The New Rules Of Design

From our ballooning skyline to our shrinking studio apartments, boom-time San Francisco is an orgy of cuttingedge design. But is there a method to the madness?

We surveyed scores of local architects, designers, and artisans to find out. Here, 24 principles that are driving bay Area design.

San Francisco is going through one of the most radical physical transformations in its history.

Four experts weigh in on the consequences—both good and bad—of a metropolis designed anew.

In his 1922 poem “The City by the Sea,” San Francisco’s unofficial poet laureate George Sterling wrote, “At the end of our streets is sunset; At the end of our streets the stars.” If Sterling, who committed suicide in 1926, were to return from the grave and update his poem today, he would have to end it, “At the end of our streets the high-rises”—a line (and a reality) that might send him reaching for the cyanide again.

San Francisco is going up, up, up. Not since the first Manhattanization of downtown, which reached its climax in the late ’70s and early ’80s, has there been such a radical alteration of the city’s built environment. That earlier explosion of office buildings obscured San Francisco’s world-famous hills and led to the “skyscraper revolt” of the ’70s, but it was largely confined to downtown. Today’s boom extends across the southern and eastern sides of the city, from the financial district to mid-Market, from Octavia Boulevard to Potrero Hill, from Dogpatch to Hunters Point. And while the earlier frenzy was dominated by high-rises, the current one welcomes buildings of any sort at all, from the 1,070-foot Salesforce Tower to the modernist apartments popping up across town like a cat video gone viral.

San Franciscans can be forgiven for feeling more than a little shell-shocked these days. Building booms are profoundly disorienting: Familiar landmarks are destroyed, views disappear, new buildings loom, the intimate texture of street life changes. In one sense our current building frenzy is less traumatic than Manhattanization—after all, you can only lose a low skyline once. But in another sense it may be even more jarring, because this building explosion is inseparable from a financial and demographic boom that is profoundly altering the city’s inner skyline. The urban-design issues raised by the dizzying proliferation of new structures are tangled up with questions of social justice and quality of life—the housing crisis, displacement, racial and ethnic homogenization, strained public transportation, congested streets, crowded parks, loss of legacy businesses, and so on. It’s hard to see a building clearly when you’re judging it not only on its cornice lines, massing, and fenestration, but also on whether it’s helping to save or destroy San Francisco’s soul.

To assess this fraught moment, I spoke to four people who have had a major impact on San Francisco’s built landscape for decades: two architects, Mark Cavagnero and Peter Pfau, and two planners, current planning commissioner Kathrin Moore and former director of city planning Allan Jacobs. The quartet divided into two clearly delineated camps: upbeat architects and extremely gloomy planners. As a whole, they offered a vital range of insights into and opinions on where the city is, what it’s doing right and wrong, and where it should be going as it navigates one of the most tumultuous and critical times in its history.

If you’re feeling glum about the present and future of San Francisco, a three-hour car tour with Mark Cavagnero is just what the doctor ordered. Cavagnero loves everything about the city—its topography, history, cultural institutions, and architecture (some of the finer recent examples of which, like the SFJazz Center, the Public Safety Building, and Sava Pool, he created himself). He’s one of the most sought-after architects in town, with commissions ranging from a new 40,000-square-foot performance space on the top floor of the War Memorial Opera House to a $400 million expansion of Moscone Center. But despite his crowded dance card, he jumped at the opportunity to drive me around town and share his enthusiasms—everything from the hardscrabble charms of Dogpatch to how the symphony and the opera are using transparent ground floors to lure new audiences.

After starting our tour at Cavagnero's offices on Sansome and Vallejo Streets and cruising through the rapidly developing northern waterfront, we end up at the newish streetscape on Octavia between Fell and Hayes and park near the bustling urban oasis of Patricia’s Green. “It’s very cool, it’s very urban, it’s very hip,” he says as we stroll past the park’s eye-opening new feature, Burning Man sculptor David Best’s gloriously ephemeral wooden temple. “Isn’t that wild?” he asks, delighted. He gestures at the buildings lining the park, a motley collection that somehow works as an ensemble. “These are all new. Some are better than others, but they’ve all been built in the last five years. This neighborhood is incredible, the way it’s transformed. There’s density now, and a few blocks away are all these Victorians, which I think is a nice balance.”

We get coffee and ramble over to Linden, the small street running behind the SFJazz Center. “Having old buildings right next to new ones can be fabulous,” Cavagnero says, “but—I hate to say this—it counts on really good architecture. See the way we cut that mass down and over?” He gestures toward the roofline of SFJazz, which aligns with the cornice of an old wooden rectory adjacent to his gleaming creation. “If we had brought it straight up, it would have just seemed chunky and massive and would have muscled the older building. By cutting it down and making the walls glass instead of more concrete, to my eye it’s very deferential. It says, ‘We like you, we respect you, we’re getting down to your scale.’ It’s a higher level of responsibility for the architect to incorporate that kind of thinking.”

We return to the car and head toward Mission Bay. Cavagnero tells me that the Planning Department, which shapes and guides what gets built in San Francisco, is far more sophisticated and open to new architectural ideas than it was 25 years ago, when he started working in the city. “I used to dread going into the Planning Department— you were pretty sure they wouldn’t like what you did, and you couldn’t do anything about it. Now I like going in, because there are a lot of good people on the other side of the table and they want to make it a better city. And a lot of times they help you convince your client to do things that aren’t about naked self-interest.”

At several points during our cruise through town, Cavagnero apologizes for sounding “Pollyannaish” and acknowledges the very real downsides of the boom, from displacement to substandard architecture. He readily admits that the current frenzy has resulted in some mediocre buildings. “There’s so much money at stake because of the property values and the possible revenue, and the rents and leases are so high, that the developers want to get in quickly,” he says. “The nuances of design, and public involvement, and the consensus and review process all take time, and that costs money. There’s always this pressure to move quickly, to not spend as much money on the design and planning.” Cavagnero also believes that the Planning Department is under pressure from city hall to approve housing: “If someone can come along and build more housing units, there’s a sense that maybe the architecture isn’t that important.”

Cavagnero is concerned about homogenization and gentrification, but not too much: “Growing pains” is how he describes them. And he finds inspiration in the intangible rewards that come with building in this city. “We had some challenges when we did Sava Pool [in the Sunset] some years ago,” he recalls. “The neighbors didn’t want the existing pool to come down—it was very political. I went to a bunch of meetings with a bunch of little old ladies. And the proudest thing for me in maybe my whole career isn’t the de Young or the Oakland Museum or SFJazz—it’s the day we had the ribbon cutting for Sava Pool. All these older women were there, and one of them came up to me and said, ‘You know, Mark, when you showed me the drawings, I didn’t really like it, but I trusted you because you listened to us. And now that I see it, I love it. It couldn’t be better.’”

Cavagnero remembers the woman giving him a hug, tears coming out of her eyes, and thinking that this was why he loved doing public work. “When push comes to shove, it’s not about architecture,” he says, “it’s about not violating a trust. If you can do that, you feel good about yourself. You’ve made your contribution.”

Although architects like Cavagnero may ponder the larger context of their buildings, that isn’t precisely their job—by definition, architects pay more attention to the trees than the forest. Seeing the forest is the responsibility of urban designers like Allan Jacobs, San Francisco’s director of city planning from 1967 to 1975 and the author of several books on urban planning, including Great Streets, regarded as a classic in its field. In response to the unbridled development during his tenure, the now 86-year-old planning legend helped create the city’s groundbreaking 1972 Urban Design Plan. “It was done,” he says over the phone, “because there were neighborhood concerns about the basic nature of the city, especially about views and buildings that were not in scale with the nature of the city.”

Jacobs does not like what is growing in San Francisco today. Inappropriate buildings are springing up all over the place, he says, a disaster for which he blames the city’s promiscuous granting of individual exceptions to its Planning Code. “More and more things are being done by discretion rather than by what the zoning laws say,” he explains. “That is always a mistake because when you do that, the party with the most power always wins. And that party is never the city planner.” As an example of “the number of really terrible buildings” that have resulted from this ad hoc, developer-friendly system, he singles out “those two towers way down there [One Rincon Hill] that totally hide the view of the Bay Bridge. They break all the original rules about massing, shadows, and stuff like that.” He praises the Octavia Boulevard development (which he and Elizabeth Macdonald planned), but blasts individual buildings like Stanley Saitowitz’s new 8 Octavia apartment building, on the corner of Market Street. “It’s aggressive; it breaks the rules,” he says. “It is not what we call transparent because it has all those louvers in front of it. It’s a terrible building.”

In The Good City: Reflections and Imaginations, Jacobs writes that “greed, when allowed to flourish, trumps good city design every time.” When I ask who or what bears responsibility for the trend of granting such egregious exceptions to developers, he answers brusquely, “I don’t want to say anything that would go in print on that.” Soon thereafter he says he has to go and hangs up.

Thanks in large part to pioneering urbanists like Jacobs, one of the top priorities of city planners today is the creation of dynamic street life—a mandate that Peter Pfau of Pfau Long Architecture enthusiastically embraces. An earnest believer, like Cavagnero, in the unique greatness of San Francisco, the architect is currently working on a mixed light-industrial and office building at 100 Hooper Street, at the base of Potrero Hill; a residential complex coproduced with Kennerly Architecture and Planning at Indiana Street in Dogpatch; and the two towers he’s building with AE3 Partners that will flank the new Warriors stadium on the water’s edge of Mission Bay (assuming that the project goes through). At his offices on Jack London Alley, next to South Park—San Francisco’s original elite neighborhood (see page 84), whose rise and fall and re-rise mirror the capricious mutability of the city as a whole—the thoughtful, likable architect explains how a building can give life to a street.

“If you look at the great cities, they have a lot of density,” Pfau says, showing me renderings of the two-building, 115-unit Indiana Street project. “So how do we densify San Francisco in a way that’s positive? How do we create spaces at the ground level that are active? This project turns the end of 19th Street into an art plaza. We’re using the Caltrain right-of-way and trying to make something of it. There’s a café here, there are retail stores nearby, and all the way down the block are entryways with stoops so you can sit outside. This is how we’re trying to activate the streets.”

Pfau sees his native city as on the cutting edge of a new planned urbanism that aims to create dynamic, European city–style street life—out of a petri dish, if need be. “To me it almost doesn’t matter what’s above,” he says, “if the quality of the streetscape is good, if it adds vitality to the city, if people are engaged. In such cases, the powers that be are willing to let the building be a little bigger.”

Pfau praises San Francisco’s efforts to institute zoning changes that protect the nonprofits, artists, and makers who are being priced out of the city. His project at 100 Hooper Street contains both tech offices and spaces for PDR (production, distribution, and repair), a category that includes light industries and artisans. A city with such a vital mix of businesses, an active street life, intelligently planned buildings, and a robust network of POPOS (privately owned public open spaces), he says, “has the potential to become quite special.”

When I point out that the money flooding into the city also has a dark side, Pfau doesn’t deny it. “The dark side is the social justice side,” he says. “How can we not displace any more people? And as we create this denser city, how can we create enough inclusionary housing, artist space, PDR space, and integrate it into the fabric in a meaningful way?” That, Pfau believes, is the greatest challenge— for him and for every other city builder.

Chatting with Kathrin Moore after talking to Cavagnero and Pfau is like jumping from a hot tub into a Sierra lake—chilling, but salubrious. The Germanborn Moore brings a formidable set of qualities to her position as one of the city’s seven appointed planning commissioners: She is professionally trained as an architect and urban designer; she possesses a European sensibility about how cities should function; and she takes her responsibility as a guardian of San Francisco’s built landscape very, very seriously.

Moore has become a crucial part of the city’s immune system, a kind of human phagocyte whose task is to track and destroy unhealthy pathogens—in this case, ugly buildings, poorly conceived developments, and other noxious urban microbes. These invaders are responsible for her extremely bleak view of where built San Francisco is today and where it is going. Over a two-hour conversation outside North Beach’s Caffe Trieste, Moore surgically dissects the forces that she believes threaten the city she has loved and lived in since 1971.

“This city is a very, very rare exception among cities in the United States,” Moore says. “Our cities are places of consumption and constant change in comparison to European cities, which are a setting for civic discourse and history. But in San Francisco, we have a really strong tradition of good city planning, which distinguishes it from every other American city.”

That tradition, which began in the ’70s with Jacobs’s Urban Design Plan, climaxed with the 1985 Downtown Plan. Created to address what Moore calls “an incredible onslaught of unbridled building in San Francisco, similar to what we’re doing now,” the Downtown Plan imposed height limits on a big chunk of the financial district and SoMa and disallowed new buildings that cast excessive shadows, blocked views, or profaned historic structures like the Russ, Mills, and Shell Buildings. It was holistic, Moore says; it “recognized that it’s not just designing singular buildings that look good—you have to design in context.” It placed “public interest values”—preserving and creating access to sun and the waterfront, open space, parks, views, and a vibrant street life—above market values. Its purpose, in short, was to save San Francisco’s unique character.

Moore makes it clear that she is not universally opposed to growth, development, or new buildings. Describing a number of projects as first-rate—the Octavia development, the large residential project on Freeway Parcel P at Laguna and Oak, Pfau’s Hooper Street project—she notes that she supports building out areas like South of Market. But in the current building frenzy, she says, planning based on the public interest has been overwhelmed by planning based on “building-driven value capture. Today, it’s basically only about money, what lawyer you hired, who talks the fastest.”

Moore says that she has sympathy for San Francisco’s planning officials: “Many of them are young and inexperienced, and they’re caught in this absolute torrent of development and being buffeted on all sides.” Nonetheless, she says, they bear a large measure of responsibility for the city’s lamentable situation. “The Planning Department...in my opinion, does not understand proper planning,” she says. “I think they are absolutely inept to do it. They have not been trained, they have not been mentored. They are becoming more like permit expediters.” The department’s pro-development bias, she says, derives from its status as an enterprise department—meaning that it’s funded with fees paid by developers whose projects have been approved. “The people who come in front of them are the people who pay them directly. Wouldn’t you do the person who pays you a favor to get his project approved?”

According to Moore, the Planning Department, which helps draw up the codes and rules that govern development, has dumped responsibility for protecting the public interest on the Planning Commission, which is charged with approving or rejecting specific projects and whose weekly hearings serve as a public sounding board. But her fellow commissioners, too, she says, are often unable to resist the pressure to build. “The commission is a pro forma good conscience. I’m just stating a fact, not trying to be critical. I’m the only one who has the professional training to be able to see what is going on. The others just sit there with their finger in the wind.”

To illustrate her frustrations, Moore pulls out photographs of the cookiecutter modernist buildings, mostly apartments or condos, that are popping up around town, especially in Dogpatch and on the edges of Potrero Hill. “This is the stuff that is really disturbing,” she says. “If you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all. I think all of these buildings are totally miserable. They have a limited flashiness, they have stripes here and a pop-out there, they get approved because they kind of look new—but in the end they’re all the same.”

I ask Moore if she thinks our built environment is worse, better, or just different than the one she found here in 1971. “That is a difficult question,” she responds. “I try to get out of San Francisco and go abroad at least three or four times a year. The reason for that is that I need to recalibrate myself, because this city, at this moment, is too fast and too chaotic for me. This is getting close to war. The things that we consider stable are all being taken away. Houses we normally walk by, with people we’ve seen for years, are all of a sudden empty. Stores that have been there forever are disappearing because they can’t afford the rent. They’re all gone.”

A few days after my conversations with the architects and planners, I walk from Telegraph Hill down Herb Caen Way to the Embarcadero, heading for a Giants game at AT&T Park. With its ever-changing views of the bay, the mighty suspension span of the Bay Bridge, and the city skyline, the Embarcadero is one of the world’s great urban promenades. I let the buildings unfurl before me: the once-reviled Transamerica Pyramid, softened by time into an icon of the city; the ungainly Gateway high-rises that stand where Luccan produce peddlers once bantered with housewives at the old Colombo Market; the wondrous Ferry Building, one of the city’s splendid survivors; the new Lumina building’s curved facade on Folsom Street, gleaming against the surrounding forest of boxy, undistinguished high-rises; the twin towers of One Rincon Hill, sleek markers of wealth and power jammed unforgivably close to the Bay Bridge.

As I take it all in, it strikes me that both the optimistic architects and the pessimistic planners are right—but the planners may be more right, their message more urgent. While Cavagnero and Pfau correctly draw attention to individual well-planned, street life–fostering buildings that have risen recently, such gems are outnumbered by the mediocre and the just plain bad. When the smoke clears, the cheap modernist apartments decried by Moore probably won’t look any worse than the thousands of unsightly boxes that went up in the ’50s and ’60s—but they probably won’t look any better either. In a city whose ecosystem is as finite and fragile as San Francisco’s, that’s a shabby outcome.

As for the high-rise explosion, not all the new skyscrapers are bad; even those at which experts turn up their noses can add vitality to the cityscape. In The Good City, Jacobs recalls someone saying that he liked a certain high-rise because it reminded him of Chicago. Jacobs retorted that San Francisco isn’t Chicago. That’s true, but for me, that glimpse of the Lumina from the Embarcadero works precisely because it adds a successfully Chicago-like note to a part of the city that has been unsuccessfully Chicago-ized. Much of South of Market is already filled with inhuman towers—one more doesn’t necessarily matter. In for a dime, in for a dollar (or 100 million dollars).

But there must be limits to the amount of human intervention allowed within San Francisco. For this is one of the few cities where you can look out your window and see the universe. At the end of our streets are stars. The natural attributes of this city are what set it apart not just from Chicago and Manhattan, but from almost every other metropolis on the planet. William Saroyan wrote, “The city is literally of the sea. It has everything. Sea, earth, sky, and the world.” Those qualities are priceless, not something to be bartered away to the highest bidder. If we allow today’s tidal wave of money to deluge our beautiful urban sand castle, we won’t just lose our San Francisco—we’ll gain somebody else’s Houston.

The hugest of San Francisco’s new buildings are stepping aside to make room for the city’s tiniest streets. By Adam L. Brinklow

In the old days of big-building construction in downtown San Francisco, developers simply plopped their giant edifices down, blocking off alleyways and virtually erasing entire streets from the city map. In SoMa, for example, you can still trace the lines where Stevenson and Jessie Streets ran through what’s now a mammoth Westfield mall.

But these days, public space is the key that unlocks San Francisco’s byzantine entitlements process. Foot traffic curbs pollution, improves retail commerce, and even drives down crime—not to mention that a bustling plaza full of people is just plain prettier than a swarm of honking cars hemmed in by glass and steel towers.

“It’s almost enlightened,” cracks David Winslow, an urban designer with the San Francisco Planning Department. But the plazas are motivated by something more concrete than kumbaya spirit: The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan of 2009 mandates that most new developments longer than 200 feet on one side, and all those that are longer than 400 feet on one side, provide an accessible alley through the property. So if you want to build in SoMa or mid-Market, you’ll be getting holistic one way or another.

SFMOMA At the moment, the stretches of Minna and Natoma Streets that flank the museum aren’t used for much other than loading artworks and supplies. But designers with Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta envision a retail wonderland here when the two streets are connected by an alley. “There are interesting spaces deep inside this block that will now be filled with shops and cafés,” says lead architect Craig Dykers. “It’s an area that most people don’t know exists.”

50 First Street If all goes as planned, this forthcoming mixed-use tower (one of two on the site) will be the second-tallest building in San Francisco. Down at street level, foot traffic will pass through it via a ground-floor plaza fed from three directions by alleyways.

The Flower Mart Despite several recent announcements of a détente, Kilroy Realty is still offering no comment on how it plans to accommodate flower merchants when it plants office towers around the botanical bazaar. According to the city, the company is juggling two designs, one of which would extend Morris Street into a plaza opening onto Brannan Street. “We couldn’t be in business without the alleys,” says David Repetto, who has sold flowers at the mart for 35 years.

Tower Car Wash This 120-foot-tall condo designed by Trumark Urban will rise on the former site of a longtime car wash at Market and Van Ness Streets. This particular block—a funky teardrop created by Mission Street’s brief split-off into Otis Street—presents the developer with a challenge. Despite its comparatively small scale, it needs an alley.

1500 Mission Street This trapezoidal parcel houses a Goodwill store, but not for long: The nonprofit scored a jackpot by selling the land to housing developer Related California for $66 million. The future of the site includes a condo tower, an office tower, and two new alleys—north-south and east-west—to make the decidedly “pedestrian- unfriendly” area (in the company’s words) a little more inviting.

5M When this 4-acre condo and office development threatened to encroach on Mary and Natoma Streets, the designers eliminated the building’s ground-floor lobby to make room for a 50,000-square-foot public plaza. “We’re at the intersection of different neighborhoods with different histories,” says Laura Crescimano, a planner with Forest City Enterprises. “The alleyways are part of that fabric.”

French doors are outdated; screens are downright obsolete. “We rarely even use standard windows anymore,” says architect Julie Dowling of Dowling Studios. “We prefer to do a sliding glass wall that creates a direct passage to nature.” For modern Bay Area houses, the more seamless the connection to the outside, the better. Homeowners from Napa to Carmel want to bathe in the sunshine, sleep in the meadow, cook in the orchard (preferably on a restaurant-quality stove), dine poolside, and recline in the woods on an overstuffed leather couch. For designers, that means exterior shower doors, double-sided fireplaces, tricked-out patio furniture, and expansive panes of sliding, folding, and rising glass.

“Clean” and “neutral” are buzzwords when designing stark, white spaces. “It’s about making a container that’s invisible,” says Frank Merritt of Jensen Architects. “That clean white aesthetic quiets outside noise.” But when Trouble Coffee owner Giulietta Carrelli envisioned her West Oakland café as a vast white box, she had the opposite effect in mind. “It needed to be loud,” she says. “I insisted on picking out the whitest white possible. Even my painter was like, ‘This is going to look insane.’” The look was inspired by a lifetime of references, Carrelli says, from the Mike Teavee television room in Willy Wonka to the experience of ocean swimming in dense fog. “I tried to pick a white that Yoko Ono would pick,” she says. The café’s concrete floors are coated with white epoxy; the walls, shelves, and bar are a bright white semigloss; and the custom furniture by Conceptual Metalworks is made with white powder-coated steel. The textural 13-by-8-foot artwork, by Carrelli herself, was painted with six different shades of white acrylic. “It's not really a normal coffee shop; It's more of an installation,” she muses. “It’s not like I’m opening up on Valencia Street.” Even so, the blazingly white café has quickly become a destination for design lovers and Instagrammers alike. Of course, such high-octane white comes with its own set of challenges, including a rigorous twice-daily mopping schedule. “If it’s raining,” Carrelli sighs, “I just don’t even go over there.”

...unless you're gutsy enough to go all black Companies like Uber and ad agency Muhtayzik Hoffer, as well as a growing number of daring homeowners, are taking the plunge into deep, dark vats of black paint. “It’s all about the contrast,” says Gensler design principal Collin Burry. “Done right, black can be superdramatic and effective.”

Craig Dykers isn’t a kitc hen designer. A principal at the architecture firm Snøhetta, Dykers is collaborating with SFMOMA on its expansion and has worked on massive projects like the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion. But he wasn’t entirely surprised when chef Thomas Keller asked if he’d be interested in redesigning the French Laundry’s kitchen in honor of its 20th anniversary. “We’re known for interrogating and exploring an idea,” Dykers says. “A lot of our work is a first.”

Keller’s mission for the project was simple: “We’d outgrown our kitchen,” he says. “We couldn’t have the comfort in our work spaces that we wanted, and we wanted to elevate the staff’s sense of pride.” His inspiration for the project—the Louvre—made things more complex. “Obviously, it’s hard to compare the French Laundry with the Louvre,” Keller says, “but they’re both iconic buildings in their respective cities.”

Dykers worked with Keller, kitchen designer Tim Harrison of Harrison & Koellner, Berkeley architecture firm Envelope A+D, and Wright Constructing to expand the kitchen by 25 percent; build offices, a wine cellar, and a butchery; and reframe the courtyard, doubling its size.

Harrison, who has worked on Keller’s restaurants for years, had specific ideas about equipment and design, but Dykers and his colleague Nic Rader had never worked in a restaurant. So they spent a day in aprons at Per Se, Keller’s New York restaurant, watching the frenetic chefs. One obvious pain point was at the so-called pass table, where chefs hand plates to the lead chef, who pushes them across the table to the head of the waitstaff, who then sends them to servers behind him. All the while, workers weave by, moving quickly through the kitchen.

To smooth out that sequence, Dykers’s team gave the French Laundry’s pass table a curved edge, providing chefs room to lean in to make way for those walking behind them. They also angled the ceiling above the table, so that when chefs are looking across the table but talking to the servers behind them, the sound will bounce back, eliminating the need to shout. Snøhetta designed the ceiling to look like a draped white tablecloth, incorporating the kitchen hoods as part of the canopy.

Materials were also important. Often, professional kitchens are equipped with the same stainless steel tables used in airport security lines, but, says Keller, “we wanted something more comforting, more relaxing.” So instead of stainless steel, they opted to make the work surfaces out of Dekton, a composite material. The worktables are anchored by slender legs designed to lend a sense of lightness.

For diners, glimpsing the kitchen is a huge part of the experience, so Dykers and his team reimagined the way visitors arrive. Now guests will walk along a path bordered by a basalt wall, pass an opening that frames the restaurant's famous blue door, then enter the garden facing the glasswalled kitchen. Green-patterned panes above and below the kitchen’s viewing window mimic the movement that Dykers and Rader observed in Per Se's kitchen. “We saw how wonderfully balletic the use of their hands is,” Dykers says. “It’s like choreography.”

The design of the space—the window onto the blue door, the path through the garden, the glass wall revealing the chefs working—isn’t exactly the Louvre, but, says Keller, “you get a sense of how Dykers interpreted that vision.” The new kitchen will open in the spring, more than three years after Keller first started thinking about it. “We really wanted it done by our 20th anniversary,” he says. “But we’ll celebrate by opening it around our 22nd.” Elise Craig

Out with the pedestrian skylight, in with the light cannon. Inspired by artist James Turrell, architect Beverly Choe uses light to reshape a room. Rather than punch a hole straight from the ceiling to the roof, she individually frames each opening in wood, sculpting the diffusion of light in stairwells, bathrooms, and reading nooks. “I try to choreograph an experience by thinking about what time of day the space is going to be used and angling the columns of light,” she says. “The idea is to encourage slowness and bring some beauty to everyday rituals.” When the sun-casting cannons are positioned in the corners and along the edges of rooms, indirect light bounces off adjacent walls to create a rich, hazy glow.

At Autodesk’s Pier 9 workshop, “artist-in-residence” is an exceptionally broad term. The makers engaged at the waterside complex include engineers, roboticists, architects, programmers, bakers, mathematicians, artists, fashion designers, and woodworkers—some, full-time Autodesk employees, others temporary collaborators. Here, a day in the life of the hive-like design factory. By Lauren Murrow

Designer Jonathan Odom built this cold-brew coffeemaker in the Autodesk test kitchen from wooden dowels, 3-D printed parts, and "off the shelf" lab equipment.

3-D printing research scientist Andreas Bastian peers into the Ember 3-D printer, which transforms resin into highly detailed products like jewelry, dental structures, and synthetic velvet.

Mechanical engineer Sebastian Morales uses a fiveaxis DMS router to create what he calls a light painting. The machine is typically fitted with a drill bit, but Morales uses an LED laser instead.

Morales sculpted this bird out of wire and clay, then created a 3-D scan of the figure in various stages of flight.

Designer Paige Russell makes wooden beach paddles on the workshop's laser cutter.

Product manager Christian Pramuk holds an object formed by the powder 3-D printer. He's currently creating a replica of a tortoise shell, which will be roboticized and used as a decoy to deter crow attacks.

Designer Mike Warren created this luminous table by filling the recesses in a slab of pecky cypress with a mixture of glow-in-thedark powder and clear casting resin.

Designer Benjamin Cowden built this hand-cranked contraption, which mixes the perfect Manhattan. “The single crank is the magic that operates the whole machine,” he says.

Intern Sean Oh uses a powerful metal lathe to create an aluminum part for Autodesk chief executive officer Carl Bass’s electric go-cart. Pier 9 designers use the lathe to create mass-manufactured metal parts, as well as personal accessories like chess pieces and etched espresso tampers.

Architect Behnaz Farahi constructs 3-D printed, electronically programmed fashion. A tiny camera is nestled into the neckline of this piece, which is embedded with muscle wire. The garment's fine quills move in sync with the viewer's gaze.

A playable wooden record, produced on an Objet Connex 500 3-D printer by software engineer Amanda Ghassaei.

Russell embraces life-size replicas of herself and Design Studio head Randy Sarafan, printed on the vinyl cutter. “We arrange them in awkward positions around the office,” she says.

Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint are restaurateurs, but you could also describe them as breeders of culinary Trojan horses. There’s Mission Chinese Food, their innovative, heavily trafficked Chinese restaurant that operates within the dingy, non-innovative confines of a Chinese takeout joint. There’s Commonwealth, a fine-dining establishment where dishes like celery sorbet and clams with yuzu bubbles cleverly distract from the charitable agenda at the restaurant’s core: $10 of every $75 tasting menu purchase is donated to local nonprofits.

And very soon—maybe even this month, permits and construction willing—there will be the Perennial: an upscale restaurant that’s simultaneously a laboratory for experimenting with progressive, even radical, environmental innovations. “We see it as a vehicle for talking about food and the environment, and not just food fads,” says Leibowitz. “We’re focused on the idea of perennial agriculture as a way of addressing and even reversing climate change. I haven’t seen that in other restaurants.”

While plenty of restaurants are taking eco-conscious steps like using local-sustainable-organic ingredients and curbing waste, the Perennial, which will serve what its owners call progressive agrarian cuisine, will go several steps further. For starters, it’s not another farm-to-table establishment: Instead, you could call it the first table-to-farm restaurant built around the idea of using restaurant waste to make restaurant food.

Located on the street level of SoMa’s giant Ava high-rise apartment building, the Perennial was named for plants that return year after year, capturing and sequestering carbon, mitigating drought, and combating soil erosion. It will employ conservation practices that are still more or less unheard of in the restaurant industry: For one, about 20 percent of its produce will come from an aquaponic greenhouse in West Oakland, where kitchen scraps will be fed to worms and soldier fly larvae, which in turn will be dehydrated into food for sturgeons and catfish, whose poopenhanced water will then be treated and circulated to vegetation destined for tables at the restaurant.

The Perennial’s beef will come from Stemple Creek Ranch, a Tomales cattle farm that reserves part of its land for carbon farming (an approach that focuses on increasing the capture of atmospheric carbon and storing it within plants and the soil). And eventually, the restaurant will serve bread made with flour milled from Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass (“Michael Pollan made some good pancakes with it,” Leibowitz reports).

“We’re not trying to make the claim that every restaurant has to produce its own food or be zero waste,” says Leibowitz. Instead, she and husband Myint hope that by prioritizing the environment, they’ll send a clearer message to their customers about where their food comes from, and the impact of their choices.

If this desire to raise public consciousness was pivotal in creating the Perennial’s concept, then a priority in the restaurant’s design was not cramming that consciousness down the public’s throat. Customers won’t realize that old menus are shredded and used for worm food, or that the restaurant dishwasher’s intake runs next to its ventilation system, allowing the escaping water to heat the incoming water. They won’t notice that the kitchen hood’s infrared temperature sensor turns the hood fans on and off based on whether smoke is rising from the cooking area—reducing energy use by up to 33 percent. They probably won’t be able to tell that the restaurant’s silverware was bought secondhand, or that the wood of its tables, chairs, and wall and ceiling panels came from salvaged urban trees.

What they will see is a mezzanine-level living pantry lined with planters from which chefs will harvest lettuces, herbs, and microgreens. If they peek behind the bar, they won’t see energy-sucking mini-fridges; instead, the bar shares a central walk-in with the kitchen (and, to save ice, sometimes pre-mixes and pre-batches its cocktails). And in the dining room, they’ll see a hundred-gallon aquarium whose fish, like those at the aquaponic greenhouse, are fed worms nourished with kitchen scraps.

For help designing their kitchen, Myint and Leibowitz turned to the Food Service Technology Center in San Ramon, a PG&E-owned resource of the Energy Star program that offers energy-efficiency consulting to the food industry. The couple quickly learned that their vision of a sustainable paradise didn’t always jibe with city and state regulations, much less with the realities of working within a corporate-owned high-rise. Early on, for example, someone proposed running the plumbing above the stoves to capture heat for the hot water, but that, Myint says, “wasn’t up to code.” Ditto a plan to recycle gray water from the bathroom’s sinks. “The long and the short of restaurant operational decisions,” Myint adds wryly, “is that they’re all really complicated.”

The restaurant’s true reality check will come after it has opened: For all of the boundaries its owners are pushing, the Perennial is not an art installation or a trip to the Exploratorium. Ingredients like local carbon-negative beef come at a premium, and Myint acknowledges a “big uncertainty” in predicting how the costs of running an aquaponic greenhouse will compare with those of buying produce from a supplier. “We’ve made projections,” Leibowitz says of the restaurant’s economics, “but they are necessarily hypothetical and subject to change.” Both she and Myint point out that such fiscal fog isn’t uncommon in the restaurant business, thanks to the ever-shifting costs of ingredients, oil, and labor. But the couple, who cite Blue Hill at Stone Barns—Dan Barber’s pioneering farmrestaurant in upstate New York—as an inspiration, have found some early ways to avoid passing costs on to their customers: To keep their entrées between $18 and $28, for example, they’ll move meat away from the center of the plate, rather than make it the main event—you won’t find any $45 steaks here.

Any restaurant owner, environmentally conscious or otherwise, can speak to the discrepancy that exists between ideals and reality. Annie Somerville, the longtime executive chef of Greens, has worked at the vegetarian restaurant since 1981, and she still remembers how difficult it was back then to find organic produce. “When there was nothing local,” she recalls, “we’d buy nonorganic, commercially grown produce because that’s all that was available. At that point in time, there weren’t a lot of options for purchasing organic.”

One ideal that Myint and Leibowitz embraced from the beginning was that the Perennial’s physical identity should avoid the usual tropes of pious farmhouse dining. “We were like, ‘What if we did Edison bulbs and a living wall?’” Leibowitz recalls. “But then in five years it would look dated.” So they turned to Paul Discoe, a designer, master woodworker, and ordained Zen Buddhist priest. That last descriptor informs all of his work, which can be seen at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, private estates such as Larry Ellison’s, and the restaurants Greens and Ippuku, the latter of which Discoe co-owns.

“They wanted to be honest and sincere, that was what I got out of it,” Discoe says of his initial meeting with Myint and Leibowitz. “They wanted the restaurant to be a real statement about dealing with the social situation we find ourselves in, where everything is based on ‘use it and throw it away.’”

Their wishes struck a chord with Discoe, who began working with salvaged wood long before “reclaimed” became a mandatory adjective. For the Perennial, he’s using redwood, poplar, acacia, and Douglas fir; the tables, chairs, bar, and paneling he has designed are being built by woodworker Lucas Ford.

The West Oakland warehouse complex that houses Discoe’s company, Joinery Structures, is the site of the Perennial’s 3,400-square-foot aquaponic facility. It also happens to be where Paramo Coffee roasts its beans. Paramo will be opening a café next to the Perennial, and its delivery truck will transport the restaurant’s food scraps to the aquaponic facility during its daily route—thus answering the potentially problematic question of how to avoid emitting carbon while trying to reduce carbon.

Discoe’s experience as a designer at the San Francisco Zen Center came in handy when Leibowitz and Myint gave their staff a say in the Perennial’s design: As he puts it, “I had 22 years in another intense community situation where people felt empowered to express their opinion.” Despite the complexities of synthesizing competing visions, to say nothing of the city’s myriad bureaucratic regulations, Discoe finds that restaurant design offers a certain advantage over its residential counterpart. “I think you can be more daring because people don’t live there all the time,” he says. “It’s like going to see a rock band—you wouldn’t necessarily want the rock band to come home with you.”

It’s an apt analogy: Dining at the Perennial, with its handsome wood accents and carefully tended vegetation, will be a little like going to see the world’s most well-behaved rock band: To hear the message, you’ll need to pay attention.

Painted Ladies may be charming, but they’re the bane of imaginative architecture. “The San Francisco Planning Department is really restrictive about any changes to the outside of a building that’s over 50 years old,” says Ross Hummel of Line Office Architecture. “Which, of course, covers most of the city.” Striking a balance between preservation and shifting tastes leaves designers playing the architectural version of the kids’ game Operation: How do you modernize a home’s interior without disturbing its historic window dressing? “It’s often like there’s a little old house encapsulated in a new, modern house,” says Ross Levy of Levy Art & Architecture, who designed the flip trick below. The reason: While San Francisco facades are protected by red tape, out back anything goes. (If the Planning Department prefers the equivalent of an impenetrable gray bob, consider this the rebellious mullet.)

“We can do some kooky things to the back of a house,” says Hummel. That includes staggered patios, spiral staircases, outdoor bathrooms, and wallspanning panes of glass. “On one side, at least, you get to create some of these interesting, fun, exciting moments.”

One man’s seedy past is another man’s design opportunity. Jensen Architects has transformed the run-down Tenderloin porn cinema Dollhouse into a spanking-new, $6.3 million venue for the avant-garde performance theater CounterPulse, opening October 16 (80 Turk St., near Taylor St.). The lipstick-pink exterior and the comehither silhouettes in the windows are gone, replaced by a new neon marquee, polished concrete floors, and a two-tier lobby flooded with light. Performers will have the run of a 900-square-foot stage equipped with LED lighting and a Meyer six-point surround-sound system, as well as two rehearsal spaces. It’s a significant upgrade from CounterPulse’s former “glorified boom box” in SoMa, says artistic director Julie Phelps. But how, exactly, can a pint-size theater company afford a $6.3 million facility? (Did we mention the in-house apartment for visiting artists?) It can’t—but the city can. The venue was purchased through the Community Art Stabilization Trust, established in 2013 to lease properties to arts tenants affected by rising rents. Even if CounterPulse goes the way of the Dollhouse, the theater will remain reserved for artists. Annie tittiger

Since: 1991 Where you’ve seen his work: Bar Agricole, Campton Place Restaurant Current project: large-scale glass sculptures for properties in Singapore, Jakarta, and Hong Kong

“I’m not that interested in making the pretty thing in the middle of the room. I like my sculptures to be integrated into the architecture. It’s like building Erector sets out of glass, only there are 40 thousand pieces that come together to form this giant cloud.”

Since: 1991 Where you’ve seen his work: Ramen Shop, Outerlands, Penrose, the Twitter office Current project: 18 stair towers for Apple’s new Cupertino campus

“Concrete isn't just for sidewalks anymore. We’re redefining what the material can do. Progressive architects and designers come to us because we’re looking to innovate and do things that haven’t been done before.”

Since: 2000 Where you’ve seen his work: Aether Apparel, the Giant Pixel office, Contigo, Serpentine Current project: a sculptural staircase for a new home designed by architect Owen Kennerly

“We don’t take on what I call potboilers, like 500 feet of boring fencing. I like to take on interesting, insanely complicated projects: a feature stairway, a jewelryquality restaurant piece. Commercial contractors call me a prima donna because I fuss over an eighth of an inch.”

Since: 2010 Where you’ve seen her work: Del Popolo, the Dropbox office, Hogwash, Lolinda Current project: custom furniture for the new Uber headquarters at 555 Market Street

“If a modern art gallery and a log cabin had a love child, that would be my aesthetic: clean, straight lines that highlight the materials. There’s so much chemistry inside a slab of wood.”

It’s 1854, and the beneficiaries of San Francisco’s first big boom, the gold rush, are looking for a place to settle—somewhere close to downtown but expansive enough to reflect their aristocrat ambitions. Taking a cue from exclusive neighborhoods in London and New York City, they reserve a block-long oval of open space and build their mansions around it. The lot is surrounded by a fence to which only they have a key. Inside is a grassy knoll, a place for families to spend time outdoors. It’s the first park in the burgeoning city of San Francisco.

One hundred and sixty-one years—and several booms—later, South Park remains ground zero for San Francisco’s enterprising soul. Dropbox is building its second office there, and Weebly is down the block. Its denizens are a study in contrasts: Eleven venture capital firms sit shoulder to shoulder with 103 single-room occupancy (SRO ) units; homeless people sleep on benches while techies sit nearby sipping espresso. It’s a high-use area, and the years of activity, prosperous and otherwise, have taken their toll. Few of the wooden play structures built in the ‘70s remain; those that do are rotting away despite their coating of toxic creosote. During events at nearby AT &T Park, revelers infiltrate the area and scatter trash. The curb surrounding the historic oval is crumbling. Poor drainage leaves muddy pools. The park, once the polished gem of an aspirational city, is now sad, ragged, and rusty.

As two tech booms have subsumed the area, residents have grown frustrated by the park’s neglect. The South Park Improvement Association engaged landscape architect David Fletcher, who is known for public projects like the new Summit Park near Lake Merced, and received funding from a 2012 bond measure. Fletcher collaborated closely with Toby Levy—a neighbor and designer whom he calls the park’s “power mama”—to make their revitalized vision a reality. Construction of a wholly new South Park is scheduled to begin November 1.

The due-to-be-expanded walkways will be a reinterpretation of the original English strolling garden. As tribute to the original oval curb, Fletcher has designed rounded stages for performances, weddings, and (he hopes) mariachi bands. There will be new play structures and larger grassy areas. Adjustable light poles may be equipped with modular outlets for parkgoers’ charging needs. (One thing you will not find: a plaque marking the spot where Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone are said to have come up with the idea for Twitter.) “This park has been loved to death,” Fletcher says. “The design is an interpretation of its roots.”

In its overhaul, the park also provides an object lesson in redesigning a public space with an eye to both heavy usage and historical respect. Standing outside her ground-floor office adjacent to the park, Levy surveys the surroundings. A few people are asleep on the benches; a mother supervises a toddler scrambling up one of the play structures; two men in button-down shirts stand on the grass, laptops in hand. Above, a drone buzzes by before crashing into the trees. “We don’t want to transform the park—we want to update it,” says Levy. “I don’t want it to be prissy. I still want it to have some toughness to it.” Andrea powell

TO A DESIGN PURIST, San Francisco's flag is all kinds of wrong. Dating from 1900 and featuring a phoenix rising from a crown of flames (a reference to the city's recovery from the fires of the 1850s), it violates more than a few rules of good flag design. Roman Mars, host of the culty design podcast "99% Invisible," is so bothered by our flag that he devoted a good portion of his T E D talk earlier this year to dissecting it. "The phoenix doesn't work," he declares. "It's a strange clip-art kind of thing." The creature's expression is weirdly imperious, the small ribbon of text below is vexing to decode (just try making out Oro en paz, fierro en Gwerra—Spanish for "Gold in peace, iron in war"—from any kind of distance), and the whole thing is nearly impossible to casually doodle. For Mars, the fact that the city's name appears on the flag is "pretty unforgivable." After all, the Stars and Stripes doesn't read "USA."

Later this year, Mars plans to launch a competition to revamp the flag, with the help of design software company Autodesk. The contest has no official relationship with the city yet, but Mars is hopeful that city hall will join his crusade to overhaul a symbol that few recognize and even fewer appreciate.

But what would a more representative, aesthetically pleasing, doodle-friendly San Francisco flag even look like? In a just-forkicks, totally-unsanctioned-by-the-mayor exercise, San Francisco invited four local designers and artists to imagine a new banner for the city. LAMAR ANDERSON

Alone among our flag renderers in his fondness for the current iteration, Fish designed a new version only for a “worst-case scenario.” If the flag must change, he wants the new one to use all the elements of the old: “Aesthetics,” he says, “should never outweigh history.” He amped up the text size and made each graphic element heavier—doing his best to increase legibility from afar. “I thought I’d make a more tattoo-able version of it,” he says. In his version, the phoenix has lost its haughty glare. “I tried to make him look more somber and still. Like, yeah, he’s rising up out of the flames, but he’s comfortable at this point.”

Riffing on the classic three-bar format, Heiman opted for a color scheme that evokes San Francisco’s “three-layer environment— the sky, the fog, the land,” he says. The tripartite structure also signals the fact that San Francisco is foggy nearly a third of the year: “I thought, ‘Could the flag have a degree of infographic built into it?’” The circle doubles as the sun and the letter O, a nod to the region’s original occupants, the Ohlone. The green triangles— code for Twin Peaks and a reference to seismic activity—pay tribute to the municipal terrain. “People and companies will come and go, but that landscape will always be here,” Heiman says.

The bison silhouette refers to the nonnative bison in Golden Gate Park—apt symbols, the designer believes, for the city’s population of transplants. “Everyone can remake themselves in San Francisco,” says Mende. The banner‘s other prime elements riff on familiar flag tropes: The bison’s three colors reference the diversity suggested by the rainbow LGBT flag. The star’s position mirrors that of the red star in California’s bear flag. “The star is black,” says Mende, “because San Francisco is a land of inward thinkers, people who are into the dark matter behind ideas.”

Berger is the only designer who submitted a flag that also works upside down: Its zigzagging arrow can point up in prosperity and down in hardship, allowing the flag to change with the times. Since the gold rush, says Berger, “the story of San Francisco has never been flat. It always seems to be a huge windfall for someone or a huge loss for someone else.” The flippable design gives the flag a built-in capacity for social commentary. “If you’re feeling like you’re going down while everyone else is going up, you can say that with your flag,” she says.

Muni’s $1.2 billion fleet of new trains May Remedy decades of iffy engineering. By Joe Eskenazi

Progress, like public transit in San Francisco, moves slowly. And rarely in a straight line. And Jesus, does it break down a lot. But in the not-too-distant future, the city’s frustrated commuters will finally be served by a light-rail fleet designed to withstand the rigors of San Francisco’s punishing terrain. It’s been a long time coming, and it won’t be cheap: The Siemens railcars being built in Sacramento and scheduled to begin rolling into town in October 2016 cost the city a neat $1.2 billion.

Will they be worth it? Only time will tell. But they can’t be worse than the current stock. For decades, Muni patrons have been subjected to trams that not only malfunction with alarming frequency but also contribute to the breakdown of San Francisco’s transit infrastructure. And all the problems begin with faulty design. On the ’70s–era Boeing trains, the doors didn’t stand up to the pounding of angry patrons. The pneumatic stairs, soaked in human waste on a regular basis, malfunctioned constantly. The dead-man switch, intended to prevent incapacitated drivers from wrecking their train, could be hacked with a rubber band. The intake cooling valves were located beneath the cars, where they sucked up street filth and sand, causing overheating and epic wear on components.

Phased out in the ’90s, the Boeings were replaced by Italian-built Breda trains that are, in many ways, even worse. A Breda car weighs 79,580 pounds, more than a BART car—which is ironic for a “light-rail vehicle.” Too long, too wide, and too heavy, the Bredas thrash rails, damage pavement, rattle trackadjacent houses, and consume vast quantities of power to get moving and keep moving. Due to the bulk of the cars and their faulty couplers, it’s impossible to run long trains during peak transit hours. That shortcoming—along with the trains’ inability to stay in service—has wreaked havoc on morning and evening commutes for decades.

John Haley, director of transit for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, says that Muni took stock of the Breda cars—their astounding weight, their ill-placed intake valves, their bum couplers—and decided against a replay. “If we could turn the clock back,” he says, “what would we do differently? What lessons were learned in the Breda procurement?”

Haley eagerly points out that while the double doors on a Breda car are 456-pound behemoths with a weak constitution, the doors on the new Siemens trains will weigh a svelte 80 pounds and have only 20 moving parts. All told, the Siemens trains will be a couple of tons lighter, and their couplers, for a change, will work.

The new trains also promise to upend a dubious ethos that has held sway at Muni for decades—that the solution to poor design is more design. Take the Breda air-conditioning system: While earlier trains got by with one or two motorized fans per car and windows that opened, circulating cool air on a Breda train requires 28 fans and two three-phase compressors on every single car. The fans operate on irregular voltages, making them prohibitively expensive—which is unfortunate, because they fail often. When a fan seizes up, the surviving fans are forced by the thermostat to work that much harder, until they too seize.

The notion of one ill-designed component causing a domino-like series of failures that ends in system-wide paralysis sounds like chaos theory. But that’s what has long been happening both within individual trains and down the length of San Francisco’s public-transit lines. Happily, the new cars are reportedly free of the design quirks of yore. Siemens boasts that its trains will roll 59,000 miles between unscheduled breakdowns. Right now, Muni is thrilled to hit 5,000.

For us, this portends far fewer trips ruined by a disabled train. Perhaps even more important, Muni may, finally, manage to keep enough trains out of the maintenance shop and rolling through the city to meet demand. The era of breakdown-prone trains being swarmed by commuters—leading, inevitably, to more breakdowns and a downward spiral—may be on the wane. If so, the answer to the reoccurring San Francisco question “Do you know what happened on Muni today?” will, at last, be “Nothing.”

It used to be that trudging upstairs was an end unto itself. Not anymore. Now ascending the steps is a carefully choreographed event. “The stair is teleporting you, transforming your location,” says Frank Merritt of Jensen Architects grandly. Today’s floating feats of design—whether perched on a single spine, encased in glass, or twisting through space—meld principles of art and engineering. “The way the joinery is assembled is really like a fine piece of jewelry,” says Beverly Choe of Bach Architecture, describing the steel and oak stairway, at right, that she recently installed in a Noe Valley home. The boxy old staircase is a relic. “It’s not enough to be vertical,” says Collin Burry, principal at Gensler. “It has to be beautiful, too.”

Playing it safe is overrated. This season, the best furniture—like the voluptuous tom dixon wingback or david adjaye’s art deco–inspired double Zero loveseat—stands out in a sea of taupe. Whether it’s a cayenne-red chaise or an yves Klein blue sofa, the hue is the thing. By LaurEn murrow

What is this stuff, and where can you buy it? See page 108 for a product key and store information.

At the Panora,mic, the first high-rise micro-unit building to be approved by the San Francisco Planning Commission, apartments range from a teensy 254 square feet to 540 square feet. Though the 160-unit mid-Market building was designed with nearby Twitter employees in mind (“We would have rented it out to garden-variety hipsters,” says Panoramic Interests developer Patrick Kennedy), as of August, the building was flooded with a different sort of tenant: students from California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. After struggling to secure student housing near its Civic Center campus, the conservatory leased the top five floors of the Panoramic for the next five years; California College of the Arts has taken the five floors below for 10 years.

The sleek, soundproofed units feature polished concrete floors, built-in furniture—a table, beds, and a window seat—and a kitchen equipped with a microwave, a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, and a fridge. Lounges have walnut booths and steel benches, and the lobby includes a reading room, a stainless steel bike-repair station (“for the hipsters with fixies to show off their carbon fiber,” quips Kennedy), and a grand piano. The rooftop yoga deck is dotted with sculptures and succulents. Conservatory students will pay $5,950 per semester for a shared double—just under $12,000 per year. “If you were in the middle of Ohio and someone described a room of this size as being affordable, you’d be laughed out of the city,” says Conservatory president David Stull. “But this is San Francisco. Here, the staff wants to move in.”

Architect Emily Huang of Huang Iboshi Architecture owns one, as do interior designer Susan Greenleaf, Joshua Aidlin of Aidlin Darling Design, architect Mark Macy of Macy Architecture, and Denise Cherry of O+A. Sought-after tech-office designer Lauren Geremia (Instagram, Dropbox, Lumosity) nabbed an all-black version—an aesthetic compromise with her recliner-craving boyfriend—while architect Gary Nichols opted for all-white. The same silhouette beckoned to Dzine furniture buyer Austin Forbord from his childhood living room and cradled developer Patrick Kennedy throughout law school. Architect Kurt Melander received his as a gift from a satisfied client 15 years ago. Architect Owen Kennerly reads to his three-year-old daughter in a vintage version inherited from his stepfather. Fuseproject founder Yves Béhar describes it in almost worshipful terms: “It’s both sensual and ergonomically perfect.”

The coveted item invariably gracing the homes of the Bay Area’s top design minds is none other than the Eames lounge and ottoman, the leather-and-plywood masterpiece created in 1956 by design duo Charles and Ray Eames. Yes, it’s just a chair. But it’s also much more than that: a mark of taste, a password to an exclusive club, and a rite of passage for design nerds.

“It’s one of those chairs you learn about in design school, and you just start planning for the day you’ll be able to get it,” says Brandon Clark, 31-year-old co-owner of the Outer Richmond vintage furniture store Mixed Nuts, who has been eyeing a particular ’50s-era model—for sale by a retired industrial designer in Sausalito—for over a year.

“What we frequently encounter in the design community is someone who says, ‘This chair was the first thing I bought with my first real paycheck,’” says Eames Demetrios, director of Eames Office and grandson of Charles and Ray. “That’s a big responsibility. If someone is going to mark a milestone in their life with a piece of furniture, it had better be great.” (Demetrios’s lounge belonged to his grandmother Ray.)

Even as tastes have changed and wingbacks have supplanted traditional lounges, the Eames remains a must-have. Though the chair is still in production, new models are considered inferior to timeworn originals. “People pay for the patina now,” says mid-century dealer Steve Cabella. “The ones that go for the most money are fucked up so beautifully, you could never reproduce that loving wear.” A brand-new Eames lounge starts at $4,859, while an original rosewood model can run to $14,000.

As for those who haven’t yet acquired their lounge, the dream burns brighter still. “I wish I had one,” sighs Hans Baldauf of BCV Architects. “I aspire to, one day,” breathes architect Mark Jensen. Clark is still preparing for his; in the meantime, he calls the Sausalito seller every six months to check on what he’s convinced is his future lounge. “I feel like I have to be established first,” he says solemnly, “to give it the environment it deserves.” L.m.

Jessica Hische draws letters for a living. But hers isn’t any old font shop: By her hand, script can be slinky and sexy; blocky and bossy; or celebratory, a little tipsy. Hische has composed designs for newspapers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post), magazines (the Atlantic, Forbes, O, California Sunday), corporations (Starbucks, Nike, Google), and cultural influencers like Dave Eggers, Wes Anderson, and Beck—even POTUS himself. But despite being among the most in-demand letterers of her generation, the 31-year-old remains democratic in her work. “I used to do book covers for romance novels,” she says, grinning. “I’d be lettering above a painting of two people seducing each other, and I’d be like, ‘This is the absolute best job.’”

Hand lettering—transforming text into art—has undergone a renaissance in the past decade, due in part to Hische’s evangelizing. The self-described “super-extrovert” with a Mon-roe piercing, side-swept bangs, and a “Type” tattoo swirling across her inner arm has become a rock star of the craft, hosting workshops, blogging feverishly, and presenting at up to 20 web and illustrator conferences a year. “When I first started out, I didn’t even know lettering was something you could do for a living,” she says. “The more jobs I got, the more I was like, ‘I need to tell everyone about this.’”

Hische got her start working for legendary New York graphic designer Louise Fili by day and freelancing by night from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. She introduced her own website, the Daily Drop Cap, for which she drew one new letter of the alphabet in an original type style every day. Eventually she completed the alphabet a dozen times, garnering a devoted online following in the process. “I had amassed this enormous portfolio by the time I was 24,” she recalls.

In 2011, Hische launched her own business, Title Case, in a Mission studio that she shares with illustrator Erik Marinovich. Her strategy, she says, is to be an “inbetweener,” working simultaneously on tech company branding, gift and greeting cards, book covers for writers like Eggers and Elizabeth Gilbert, and typefaces for filmmakers. (She named her Moonrise Kingdom font Tilda, after the inimitable Swinton.) “It’s as fun for me to do a cheesy ad campaign as some sexy, highbrow editorial job,” she says.

With last month’s release of her first book, In Progress, and the arrival of her first child, Ramona, five months ago, this year has been a particular boon for Hische. In an expensive, startup-driven city, successful freelance artists of her ilk are becoming a rarity. “Tech companies are offering 200 grand a year and kick-ass benefits and unlimited fuck-around time— that can be hard to resist to run a small studio and struggle to pay your $3,000 rent,” she says. “But what I’ve found is that everyone is so hungry for people who are not in tech.” For once, the companies are clamoring not for coders, but for an independent artist wielding a pencil and a sketchbook. L.m.

As Bay Area housing grows ever scarcer, the traditional backyard is becoming a disposable luxury. Space-crunched homeowners are converting their unused sheds and garages into tiny, Airbnb-friendly lodgings. “The trend is in making your guesthouse as small as possible,” says architect Julie Dowling of Dowling Studios. “It’s less complicated, requires less maintenance, and lends this interesting, jewel box quality.” Eric Haesloop of Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects recently demolished the detached garage behind his own 1908 Berkeley home to build this sun-flooded 432-square-foot cottage, which includes a compact bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and living room. “We’re used to doing bigger residential projects,” he says, “but there’s a certain art to going small.” Ian Read of Medium Plenty went even smaller, replacing an Oakland client’s shed with a 370-square-foot guesthouse, complete with a Murphy bed and sliding glass doors that open to a backyard deck. With the benefit of generous windows and ample skylights, such makeshift studios feel surprisingly spacious. Though Haesloop currently rents his cottage to Berkeley postgrads, “My rent-strapped kids will be eyeing it in a year or two,” he predicts.

Banish memories of grandmotherly florals: Wall coverings are not what they used to be. This is, in part, because the cost of printing high-quality wallpaper has plummeted. “Suddenly, there‘s all this totally crazy, really awesome graphic wallpaper,” says Jessica Weigley, principal at Síol Studios. “It’s the modern version of the accent wall.” Animal prints, opulent blooms, and poppy patterns are jazzing up bathrooms, bedrooms, and dining rooms across the Bay Area. And it doesn't stop there. When it comes to decking the walls, Bay Area homeowners are going big. Some hire street artists to create personalized murals; others enlist designers to digitally print blown-up photographs onto surfaces like the Cow Hollow casework shown here; still others call in decorative painters like Caroline Lizarraga, who created the contrasting chain-link effect at right. And in their new full-length book, Tile Makes the Room, Heath Ceramics co-owners Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic advocate tiling unusual spaces, from living room walls to bedroom ceilings. “There’s been a huge shift toward art that feels custom-made and hyper-specific,” says O+A principal Denise Cherry. “Nothing off-the-shelf.”

In the aughts, every new bar, office, and restaurant that opened looked like the candlelit hull of a sea-battered ship. “Reclaimed wood had become incredibly tired and dated,” recalls Gensler principal Collin Burry. These days, the beleaguered, beloved material is being employed more discerningly: on the ceiling. “We use wood sparingly now, more purposefully,” says architect Eric Haesloop of Turnbull Griffin Haesloop. “It‘s become more of a precious resource.” The overhead trick emphasizes the room’s depth and volume and can be achieved in a range of materials, from ebony-stained cedar to inexpensive flooring. “A wood ceiling creates this warm, cozy enclosure,” says architect Julie Dowling of Dowling Studios. "It‘s way more inviting than stark white.”

Playgrounds are becoming smarter, smoother, and less treacherous—but are they more fun? By Joe Eskenazi

From 1959 to 1993, Larsen Park, an otherwise nondescript scrap of greenery along 19th Avenue, was the resting place of not one but three decommissioned military jets. The lethal hardware, originally designed to rain hellfire upon America’s enemies, had been nonchalantly dumped in the park, where kiddies happily clambered over the lead-contaminated, asbestos- flecked play structures.

That was then. Now, in lieu of a real jet, San Francisco is erecting a jet-shaped climbing apparatus in Larsen Park: a roughly $232,000, ADAcompatible structure complete with a rope-climbing area resembling jet wash—part of a $1.2 million rehabilitation of this 6.5-acre plot abutting one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

San Francisco’s playgrounds, like everything else in the city these days, are booming. The city has spent $44.6 million on 38 of them just since 2007—$1.5 million at Glen Canyon Park; $2.7 million at Dolores Park; $2.9 million at Aptos Playground near Stonestown Galleria; and $4.4 million on the Koret Children’s Quarter playground in Golden Gate Park. The parks’ faux fortresses are a far cry from the structures that most of us grew up climbing on (and falling from). City playgrounds of old were built with arsenic-treated wood and metal that reached skillet temperatures in the summer. Their layout was such that if you tumbled from the top of a jungle gym, you’d smack every crossbar on your way down, ending with a splat on unforgiving wood chips or even asphalt. It wasn’t until the 1980s that injury reports from the Consumer Product Safety Commission led to any sort of safety guidelines at all.

How far have things come? Well, you won’t find rusting monkey bars over a blacktop anymore. In fact, says Dawn Kamalanathan, director of the Recreation & Parks Department’s capital and planning division, pretty soon you won’t even find sand. Sand, says Craig Faitel, a state-certified playground safety inspector, is not safe for falls of over three or four feet. The preferred ground surface today is poured-in-place rubber or, Faitel’s preference, engineered wood fiber, which is softer and spongier than sand or wood chips, yet firm enough to roll a wheelchair over. And, thanks to use zones that mandate adequate space between merry-go-rounds and seesaws, a kid won’t ricochet from one structure to the next as she plummets toward that wood fiber.

Today’s San Francisco playgrounds, Kamalanathan says, attempt to square the circle of imparting the “experience of risk” without being actually risky. Whereas our parents enjoyed tree swings, our children enjoy well-engineered tree swing–like substitutes. Kids of yore ran through the woods and climbed up boulders. Now, Kamalanathan notes, such gambols can be re-created via a “wide range of design choices” that allow children to scale artificial-rock faces and play hideand- seek in man-made (but naturalistic) grottoes.

While the slide (pun intended) toward sanitized structures may seem like a historic reversal, it is, in fact, part of a long evolution in playground design that began over a century ago. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, playgrounds were seen as a key weapon in the fight against crime and immorality, especially in San Francisco’s working-class immigrant enclaves (tonier sections of town fought against incursions of noisy children). “I respectfully suggest that a portion of every park in the city, or as many of them as may be necessary, be appropriated for recreation grounds for…children,” declared city health officer Dr. J.L. Meares in his 1885–86 annual report. In the first recorded call for playgrounds in San Francisco, Meares wrote, “Destroy as many trees and as much shrubbery as may be necessary for this purpose…. We would have fewer ‘hoodlums,’ and many children would be saved from the disgrace and ruin of a commitment to our so-called reformatory institutions.” It took San Francisco a generation to finally heed Meares’s call: North Beach Playground, which opened in 1911, was the city’s first. In the fashion of the day, its desultory swing sets and other play structures were shunted to one side to make room for unadorned fields.

In the decades that followed, playgrounds continued to serve purposes beyond simply providing children with grounds upon which to play. In the early 20th century, bonds to fund their construction were overwhelmingly popular in the city’s poor and blue-collar districts, where the prospect of building them was enticing to manual laborers. And today, millions of dollars earmarked for playgrounds are used as leverage by politicos to float much larger bond measures that primarily fund less cute ends.

Still, by and large, San Franciscans pass these bonds in the name of the children— even as fewer and fewer children live among us. In 1885, Meares begged for playgrounds on behalf of the “70,079 minors of the city between the ages of 5 to 18.” Despite a tripling of San Francisco’s overall population since Meares’s plea, roughly the same number of children were living here in 2013.

So why do we go on building ever-more-elaborate playgrounds, even as the number of children in the city keeps declining? Several reasons, including, of course, that politicians are rarely faulted for overspending on a glorious playground. But, slightly less cynically, also because they are tangible improvements to the city’s landscape. San Francisco directs torrents of money at intractable problems—homelessness, scant affordable housing, soaring property crime. These and other vexing scenarios have cost the city billions and haven’t come close to being “solved.” Newer, better playgrounds won’t, on their own, solve the city’s unfriendliness to families. But they are something real that can be pointed to—and climbed on—to signify an effort to make life more livable for those families. And, in the end, they provide something that most urban infrastructure doesn’t: unvarnished childhood joy.

Swings in the kitchen, rope ladders in the bedroom, chalkboard paint in the bathroom, and Astroturf on the deck: Precious, these spaces are not. The defiant counterpoint to minimalist, stark modernism, these family homes are made for roughhousing. Síol Studios transformed a Pacific Heights client’s unused closet into a six-foot-square play nook shaped by curvy ramps, lined with LED lights, and covered in nubby fabric. “It was totally designed for kids,” says principal Jessica Weigley, “but it ended up being a place where adults go to unwind—or make out.” Ross Levy of Levy Art and Architecture added an open-air passageway of artificial turf between the bedrooms of two soccer-playing sisters in Noe Valley. Susan Greenleaf of Greenleaf Design Studio linked bunk beds in her Pac Heights home with a treehouseevoking rope ladder. And a slew of local architects, including Levy, Casper Mork-Ulnes of Mork Ulnes Architects, and Jonathan Feldman of Feldman Architecture, have installed free-flying wooden swings in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms from Dogpatch to the Haight.

SANF - October 2015

The New Rules Of Design

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