2022 WILA Walk – Additional Sites – ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture

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The projects below are not WILA Walk stops, but there are several other locations within the vicinity that are of interest.

Project Name: 181 Fremont

Landscape Architecture: MFLA [formerly Marta Fry Landscape Associates]

Project Designers:
Marta Fry / MFLA. Principal
James Munden / MFLA. Director of Design

Architects: Heller Manus Architect, San Francisco. Tower

Interiors: ODADA. San Francisco. Residential Condo Lobbies

Vision

The re-design of an existing POPOS, known as “the Poets Garden” and new streetscape developed concurrently with the design of the 800-foot tower, 181 Fremont. A previously walled vacant site once abutting the “Poets Garden” was developed into a 54-story mixed-use; office residential highrise. At the time of completion in 2018 it was the tallest building in San Francisco at 803 feet. The curtainwall lobby created a transparent and seamless view into the exterior passageway and wrapped the courtyard with the backdrops of the historic brick two-story building housing Town Hall restaurant, and the 199 Fremont office tower.

The transparency of the 181 Fremont tower base suggested a design that was integrated into the lobby and “read” from all views. MFLA developed a birch grove that both scaled the double volume lobby yet provided a delicately light and seasonal canopy. Transcribing the “words” of the original Poet’s Garden was scribed within the horizontal layers of the project. Utilizing monolithic sculpted stone seats that intersected site and lobby further pushed the seamless relationship. A passageway, a place to pause or perch, a secondary lobby entry, a short-cut through to other towers, a plaza, a restaurant forecourt, the 181 Fremont Tower POPOS does all of this.

MFLA also developed amenities for the tower’s residential condominiums with a sky terrace that wraps the private lounge amenities as well as the Fremont and Howard streetscapes in which we had to “play by our own rules” utilizing the design guidelines we developed in our “Transbay Redevelopment Project Area Streetscape and Open Space Concept Plan,” 2006.

Project Name: The Infinity

Landscape Architecture: Hargreaves Jones

The 1.5-acre courtyard landscape and perimeter streetscape for The Infinity, a luxury residential development by Arquitectonica for Tishman Speyer that occupies half of a city block in downtown San Francisco, creates a public / private realm that is both of and removed from the city.

Completed in 2009, the courtyard is built on structure over 6 levels of below-grade parking the central courtyard is punctuated by a series of whimsical garden islands with seating that provide color, shade and a meandering path of movement through the space. The tree canopy provides privacy for the residential community and dappled light in the plaza while a 2-story waterwall animates the central courtyard plaza and transfers light and sound to the pedestrian entrance of the parking garage below. Sculptural seating terraces and glass skylights create a transition to the upper courtyard and provide reflections of light and shadow on the pool in the fitness center below.

For the streetscape design and implementation, we worked extensively with the City of San Francisco developing three distinct perimeter streetscapes and a required mid-block crossing. The Spear Streetscape was the first block of a phased “green street” intended to expand to adjacent blocks. The project includes gardens with stormwater infiltration, benches and seat walls, landforms, and pedestrian scale lighting.

Project Name: Absorption Sculpture

Artist: Alicja Kwade

Credit: STUDIO PHOCASSO, courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

Alicja Kwade deals in her multimedial work with perceptual structures and basic physical laws. Optical experiences and their deceptions characterize her creations, which regularly transgress habitual ways of seeing. Crucial elements of her artistic strategy are thus based on the idea of transformation, and the consonance or mirroring of objects and materials. Her work ‘Absorption’ is concerned with the interplay of ‘being’, ‘hiding’ and ‘transforming’. Three ‘stones’ of identical volume but made of different materials – a found boulder, a bronze cast and an aluminum cast of it – lie next to each other, separated by three identical two-sided mirrors. Depending on the position from which it is viewed, the mirror glass functions on the one hand either as a reflecting plane, as a mirror, or on the other as an apparently see-through surface, confronting the natural stone with its bronze double and the transformed shiny aluminum double twin: the glass conceals part of one of the objects, yet at the same time completes it with the mirror image of the same part in the other. In this way a new, illusionary object is created through the overlaying of reality and appearance.

Description by: Tanja Lucia Scherer

Project Name: 500 Folsom (Transbay Block 9)

Landscape Architecture: GLS Landscape | Architecture

Project Designers:
Gary Strang, FASLA, AIA, GLS
Wendy Mok, ASLA, GLS
Jasmine Kwak, GLS
Justin Frodesen, GLS

Architects:
Skidmore Owings & Merrill
Fougeron Architecture

500 Folsom at Transbay Block 9 is one of the new high-rise projects transforming the vestiges of the former Embarcadero freeway into a transit-oriented neighborhood supporting a range of residential, retail and open space opportunities. Block 9 consists of a 43-story high rise tower with 428 market-rate units and 109 below-market-rate units. The 9th floor terraces offer a range of additional amenities including, seating, fireplaces, barbecue area, and spa. At the tower’s base and adjacent to the project’s 8-story affordable housing portion is a courtyard, designed by GLS, with public seating and retail. Streetscape designs conform to Folsom Street Improvement Plan.

Project Name: Bay Area Metro Center

Landscape Architecture: GLS Landscape | Architecture

Project Designers:
Gary Strang, FASLA, AIA, GLS
Wendy Mok, ASLA, GLS
Jasmine Kwak, GLS
Justin Frodesen, GLS

Architects:
Perkins & Will
TEF Design

The renovation at the Bay Area Metro Center transformed a 1940s-era military warehouse into a modern, welcoming workspace serving four major Bay Area agencies: the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The outdoor space and new atrium were carved from the existing concrete structure, transformed by GLS with Perkins + Will and TEF architects. The eighth-floor terrace offers agency workers a rooftop refuge and brings nature into the building, merging indoors and outdoors with striking Bay Bridge views.

Project Name: Rene Cazenave Apartments

Landscape Architecture: GLS Landscape | Architecture

Project Designers:
Gary Strang, FASLA, AIA, GLS
Wendy Mok, ASLA, GLS
Justin Frodesen, GLS
Glen Phillips, AECOM (formerly GLS)

Architects: 
LMS Architects
Saida + Sullivan

Rene Cazenave Apartments is located at Transbay Block 11A, the first block to be completed in the Transbay Streetscape and Open Space Concept Plan area, at Folsom and Essex Streets on the edge of the Rincon Hill Area Plan. The nine-story building holds housing for the formerly homeless, with a one-story section of offices topped by a green roof. The courtyard is intensively designed to provide greenery, seating, and flexible outdoor space for events. Massive structures for stormwater retention are concealed under wood decks. The roof has just 12” of soil, planted with succulents varying in color and texture.