200 6th Street Design

Located within the potential Sixth Street Lodginghouse District, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and Mercy Housing requested San Francisco’s Architectural Review Committee review and comment on their proposed project at 200 6th Street today.

The proposed work includes demolition of the existing four-story building and the new construction of a new nine-story residential building (dedicated to affordable housing) with ground floor retail and parking.

As designed by Kennerly Architecture & Planning, the new building will feature a total of fifty-six units composed of seventeen three-bedroom flats, twentytwo two-bedroom flats, and seventeen one-bedroom flats.

The new building will have two distinct masses: a larger nine-story mass at the corner of 6th and Howard Streets and a smaller eight-story mass along 6th Street. Overall, the design will be contemporary in style and will feature brick veneer cladding, dark patinated metal siding and exposed structural concrete on the exterior. In addition, the project will feature painted or dark anodized aluminum windows, steel and glass entry marquis, and concrete and translucent glass balcony rails.

The existing four-story building is better known and recognizable to most as the Hugo Hotel, canvas for Defenestration.

Hugo Hotel in San Francisco (www.SocketSite.com)
South of Market Resource Survey Says…Five New Historic Districts [SocketSite]
Review and Comment: 200-214 6th Street [sfplanning.org]
Eminent Domain Suit Semi-Successfully Snatches Hugo Hotel [SocketSite]
Hugo Hotel’s Flying Furniture Update, No Word On The Graffiti [SocketSite]
And Now Back To The Hugo Hotel (And Eminent Domain On Sixth) [SocketSite]

18 thoughts on “Defending The Design For 200 6th Street And Adieu To Defenestration”
  1. The sooner we get rid of that piece of junk with the stupid junk hanging out the windows, the better off the neighborhood will be.
    Pretty cool new project. I like it.

  2. Sad to see such a cool building go, but change happens and good that there will be an occupied building on this corner instead of a slum.

  3. I’ll miss Defenestration too but it did indeed go into overtime for an ephemeral piece of installation art and I’m grateful for that.
    I guess they finally upzoned that site. It had previously been limited to 50′ which seems way too low for this part of town.
    Ditch the brick veneer. This isn’t Chicago.

  4. oh dear, how is is existing building at all a “cool” building? I never cease to be amazed at the (false) nostalgia for a lot of our older buildings that are really classified as urban blight. Yes, some are worth saving, this one is not.

  5. Modernqueen it wasn’t the building that was cool, it was the art project. That was very cool when it first appeared. Yes its way overdue for demolition, but you if you were around when it first when up, you have to admit to a chuckle every time you drove down Sixth at that time. Or maybe you’re not the chuckling kind.

  6. Att: Planning Commission- “Marquis” is a French noble title. “Marquee” is the thing that shelters an entrance (in this case steel and glass.)
    Almost, but not quite as bad, as “Port Kosher” instead of “porte-cochère”

  7. Love it.
    The eyesore in place should have been removed years ago.
    That said, the endless amassing of social services in ONE location is bad planning and relentless. We need to distribute programs throughout the neighborhoods for all ‘hoods to carry some of the balance of various ss needs.
    Twitter and Zendesk notwithstanding, we’re still scratching our heads at the challenge of Mid-market.
    Just look around.

  8. Somebody previously said it was a cool building. Huh?
    Yea, I was here in SF when the “art” project went up. Thought it was dumb then. Still do.
    Start the bulldozers now.

  9. This town has become a $7 billion dollar per year luxury non profit cesspool. This building and its financing into perpetuity depends on a massive influx of good money thrown after bad.
    I am sick of it.

  10. to Stucco-sux, This is a great project that will improve this neighborhood in this wonderful diverse City, where so many people from all over the world want to live. Except, maybe you. You should definitely move back to Orange County, where your life will be better, without luxury nonprofit cesspool.

  11. Cool project. How it will change this dangerous area into a safe one, is beyond me.
    There was another murder just this morning – right up the street. Like any business that can afford to, we are leaving 6th street. More accurately, we can’t afford to stay. Even with city support, all sorts of extra security and participation in every neighborhood organization there is, the crime and filth is too much.
    The area got much better after Care Not Cash came in. (No money, fewer drug dealers.) Now there’s another element of the desperate and deranged plus a slew of young people who are angry and target anyone who has something they want. Women are the marks for a good deal of this crap.
    Unless there’s some serious crime sweeps in this edge of SOMA and in the Tenderloin, these areas can be built up with pretty buildings that will stay empty or end up as part of the problem.

  12. I like this proposal, but the rendering seems strangely like an HDR image of a more conventional rendering.

  13. ^^^ That’s funny because traditional drawing and painting is sort of the “original HDR”. Artists naturally render the dynamic range as they see it. Straight photography often clips off one or the other end of the brightness range due to the limitations of film and digital sensors.

  14. I love that building, but I can’t be sad to see it go because I’m just glad it lasted as long as it did. Nothing is forever and Defenestration had a good run.

  15. Been living a few blocks from that place for nearly fifteen years. Attended the opening of the art exhibit. Stopped liking it years ago. It insults people of modest means who live on Sixth Street by saying to them, “this represents your neighborhood, this is who you are.” Arguably “Defenestration” has been expressing gentrifiers’ and speculators’ snobbery all these years in two ways: by visually equating poverty with decay and disorder, and by denying usefulness to a potentially useful building while people who lack homes camp on its sidewalks.

  16. I think you’re reading far too much into Defenestration Martha. It could just as easily be interpreted as a statement on the excesses of the wealthy, wasting their possessions. Which is what the owner of this property did for the last two decades.
    Like your blog!

  17. Thanks, Milkshake.
    It’s the way the property has been warehoused that sets me off on the rest of the rant. I mean, even high-priced development is better than just locking off a property from beneficial use for twenty years.

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