Mission Rock Design Cohort Leadership
Location
San Francisco, CA
Status:
Design Cohort Leadership Phase completed 2018
Client
Mission Rock Partners (San Francisco Giants and Tishman Speyer)
Type
Planning
Size
28 acres
How can we lead multiple design teams to create a place that’s greater than the sum of its parts?
In 2010, the Port of San Francisco and the San Francisco Giants baseball organization entered a partnership to transform a 28-acre site on San Francisco Bay from a parking lot into one of the city’s largest mixed-use waterfront developments. After more than a decade of community outreach and planning, the Giants and the Port—in partnership with Tishman Speyer—engaged Studio Gang to help deliver the first phase of Mission Rock.
In-person design workshops and regular calls with the entire Design Cohort facilitated co-discovery, constructive criticism, and technical knowledge sharing among the teams.
In-person design workshops and regular calls with the entire Design Cohort facilitated co-discovery, constructive criticism, and technical knowledge sharing among the teams.
In-person design workshops and regular calls with the entire Design Cohort facilitated co-discovery, constructive criticism, and technical knowledge sharing among the teams.
The Studio worked closely with the client group to organize Mission Rock’s first four buildings around a common intersection with a strong connection to the adjacent park and waterfront — as shown in this collaborative site model.
As part of that engagement, Studio Gang developed and led a strategic design process to ensure that the transition from master plan to architecture not only was seamless and collaborative, but also resulted in a holistic and distinctive new neighborhood from day one.
The Studio guided a Design Cohort of four independent architecture firms—each assigned to design a separate parcel at Mission Rock—through a collective design process that leveraged the combined talents of the full group. The overall aim was to ensure that the neighborhood’s buildings, shared systems, and public realm were not designed in isolation but in relationship to one another.
Through facilitating design workshops, technical exchanges, group discussions, site tours, and more, Studio Gang led the multiple design firms to take mutual responsibility for the success of the development as a whole—while also allowing the architecture and urban design work of each individual firm to benefit from the knowledge, creativity, and critical insights of their peers and client group.
With this uniquely collaborative approach, phase one of Mission Rock has now produced a welcoming neighborhood that harmoniously blends the different perspectives of the Design Cohort. The process serves as a model for future phases of work at Mission Rock, as well as additional large-scale developments that seek to make a potent contribution to the life of their cities.
The Design Cohort developed five architectural and urban scale goals to define the whole of Mission Rock, as well as specific design strategies (“commitments”) to achieve each goal. The latter ranged from integrating “micro-activations” into every ground floor, to designing the tops of the towers as a related family.
Responding to the “rock” of Mission Rock, the cohort was drawn to a shared mineral palette that resonates with San Francisco’s material history and develops a patina over time.
Today, Mission Rock’s public spaces are activated well into the evening — a testament to the Design Cohort’s focus on co-designing a vibrant public realm in close collaboration with landscape architect SCAPE.
Design Cohort
Design Cohort Project Team
Adamson Associates Architects, Architect of Record
Magnusson Klemencic Associates, Structure
Heintges, Façade Consultant
WordSearch, Place Strategy Consultant
Runyon Group, Retail and Real Estate Consultant
