The Transbay Joint Powers Authority Board announced that the Foster + Partners / Heller-Manus Architects team has been dropped from the Transbay Terminal design competition. The four design/development teams left standing:
1. Richard Rogers Partnership with Forest City Enterprises and MacFarlane Partners
2. Santiago Calatrava with Boston Properties
3. Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects with Hines
4. Skidmore Owings & Merrill with Rockefeller Group Development Corp.
Drawings and proposals are due in July (remember, it’s tips@socketsite.com), and the winning team will be named on August 23.
∙ Transbay Terminal (And Tower) Design Competition: The Teams [SocketSite]
∙ San Francisco Transbay Terminal: Design Competition Update [SocketSite]
∙ We’re Thinking Gehry (No, Not Geary) [SocketSite]
Hey, that picture is of the HSBC building in Hong Kong. Er, nothing else to say…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC_Hong_Kong_headquarters_building
I’ll miss Foster, but not Heller-Manus. The latter is responsible for much of the mediocre, high profile architecture in SF for the last 15 years. Unfortunately, the firm mastered the politics of development, but not the art of architecture.
(Hotel Vitale arguably gets honors for the worst use of the best site in SF in recent years)
I’m very surprised the team was dropped for apparently dropping the ball on requirements. Heller -Manus is all about the process.
What’s wrong with Hotel Vitale? I personally like the look of the building. Also, I think that the building they show of Hong Kong looks very stylish. Perhaps the other contenders will be presenting designs that are a notch above this.
I concur with the comment about Hotel Vitale. It’s an absolute loser. Press-on brick…heavy, dark and depressing architecture befitting a ground floor Walgreens or Quiznos. A crying shame.
There is a rumor that the entire building above can be disassembled in components and put onto a container ship to be moved in case there was a major crisis in China. The other cool thing is that the banking customer’s escalators have bad feng shui and the escalators for the bank employees have good feng shui.
I wouldn’t doubt Heller-Manus (and unfortunately Foster) is being punished for the Vitale. From a Chronicle piece a couple of years back:
“The Vitale already has had more barbs aimed at it than any local building in at least a decade, with everyone from newspaper columnists to Supervisor Aaron Peskin chiming in. But the problem isn’t that it is uniquely bad. Rather, it embodies the architectural philosophy of too many new buildings in San Francisco and the Bay Area: Don’t make waves. But when business-as-usual meets a one-of-a-kind location, the result shows how barren this approach can be.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/21/BAGGGCCIUM1.DTL
Then again, at the time of construction Foster’s HSBC building above was rumored to have been the most expensive building ever constructed. Perhaps that spooked our cash strapped city…
That HSBC building is one of my favorite towers of all time. The skeleton is unusually strong in order to withstand hurricane force winds, and the habitable parts are suspended from the structure like clothes hangars. It could be great to see a Foster building take center stage there, but it seems like they lagged while other entries generated real fanfare. Even the greatest only have so much time! By the way, some of the best views of the HSBC building are to be had from boat tours of the Hong Kong harbor–highly recommended!
Richard Rogers is a top bloke. I met him in a pub on the King’s Road once. I did my “oh my god, you’re RR” introduction, and was surprised when he invited me to his table for a drink. We chatted for about two hours. He even left to pick something up, then came back.