMa in the mid-1800s where he disassembled vessels and sold the parts to other industries in the city.
The Exploratorium is working with the archaeologists to display some of the objects found during two excavations of the Charles Hare site and teach guests about the city’s buried history.
Susan Schwartzenberg, a curator at the Bay Observatory at the Exploratorium, said eventually the items will be collected in a small display or exhibit, and she hopes to line up more visits and talks with archaeologists.
“I’d like people to be able to think, when they’re walking around the waterfront area, that beneath their feet about 16 feet or so is the history of San Francisco,” she said.
The most recent excavation, at 201 Folsom St., began in February 2013, and archaeologists from William Self Associates in Orinda are still doing artifact analysis. The site stretched to 300 Spear St., where the firm unearthed the Candace in a previous archaeological excavation 2006-07.
The ship breaking yard was there from about 1850-56, and later, it was a residential site from about 1865 to 1906, when the earthquake hit.
Jim Allan, principal archaeologist at William Self Associates, gave a talk about the Charles Hare site and showed some items from the excavation at the Exploratorium’s first Thursday “After Dark” evening adults-only event on Nov. 6.
“It is a big dig,” Allan said of the Charles Hare site. “It’s a fairly small parcel, but it had numerous archaeological deposits and features that were somewhat of a surprise. Not that they were there, but because of how intact and archaeologically rich they are.”
Allan said the team recovered “thousands and thousands and thousands” of artifacts dating back to shell middens, or domestic waste heaps, from a pre-historic Native American occupation of the site.
From the mid-19th century, the ship breaking yard artifacts included ceramic smoking pipes, slats from a barrel, and pieces of a “lighter” vessel used to transport provisions from shore to ships in the Bay. Even more recently, from the era when it was residential, items included bottles and ceramics.
Schwartzenberg already has put a few of the artifacts in the Bay Observatory.
“I’d like to label them,” she said. “I’d like to tell the story of the Charles Hare ship breaking yard and the story of recycling in the 19th century.”
The artifacts complement other displays in the Bay Observatory, including a “Shifting Shorelines” exhibit” with a geo-rectifying map of buried ships that can be layered to see where they are under present-day streets. At the same time, visitors standing at the exhibit can look out the window toward what was once the coastline.
The archaeology team unearthed “thousands and thousands” of artifacts from the Charles Hare dig, Allan said, and “all items you see are deemed to be redundant or not archaeologically diagnostic and would be discarded” if not given to the Exploratorium.
The scientists keep a statistically viable sample to analyze, and the collection is then cataloged and housed at Sonoma State University. The “redundant” items are often thrown out.
“The fact that they’re being saved from discard and put on public display is a particularly wonderful thing,” Allan said.
Part of the obligation as an archaeologist is public dissemination, he said, but often findings get written up in reports no one sees. He said he hopes to return to the Exploratorium to give more talks.
Allan said they don’t know yet what they might learn from this excavation, as they’re still analyzing it.
Schwartzenberg said she likes the fact that the Exploratorium encompasses history and culture tying into science within its exhibits, and this is a perfect example.
14 Friday Nov 2014
Posted Planning
inFrom the San Francisco Business Times:
As Transbay Transit Center rises above ground, tax fight still boils below
Nov 14, 2014
Cory Weinberg, Reporter- San Francisco Business Times
The mood was celebratory last Friday when city officials and development big wigs marked the start of above-ground construction on the Transbay Transit Center — the anchor development that helped spark an avalanche of skyscrapers south of Market.
“We know there’s been a lot of work going on before, but for the public it’s mostly been subterranean rumblings,” Michael Theriault, heads of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, said at the event. “Now they’re going to see it standing up in the air.”
Jackhammers aren’t the only rumblings that have reverberated underneath the surface. Developers’ lawsuit threats over how much they have to pay to help the transit center get completed still boils below, and the drama that started to unfold in September likely won’t see much of a conclusion until the new year.
So what’s the issue?
Developers, including Hines and Boston Properties, are building breathtakingly tall buildings, like the Salesforce Tower. In order to get the rights to build towers so tall — way above heights allowed by zoning — those developers had to agree to take part in a special tax zone called a Mello-Roos district. That means that in addition to typical property taxes, developers have to kick in 0.55 percent of the land’s assessed value, or $4.91 a square foot, to help foot the large bill to extend Caltrain tracks downtown from its current location near AT&T Park (and some other infrastructure needs). Money could also go to pay for the public park slated to go above the transit center.
Developers knew about the extra taxes even before they bid on the land before the financial crisis, say they were only expecting to pay $3.30 a square foot for office projects, and for taxes to fall if land values went down. Once they realized their bill would be millions more than expected, “that’s when we all got organized, hired bond consultants, tax lawyers,” said the head of one development firm who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Yes, developers have to pay more, but land value is also going up in part because of their ability to build taller, said Matt Lituchy, chief investment officer at the Jay Paul Company, which is developing the office-condo tower 181 Fremont. Speaking at a panel put on by the website Bisnow, he said rising values make the land an even bigger ticket.
“We bought (181 Fremont) for $71 million in 2013. Based on recent land sales in the very close proximity, we think it could go to over $120 million in a year and a half,” he said.
Landowners building new developments near the transit center will vote by mail on whether to form the Mello-Roos district by the end of December. (City officials say they almost certainly have the two-thirds vote to form the district because many parcels are still publicly owned and a small number of private developers oppose the plans.)
Then, the district’s fate goes to the Board of Supervisors, which has also demonstrated support for the district over and over again.
Once the district is formed by early next year, lawsuits may follow. If developers do sue, towers could hit delays and the money that would come from the special tax district would stall. It could even prevent them from being able to occupy new buildings or derail projects, which would ice the development momentum south of Market Street.
Michael Covarrubias, head of the developer TMG Partners, has said he won’t sue but still protests the district. He said he thinks others may push a lawsuit. His team is building two towers and over 1.2 million square feet on First and Mission.
“The math under the current plan is really challenging. I’m reminded of the movie ‘Argo’ when they say, ‘Is this the best bad idea we have?’ I think we’re going to find the best bad idea we can find. That may depend on other people doing stuff that are litigious,” he told the Business Times last month. “Based on history, I don’t have a reason to say it’ll get fixed but there are some seriously smart people on both sides.”