Urban Drift
Climate change is a global problem, and the San Francisco Bay Area is especially threatened. Around one thousand miles of shoreline frame the region, so we will be greatly affected by sea level rise and intensified storm activity.Given our particularly risky situation, the Bay Area is on the forefront of climate change action. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Institute for Local Government have collaborated to release the San Francisco Bay Area Climate Action Portal, a web based tool designed to provide local governments with the resources they need to take action on climate change.
The site provides access to a wide variety of information including climate change policy, science and current news, inventory and statistical information, project examples throughout the Bay Area, and goals already accomplished. The portal also has an interface for climate change communication, linking people together for meetings, events, online discussion forums, list-serves, and blogs.
While attacking climate change may often require extremely site-specific strategies, there are many issues such as transportation that we need to approach as a megaregion. The Climate Web Portal allows Bay Area cities to learn from one another, while also helping local governments discover their own unique needs.
SPUR members toured the Mission Armory, the 200,000 square foot Moorish Castle Reproduction completed in 1914. From it's completion until 1976, the Armory was used as a National Guard facility, and later joined the National Register of Historic Places.
The drill court, spanning nearly an acre, served not only as a military training facility, but also as boxing arena, and hall for social events for the City's national guardsmen. Future use as a community space will be managed by The Armory Community Center (TACC).
The interior space contains 160 rooms grossing 190,300 square feet. Decor ranges from utilitarian to the more decorative, as seen in the Main Entrance Hall:
Filming By CyberEntertainmnet, Inc, which acquired the Armory in 2006, occupied many areas of the Armory, sadly restricting the SPUR visit. Tours conducted by employees of CyberEntertainment are offered the 2nd Friday of the month. For more information, please visit: http://www.sfarmory.com/
Accessibility for persons with disabilities, New Urbanist planners and architects will tell you, is an important principle. Still, other New Urbanist principles can come into conflict with accessibility; or, at least, they often clash with interpretations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, or with accessibility as defined by disability-rights advocates. Take February’s “Lifelong Communities” charette in Atlanta, at which Congress for the New Urbanism co-founder Andres Duany and Eleanor Smith, of the organization Concrete Change, were able to agree on the removal of requirements for elevated entries from the Duany Plater-Zyberk SmartCode—prized by New Urbanists for the privacy they enable, but a barrier for wheelchairs—but had to agree to disagree on issues including the utility of walk-up apartments located above retail.
New York Times "Streetscapes" columnist Christopher Gray highlights a few of Manhattan's ghost buildings—grand architectural plans shelved after the 1929 stock market crash. However easy it may be to compare then and now, let's hope that some of San Francisco's own grand plans—the Transbay Terminal, for instance—don't get stored away in a flat file somewhere, only to resurface decades after the fact.
As students rushed home for the day, SPUR members filtered in for a tour of the San Francisco Friends School. Built in 1906 after the earthquake and fire, the building housed Levi Strauss & Co. until 2002. Fundraising for the Friends School began in 2006, and classes commenced in September of 2008. Peter Pfau and Kami Kincaid of Pfau Long Architecture explained their process of renovation. With general contractor Plant Construction Company, the team designed the school to preserve the light, open feeling of the historic space, and honored the school’s mission with close attention to sustainability and simplicity.
The building is naturally ventilated with four thermal towers. Sunlight enters through the glass to charge the heating plates; sensors throughout the building tell the vents to open and shut. The white roof reflects heat to control the temperature in warm weather, and will eventually contain solar panels. Last April the school was chosen by the American Institute of Architects
and Gavin Newsom as one of the Top Ten Greenest Buildings in the city.
The original factory floor remains on the second story. During the Depression, Levi Strauss & Co. kept employees on payroll by building the maple floors. The stains and scuffs of years as a working factory remain in place. “The contractors wanted to sand them down,” Pfau says, “but I said no way. This way the history is alive in the building.” One coat of sealer and wax preserved the floors, including every mark of the building’s past.
The second floor contains the meeting hall, where students of all ages can observe the Quaker tradition of silent reflection. Benches in the meeting hall were made from the beams removed from the first floor during the seismic upgrade. Nearly 50% of the materials used in renovation were previously part of the building. After adding a theater and a second floor to the library, the building will total over 80,000 square feet with a 10,000 square foot playground and garden in the front of the school. To see more photos of the tour, check out the Urbanists on flickr!
[Images: Colleen McHugh]
Today was the second day of the six-week Better Market Street Project trial number one, which diverts cars headed north off of Market Street at 8th and 6th avenues, in an attempt to reduce traffic on the oft-clogged street. What a transformation! The morning bicycle commute has become a breeze and we hope will encourage more workers to choose their two-wheeled vehicle.
The Better Merket Street Project hopes his traffic reduction trial will be the beginning of the metamorphosis of Market Street into one of the great city boulevards of the world. More trials to come will include new mini-plazas with tables and chairs. See our own SPUR Deputy Director Sarah Karlinksy share her thoughts on the matter here.
We spend much of our days with a roof over our heads, but rarely think of how roof exteriors could be so much more than just a weather shield. The growing urban rooftop farming movement just may change that. An article in today's New York Times describes how the green roof movement and the healthy food movement are converging. City policies can play a role in acclerating plantings - Chicago and New York provide tax incentives - though the urban farmers surveyed in the article admit rooftop gardening is more a labor of love. Although they can be expensive (even if subsidized) and not suitable for every type of roof, green roofs also provide public benefits through reducing urban heat island effects, cleaning air, and producing local food. For a vertical spin on growing food and plants in an urban setting, check out the blog Veg.itecture.
To the litany of statistics bearing out the severity of this recession, add one more: the number of Americans who moved between March 2008 and March 2009 was just 35.2 million, the lowest total in 47 years – and back in 1962, there were 120 million fewer Americans. Such relative stability might be viewed as a good thing for neighborhoods besieged by foreclosures, or cities suffering from long-term economic decline (not to mention the effect on the environment). But, economists point out, reduced mobility is, rather, a sign that people are unable to move in pursuit of jobs. And it’s not just emigration: the 1.1 million immigrants who arrived from overseas between March of last year and this, meanwhile, constituted the lowest number since 1995. The little movement there was, however, was outward: Suburbs gained 2.2 million movers while major cities lost 2 million.
After learning about new plans for San Francisco's public realm—widened sidewalks and bike lanes on Cesar Chavez Street and throughout the Mission District, a complete makeover of Fisherman’s Wharf—it was time to tackle a public space issue ourselves: Market Street.
SPUR teamed up with Next American City and the AIA to host an interactive charrette. Building on the Better Market Street Project, we brainstormed the transformation of Market into our city's grand boulevard and anchor.
[Image: Nelson Nygaard]
Jeff Tumlin of Nelson Nygaard kicked things off with an outline of what makes a great street: it invites participation, teems with people and offers transparency. It challenges our assumptions, inspires and surprises, plays with light and shadow and makes us feel sexy.
Brimming with sexy ideas, focus groups scattered to various corners of the urban center. Kim Havens of Wilson Meany Sullivan led the Commerce (Planning and Development) discussion and Karin Flood Eklund of MJM Management led Commerce (Shopping). Tim Papandreou of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency and Neal Patel (pictured) of the SF Bike Coalition facilitated the transit and bike conversations, and Jill Manton of the Public Arts Commission and Kit Hodge of the Great Streets Project took on public art and public space.
[Image: Colleen McHugh]
An interesting theme emerged: to achieve our goals, groups needed to work together. Sure, there were some specific requests, such as dedicated bus lanes and stop consolidation (transit) and regular exhibitions (public art). But the majority of ideas required a partnership. Commerce and public space needed help from public art programming to draw in crowds. Public art needed help from public space and transit for fresh new locations for work. Obviously successful transit and bike systems required cooperation. And the list went on.
So can we make Market Street an avenue of constant activity, our own Champs-Elysées? According to this charrette, if we work together, then yes.
