A Few Renderings Of The Buildings Rising Up In South Mission Bay

Nice designs but it’s lookin a bit too much like a large corporate campus. I hope there’s enough retail along third so that it develops a neighborhood feel as opposed to a corporate cluster.

Uhh….Some of it is a corporate campus! e.g. the Old Navy building, for starters.
Once all this development finishes I wonder where all the stoners will go. I’m sure they won’t be allowed to keep smoking up in their cars along Terry Francois next to Mission Rock. And I am curious how long it will take for Jelly’s and Mission rock to become wine bars, sushi joints or dog clothing stores.

Was anyone around in the early 90’s when Catellus was claiming they were going to build America’s finest “european” neighborhood in Mission Bay? Streets without cars, with retail, cafes, parks, canals, galleries, performance spaces. I have mentioned before that they sent designers on a world tour to study new neighborhoods that “got it right”. Trains, trams and electric bus lines would go down parkways, while other streets had the density of old Barcelona or Amsterdam. The architecture was sort of “new urbanist”, and mostly modern, but not commercial. And THIS is what we get? This is an edge city office campus like you would see out in the East Bay or Orange County, not an urban neighborhood.
This also is another reminder to me that people who live in the city now, are not really city people at all. They don’t want to live in dense neighborhoods with a mixture of different economic groups, shops and architecture. They want buildings that could be in anywhere U.S.A., and are “tired” of older structures without parking and airconditioning. They want stucco, security cameras in the garage, doormen, and a place to walk the dog, but no real street life. I am going to predict that SOMA and Mission Bay are going to be more Los Angeles than Los Angeles, while L.A. goes the other direction with more unique neighborhoods that change organically like Silver Lake and Venice. Abbot Kinney Blvd. in only 8 years has become what San Francisco was. No chain stores,but REAL lofts, interesting galleries, rich & poor, new and old, all mixed together in a neighborhood where people walk and enjoy a world without corporate campus sterility .

Golly, Morgan! Do you think adding some bay windows might help? Good luck shoe horning real lofts and cultured city street life anywhere half million dollar base unit prices dictate that lawyers and high level account managers are among the most likely residents.

…or Emeryville (though the renderings of the building at the top show a subtlety and tactility in the surfaces lacking in the lower corporate campus looking stuff.

Should be no surprise that plans are fluid until the first shovel full of dirt is turned over by a politician with a gold spray painted shovel in hand. If you don’t like what you see, wait 100 years until what is there is torn down and redone as something else.

I love modern architecture – I really do. But it’s more appropriate (generally) for commercial use, not residential. It’s too “cold”. Anyone walk near the Beacon, Glassworks, Berry Street developments and feel any kind of neighborhood warmth? Millenium tower can be all glass b/c it has context with downtown…but a true residential neighborhood cannot be made of only glass, steel and un-ornamented concrete or prefab crap. Some homes need to be home-y…not all loft-y. Capisce?

Hey, that 1500 Owens Street (Parcel 5) is pretty nice, as is the place along the waterfront. For the latter, the scale and the ratio of window to wall really work for me, as do the eaves created by the horizontal planes. The fenestration on the former is sweet.