 Welcome everybody to the Mechanics Institute. My name is Ralph Luhn, I'm the Director here and it's just such a special night. We're so pleased to be partnering with AIA on this program. I wanted to welcome you all to the Mechanics Institute. It's one of San Francisco's oldest cultural institutions. It's been here since 1854. Some say the DNA of San Francisco can be traced to this very place. And if you want to be part of the Mechanics Institute, I'd encourage you to become a member. It's a great community. We have events like this often. We have this great library. The Chronicle wrote a piece about us not too long ago talking about us as one of the best shared workspaces in the city. So please come, become a member. It's very easy at our website, milibrary.org. And with that, I'll pass it over to Laura Shepard, our Director of Events. Welcome. Thank you, Ralph. And welcome, everyone. I'm very pleased to welcome you to our program on the future of the city, which concludes our Transforming SF series. And we're very pleased to welcome award-winning architects Craig Hartman and Marcia Matum and our San Francisco Chronicle urban design columnist, John King. And also we are very pleased, as Ralph mentioned, that we're partnering with AISF. And I'm very pleased to welcome Jennifer Jones, who's the executive director and also our moderator for tonight. And also please watch out for the future announcements about AIA's architecture in the city festival. We will be participating with an MI treasure hunt. So please watch for that, because we're looking forward to all of our engagements with that great month-long festival in September. So a little bit about our moderator. Jennifer Jones serves as the Executive Director of AIA San Francisco, one of the largest AIA chapters in the nation, representing 2,200 plus members in San Francisco and Marin counties. As Executive Director, her core responsibilities relate to the long-term organizational stability and success of AIA SF, which includes establishing and maintaining internal and external partnerships, guiding strategic planning, formulating policy, and leading administration in the interest of architect and allied professional membership. She has a Master of Science in Public Service and Nonprofit Management from DePaul University, and was a 2006 DePaul Public Service Fellow. Jen has been honored for her accomplishments in association management by PR Newswire, Association of Media and Publishing, and the International Association of Business Communicators and Association Trends. So I'm very pleased to welcome Jennifer Jones and our esteemed panel. Well, thank you so much, Laura. Oh, I'm sorry, ahead of time, till they figure out the reverb. But as Laura said, I'm Jennifer Jones. I'm the Executive Director of AIA San Francisco, and it is always a pleasure to be here at the Mechanics Institute and to partner with our good friends here. So I just wanna say thank you to Laura and Ralph for having us here, and tell you a little bit about AIA San Francisco. We're pleased to count Craig and Marcia as some of our fellow members of AIA San Francisco, and they are among our almost 2,300 members that we have in San Francisco and Marin counties, and our members are responsible for a lot of the transformations that you see in the city today, whether it be single-family homes, multifamily housing, affordable housing, or some of the large buildings that you see going in, and I think that we'll hear a little bit about the Trans Bay Terminal this evening as well as a number of other master plan projects. So everything from the small to the very large our members have a part in. So it's very good to have everyone here today, and of course John as the critic of the architecture in San Francisco and the public realm. So we're really pleased to be a part of this and always pleased to partner with programs at the Mechanics Institute. So I just wanted to give you all a little introduction into our panelists here today. So first up, we have Craig Hartman down on the end. Craig is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and serves as Skidmore Owings and Merrill Senior Consulting Design Partner based in the firm San Francisco office. His work with SOM in the United States, Europe and Asia, while extremely broad in typology, ranging from entire urban districts to singular works of commercial, civic and cultural architecture, consistently adheres to a rigorous modern vocabulary that acknowledges issues of place involving climate, physical and cultural landscape as well as historic precedent. We're so pleased to have Craig here today. Thank you. John King to my immediate left is the San Francisco's Chronicles Urban Design Critic. He joined the paper in 1992 and has been in his current post since 2001. His writing on architecture and urban design has been honored by groups, including the California Preservation Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists, the California Chapters of the American Institute of Architects and the American Planning Association. John was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002 and 2003. Marcia Madeham in the middle is also a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and is a principal at Letty Madeham Stacey Architects in San Francisco. For over 30 years, Marcia has focused her career on community, cultural and socially responsible projects that promote sustainable design. Her work has included the creation of new buildings, the rehabilitation of historic buildings and the adaptive reuse of existing structures. Marcia's work has received over 90 regional, national and international design awards, including this year, LMS being recognized with the AIA's National Firm of the Year Award, which is the highest honor bestowed by the Institute. So thank you panelists for being here today. Let's give a preemptive round of applause. And then also hello to everybody watching on Facebook Live. Be sure to address, hello. Be sure to address any questions and we'll also be featuring questions that we get from the audience as well as online today. So Craig, if you'll kick us off a little bit and tell us about your perspective as it relates to the city of San Francisco and how it's transforming. Sure, thank you, Jen. And so while Seth and Jetta think are queuing up the slides, go ahead guys. I'll just remark that first of all, a lot of privilege is and pleasure to be in this great room, in this great San Francisco institution with all of you who care about the city and about architecture and the urban realm. And especially be here with my two friends and people whom I greatly respect, Marcia and John, and so I'm happy to be here. Let me just quickly say that I'd like to touch kind of briefly in a very broad way about our city, the public realm that defines it and it put it a little bit in context of what's happening maybe in the world and some of our challenges right now that we've seen in the 21st century. And then share with you, I think maybe four projects that are examples of things that myself and we've been working on recently that will give some ideas perhaps about what we might expect about some of our work coming forward in the city. So no walls, no barriers is kind of an aspiration that the values of the city might pervade the public realm. And of course, Louis Mumford, the great American historian, sociologist and critic was referring not just to the skyline and architecture of great cities but more importantly about the social and creative good that comes from bringing people together in compact, livable places. Cities are truly the most intelligent form of human, a pattern of human settlement. And so if we can advance this, planetary scientists tell us that we're at a new geological age called the Anthropocene in which we as human beings are shaping the destiny of the planet as opposed to the other way around. And so this is a brand new, never before experienced condition and we're not doing so well. We are consuming more resources and emitting more carbon dioxide than our current biosphere can support. But personally I'm optimistic. I think that both human creativity, intelligence and frankly the fact that most of us now live in cities is a very, very hopeful thing because cities are arguably one of the most important keys in addressing this climate crisis that we have globally. Most of, in fact, two thirds of the carbon emissions that we generate are through the buildings, our buildings, where we build them, how we build them, how we operate them and where we place them and how we move between them. And so compact, livable, walkable cities are enormously important in addressing this issue. Now this is a snapshot of a day in the Bay Area. This is the daily commute. And currently there are almost a quarter of a million cars that go across the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge emitting about five million pounds of CO2. So these, of course, are fast moving vehicles, big mass, single, 90% of them single occupancy drivers. So when we bring that kind of thing into the city, the streets become, rather than a connective tissue, they become disrupted. And so a question is, in fact, this is actually an interesting model. This is something we did a while back looking at, if you took away the buildings of San Francisco and simply extruded the traffic volume, you'd find, ironically, that the three major streets here, Market, Mission and Embarcadero, flat streets that are really conducive to bicycling and pedestrians in social life are, in fact, also the streets that carry the most traffic. And so you can see that, I mean, this is almost a physical direct embodiment of what that is. It's basically a wall. Now it's interesting though, I think, happily, that over the last 50 years, through city policy, Market Street, the character of it has really changed, I think, for the better. Still has a long way to go, of course, but now 85,000 people a day ride bicycles to work. Now we could also maybe take some lessons from what happened from the character of Market Street 100 years ago, and probably many of you have seen this, but it's really interesting to me, at least, to see what a street could be in this city. I mean, this is chaotic, of course, but it's also how much more socially alive can you be? And it's a shared street. Now, I suppose there were some traffic fatalities, but not very many, but it was a very, very lively and interesting place to experience. And I think, perhaps there's a lesson there, that if we think about the shared road and about the nature of an urban street, that maybe these high velocity, very weighty vehicles are not the way to go. And I'm, at least, very encouraged by the kind of creativity we see in this city, and the kind of, no kinds of urban personal mobility that we see in San Francisco and other streets, other cities. So if we think about what the street is and think about the public realm, it really is about the street. And so how can we make architecture that really reinforces and builds on these qualities? So this was really on my mind, and my colleagues, when thinking about the design of Treasure Island. This, as you know, is a transformation of the Navy base here and into two neighborhoods for about 20,000 people. And the idea is represented in this street drawing, which is that we make a place that is very lively at the ground level, and the streets are very narrow, they're compact, and the buildings themselves are support, this idea of life of the street. And in the landscape, it's not the kind of landscape that we see in the traditional, in the city, but rather a kind of landscape that supports biodiversity. And we think that bringing that together with a dense environment is a very, very positive thing for the quality of life. And of course, Treasure Island is in the middle of San Francisco Bay, and that has its own issues, including that we have on a daily basis, enormous weather pattern that sweeps across the bay. So we use that as actually the way to generate and shape these neighborhoods. So the street grids respond to the wind, to the fog, and to admit as much sun as possible into the public realm. And that literally shaped the nature of this neighborhood. If I can try to advance this, here we go. And this is the result. Two thirds of the island remain open space, one third becomes developed. The public space, open space, ranges from unstructured to highly structured art parks, to small-scaled urban neighborhoods that weave their way and thread their way through the neighborhoods themselves. So it's a kind of a place we think that will represent a new kind of urban life, and one of which tall buildings support that life, in which they're placed very specifically around transit, in this case the ferry, and the buses, and around the urban parks that help support density at those key locations and help to mitigate wind and fog. So in the city of San Francisco, there is just enormous amount of transformation happening and sorry this thing isn't advancing. Could you please advance the next slide? Thank you. There we go. So enormous flaws of the city are being reconceived and in a very, very thoughtful way, I believe, through community meetings and through work with the city and many, many constituents. So the question is, what will remain after this enormous episodic development? And I'm not sure where to point this exactly. There we go. But the form, the shapers of the urban form are legislative, what the sculpted heights might be, shadows and wind. And one of the most significant of course is right in the center of South of Market, which is the Transbay neighborhood and it's centered on the Transbay Tower. Sorry Seth, can you advance that, please? There we go. And a neighborhood that will be mostly residential, very compact and using new height to bring a level of density and social life to this place. And I get, please advance, thank you, one more. So this is, you can see that there are a lot of buildings being built, proposed and built. So one of the first is this one and the red dot is the one that I've just finished. It's 350 Mission Street and it is a links the Transbay terminal with Market Street. Seth, would you please advance? Thank you, one more. And the building itself is very simple. It's an office building, but with new technologies. A lot of us have really thin slabs, tall ceilings, 11 foot ceilings in a four to four height that would normally be nine feet with a skin that is as kind of richness to the city skyline while bringing enormous amounts of daylight to the interior. But the important thing about this, go ahead, next, is the connectivity to the street. Go ahead, next. The idea of porosity permeates the concept of this building. We've lifted the building 50 feet up in the air to create a greater urban room. Go ahead, is lead platinum for environmental performance. And the idea is to completely erase during days like today the boundary between the public and the private realm to bring people into this building in a way that they can linger as opposed to pass through. Go ahead, next. And to make an urban topography within this space that allows different vantage points for people to look at what's going on in this amphitheater stair on the left will bring you up to what will eventually be a restaurant and bar. So we extended this to the artwork and the art is a very large digital wall, 90 feet by 50. And it changes, of course, all the time. It displays not only art, but also is designed to display the environmental performance of the building to bring environmental consciousness forward to the public and also is designed to also scrape the internet for tweets. And theoretically, you can talk to the screen. Now I haven't seen people do that yet because I think they try to be careful about what's said, but go ahead to the next. Go ahead, next, please. Okay, there we, oops. Go ahead to the next, please. Okay, so anyway, what you just missed, I guess, was a video showing the new development that is happening at the corner of South Bend S, Market Street and Mission Street. This is a new overlay that's developed in which tall buildings will be created this intersection, taking advantage of the transit density that we have on Market Street especially, as well as Venice. In this case, we are creating both the new tall residential buildings will be built. In this case, this is the Goodwill site, we are creating a residential tower, but integrating this with a new office building for the city, which will combine these three tenants, the Department of Public Works, Department of Building Inspection, and city planning into one space. And in doing that, the idea is to knit this together in a block that is not a single monolithic block, rather with streets, with alleyways, pedestrian streets, that lays their way through this. And the red shows the intentions here of making this a very active place. It's connected back to Munich on Market Street on both 11th and Venice, and also to Mission Street. Sorry, Seth, go ahead, please. And bringing the civic intentions of this building forward to Venice with a gallery that shows information about the city, go ahead, Seth. Next, and making this forum a place that is very energized and lively, supported by retail and by cafes. So as you're coming into the building to get your permits, the idea is that you'll come to this space that is making, getting your building permit a joyous experience, if that's possible. But the idea equally is to extend that horizontal forum up vertically into a vertical forum that becomes the kind of the center life of this city office building. And go ahead, Seth. So this is a weave of spaces between the two major office blocks linking them. There are three storage spaces that have stairs connecting them, conference rooms, amenities around them, encouraging city workers to come together to collaborate, to not work in silos. And to make these spaces, they're inside, outside spaces, and to make us aware of what's going on in the city. And within an architecture that's simple, it's clear, it's rational, transparent, and luminous, just like we want to see city government. That's the idea at least. And so this building is about to happen. And with this is the residential tower. Now the residential tower, of course, is in contrast. It's very sculpted. It is masonry and stone. And it reflects, it's sycopeia facade reflects the kind of domestic life within as opposed to the city. Go ahead, Seth, to the next. And this, of course, is a very, very windy place. And so wind mitigation, it took us to literally two national labs working with us on the wind to find ways to suppress or to make the wind not an issue around the site. And the main device are two trees and this giant wind canopy, this porous canopy that wraps around from Vanessa Street, which you see here, around to Mission Street, which is where the new residential entry will be. So this will be, we think, an important addition to the public realm and hopefully a very happy part of people's lives as you go forward with your, trying to build our dreams for our houses and our decks. So this, I guess this is our last project, is Musconi Center. And, of course, this site occupies the very heart of what the new San Francisco is going to be. And for a long time, many of you who've been around for a long time would remember this was kind of a moonscape after the regrettable clearance of the SROs and the housing that occurred in that part of the city. And you probably also know that this is an outline of the site, that Musconi Center goes under, you're going to Gardens to the North, and under the Children's Playground to the South. So we are expanding that connection, opening up, digging through Howard Street to make this a contiguous connection and then building an enormous new ballroom and meeting spaces as part of this. But the real focus has been, for us at least, has been certainly on making a great convention center, but go ahead, Seth, to the next. But also, one that is environmentally very, very gentle. So this will also be a lead platinum building. We are literally harvesting more water from the foundations than we can use in the building. So we're also using the water, we'll be using the water here to irrigate your morning gardens, the Children's Garden, and the remainder surplus to clean city streets. So it's a, I think, incredible use of found water, we'll say. And in the past, that water was shipped out to the plants and shipped into the bay. And it'll have the largest solar ray in the city. So the architecture again, the idea of lightness and monosity, but also to bring the life of the building to the street, the interior life of the building to the street, and likewise, the street to the building. So to make it really participate in the life of the city, and not a closed black box that many commission centers are, of course. This is the corner of Third Street, looking back toward SF Moment and down Howard Street there to the right. So the vertical conveyance will be very, very clear here. The idea is to make this, to bring the buildings forward, both the north and south, to get rid of those surface parking lots that have been there, and to make this a much more urban experience for the users and, oops, sorry, we're going all the way here. Here we go. And to eradicate, you may remember this, the exit ways, the bunkers are all on there, and especially on the right side there, you can see we're a pedestrian or prohibited, a friendly sign, that there's a big service ramp there that took up half the blocks. We're able to get rid of that. And so Howard Street will become now a very urban kind of place that encourages pedestrian movement. There'll be two bridges that span across it. One, a very lightweight bridge you see on the left, and then a land bridge we call it on the right. The lightweight bridge will be suspended, very, very delicate, very light, and will have within it a work by Leo Villarreal, the artist who did, of course, the bay lights. And this is something you'll be able to see from the street, but also, of course, the important part of the, go ahead Seth, to the, go ahead Seth to the next, to the, you can go ahead and change the slide if you are back there. Hello. Here we go. So it'll be a very important part of the commissioning experience as well. The other bridge is a land bridge. It will connect directly from your boarding gardens, directly to the children's left playground. You may remember there was a bridge, but it kind of inexplicably landed above the playground, so you had to take an elevator down or you could take a big spiral ramp. So we really connect that directly across, make it wide enough to make it with landscape, and make art a part of the experience. Under it will be a new visitor center open to the public. Go ahead Seth, to the next. You can go ahead, there we go. And art, go ahead, keep going. Or be part of this. This is the view along Third Street, the open plaza where there used to be a service ramp. And very importantly, cutting through the commissioner itself, so that a new paseo will connect from Third Street all the way through to the children's garden. So as a member of the public, you can do this even while conventions are going on. And this paseo is a place that we think is a great opportunity for active art, to bring again amenities that would support that. And then to find your way up through this paseo continues past the children's playground. There'll be also new work with that. When we get rid of that, the current bridge there next to the carousel, we're now able to open this up for new pedestrian plaza that will connect around directly to Howard Street and really open up and make the carousel more visible and more contained. So just in closing, the idea is again to make the street now really part of the experience. The architecture simply supports the street. And the notion is that if we can think about our streets as places that really are the public realm and the streets are what makes living in cities really great. And that if we can think about that and how we use architecture to make that happen, the streets are truly the voice of our city. So I'll leave it at that. And Marsha, pass it over to you. Wow. I'm sorry about this thing. So. Well, I feel like we should just open our discussion now. I know, right? I think I know what that is. Thanks. No, thanks Craig for sharing all that. It's, you know, your firm has had such an impact on our city and beyond around the world. So it's great to share this discussion with you tonight. And I feel like I'm Bambi and Godzilla here, but I'm going to do more of a SWAT team approach. And just, I just brought a few slides to share a little bit about our approach to architecture and the impact that we've tried to have on our community. I am a native San Francisco and really love the city very much. And so our, in our small practice, oh thank you. Great. Thanks for taking that up. In our, in our much smaller practice, we're usually around 20 or 25 people. We've really focused, focused our work on mission-driven design. And Richard, Stacy, Bill, Eddie and I have been practicing together since 1983. And about 15 years ago, we decided we really wanted to focus on projects that we felt could make a contribution. So we have been focusing on mission-driven work with non-profit organizations, educational clients, supportive in non-profit housing. Those are the three areas that we really have focused our practice on. And we think that social and environmental sustainability go hand in hand. And it's really interlinked with issues of equity. And that as this slide says, everyone does deserve good design. And we think that that's really an important message, particularly these days of divisiveness. And we really do believe in the power of architecture to have a positive impact on our community. And that's what we've been working on over the last few years. This is, there we go. So our city is faced with a lot of challenges. Homelessness is a challenge, this series in the Chronicle again this week, checking in a year later. There has been some progress, but there's certainly a lot more we need to do. And we've been working on creating supportive housing and affordable housing within the city and also permanent housing for the chronically homeless. We also think that the work we've been doing in the educational arena is also equally important. Creating environments that really are helping to transform the way we teach and are targeting the learners of the 21st century. Trying new models that go away from the factory where you enter in as a freshman and get burped out at the end as a senior. But really focusing on schools as daily, in a daily environment for teaching lessons about stewardship, interdisciplinary thinking and learning, and hopefully innovation that are gonna solve our world's problems. So oops, now it's too jumpy, there we go. So in addition, we do a lot of community projects too with non-profit organizations. And we really do believe that design excellence is the integration of all these things. Of course, beauty, making great places for people, but also integration of smart building strategies and technologies, dealing with good stewardship of our resources and social equity in addition to environmental equity. And that we do believe is designed with purpose. So I think that one of the things that we try to keep in mind is that we all need to act locally. That's absolutely essential, particularly this year. It seems like acting locally is a good thing to do instead of thinking about what's happening federally. So I think that in our practice, we've really been trying to act locally with global aims and think about our work as case studies that can serve as models that have a rippling effect out to other communities. And one of the greatest challenges, as Craig really outlined in a big, bold way, is this issue of resiliency. And the challenges that we hear in San Francisco but all around the world are going to have in dealing with the changes ahead with climate change and also the repopulation of the world to urban centers. Anyway, it's a giant challenge, but we feel there's no more exciting time to be an architect because we really are trained to think creatively about these problems together in an interdisciplinary way. Okay, here we go. Oh shoot, come back. Wait, you just blew my order, there we go. So I think another part of our practice is designing for social equity and we really do believe that design is a social justice issue that everyone deserves an inspiring, healthy, and great place to live and work and be. And so that's something, another theme that runs through our work and I think does make for a great city. Here we go. One more. If you could advance it, that would be great, thank you. But we also feel that connecting to history is very important. Here in San Francisco, we do have a really wonderful, rich history and an incredible built environment, but we feel that we need to connect with history in a respectful way, but also looking towards the future, not to be captured by that history, but to really acknowledge it, respect it, and move forward and integrate it into what we need to do for the future. So now, I'm just gonna run through a few projects that just describe a little bit about what we're doing. And this is just a quick tour just because some of these projects you probably know and you might just be interested in seeing them through the lens of what we were trying to accomplish. So I think this idea of connecting to history and finding a contemporary way to be respectful but still forward-looking, this is a project at Seventh and Townsend. And again, bridging these two things together and of course we were really happy to receive an award from San Francisco Architectural Heritage for this as well as acknowledgement from the city. So I think these two things in a city as vibrant as San Francisco can live side by side, hand in hand, in great harmony. So don't be afraid of the contemporary but respect the history. Next. And I think we need to look at our resources in new ways. We've had the great opportunity of working in the transformation of the Presidio from an army base to a national park. And also we've been working since the year 2000 at Fort Mason. And so I think looking at these resources within our own city we have such a unique set of buildings and places here in San Francisco and finding ways to transform them and think about them in new ways for a new life. So Pier 2, which we did the renovation of two years back and put the largest photovoltaic solar panel system in the national park. That was a great victory on my part. A lot of argument with Washington and Sacramento on that on this historic landmark. But it's producing a huge amount of energy and the Park Service is very proud of this and embraces this approach now. But we're just completing the new Graduate Center for the San Francisco Art Institute inside Pier 2 which is going to bring 24-7 life to Fort Mason and provide a great link to the historic campus of the San Francisco Art Institute which is such an amazing place with the Diego Rivera mural that Craig is actually working on the renovation of that. So there's gonna be this linkage now between the history, great history, both architecturally and in terms of art at the Russian Hill Campus linked now to Fort Mason. So it's just gonna be a great new addition to our city and we need to think about those opportunities around. Here we go, next. And in the Presidio, this is an old Army barracks again looking at those historic buildings and abandoned buildings in this case when the Army left. And now there are 450 young people learning about interdisciplinary thought and education and resources, new uses of resources and stewardship. So it's a great use in transformation of a historic project. California College of the Arts which was a project we did a long time ago but it's an SOM, I put it in because it's an SOM, Greyhound Bus Maintenance Facility from 1951, a beautiful building that nearly collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake. The slab on grade became a suspended slab, ground just dropped. So again, thinking in a creative way about how to reuse that industrial building, it's now been in use for, I don't know, 12 years, something like that. And was transformative for the California College of the Arts and makes this great interdisciplinary art space in this dynamic industrial structure. It's all heated by the sun. So again, so many interesting things are layered onto this project and it's been very successful and they're now continuing to grow with the Genie Gang Campus in the future which is terrific. So we also need to be pushing the envelope on technology and innovation. This is a project we just finished at UC Berkeley with the engineering department and inside this building which is actually three levels with two basements, there's a lot packed in it. It was an old volleyball court. So in this tiny little footprint are the future innovations that's gonna save the world. So it is a part of the engineering department but it's open 24 seven to any student on the UC campus. There's, I can't remember how many thousands of people went through here last semester in I think 40 different clubs. So one day I was walking in here and two young women were working on a robotic hand for vets returning for more and it was brightly colored and beautiful and doing all these amazing things. So creating innovation spaces that are resource efficient, generating electricity, healthy environments and really wonderful places for people to invent our future. Next. In the Ed Roberts campus which I showed an image of earlier, this is at the Ashby Bart Station. Again, it's a great way to interconnect transit and social issues and making a new civic face for the city of Berkeley and really combining so many great agendas on one site. And it's been a great success for these nine organizations dealing with disability rights and independent living but it's also become a great place for the city of Berkeley. They do statewide nationwide conferences there. The symphony performs their operas. They do weddings which is a great revenue source. So anyway, unexpected ways that our built environment can be a positive contribution to the city. Here's our North Beach library that we worked on together. So again, a small footprint of a building that has actually provided a lot of great resources to this incredibly dense neighborhood on the backside, expanding public open outdoor space and revitalizing a neighborhood park. And I'll just end with a couple, oops, that was too fast, a couple housing projects. Again, I think housing is one of the paramount challenges in San Francisco, we all know about that. But this was one of the first new purpose built housing for the chronically homeless in San Francisco under Mayor Gavin Newsom. This is one of the first model projects where support services are actually located directly on site. So one of the breaks in the system is when an individual who is put into either shelter or temporary housing then has to navigate all the way across town to see a social worker, go somewhere else to get their medication, maybe go somewhere else for job training. And so that system doesn't work effectively. And so this was the idea of putting all those support services on site. And it's been very successful and has been used as a model throughout the country and the city has built more of this type of project next. We have to provide housing for all kinds of the diverse range of population in San Francisco and also in the Bay Area. This is a project in Oakland that has a number of units that are set aside for at-risk youth in the former foster in the coming out of foster care. So I think we need to look at the whole range of housing both the chronically homeless, foster youth and workforce housing and affordable housing need to provide housing for everyone. Another project in Oakland is actually senior housing for at-risk seniors with HIV AIDS. That population is now aging. And so there's a whole new set of issues that's coming to the forefront with this. And this is also a lead platinum project but the healthy interior environment just supports, it's good for everyone but particularly for this population. And here in San Francisco at Mission Bay we just finished relocating Family House a nonprofit organization that provides temporary housing for families whose children are being treated at UCSF Children's Hospital. So when the Children's Hospital moved from Parnassus down to Mission Bay, they needed to move. And they had been in a couple small apartment buildings so this was a very large project for them and we helped them navigate building this first of the kind project right next to the new hospital. And it provides housing for 80 different families who come for treatment ranging from a week. Some families have been there 18 months to two years and they help relocate siblings into the San Francisco public school system, give them grocery cards, provide transit. Anyway, it's a great San Francisco model of how we try to take care of people. And next I think affordable housing for first time homeowners here in Mission Bay. We did this project a number of years ago but I think again dealing with the issue on the full range of housing types and economic diversity. And this is one that we just finished in the Trans Bay area. So nestled in amongst all the new incredible office buildings like Craig is working on and the million dollar condos. The city, the first building you see as you come off the Bay Bridge is housing for the formerly homeless. Again with onsite support services, it's just completely integrated into the city. It's again a lead platinum equivalent building but it's just seamlessly integrated into the new retail street of Folsom with a fancy chocolate shop and a great Vietnamese restaurant. So it's just right in there and just part of the neighborhood. And that's it. So I think I would look forward to talking with everybody about these three issues that I identify in terms of resilience and respecting history and creating better cities. As someone who writes about architecture and urban design and planning at the San Francisco Chronicle, I've been looking a lot at the Salesforce Tower for the last year or so as everybody has. And recently I wrote a piece on it just kind of as it really hit the point where I was hearing just from coworkers and friends and the family and things like that who are all kind of what is this thing? So I have done several pieces in the last six, eight months but this piece is about three months ago. And I got two particular responses that I wanted to mention to you. One was from a man who lives in Oakland and I was writing about Salesforce Tower but also shortly before that, I'd been writing about the market in Van Ness area where Craig's project, the city office building would be this planning area called the hub where there'd be several towers of housing and offices and things. So he was talking about, have you bothered to look at the effect all these mega buildings are having on San Francisco's lovely hills? Pretty soon you won't be able to see them because of all the wretched construction going on. Every day I come from Oakland going to Half Moon Bay where my greenhouse is located and I have to go buy these nightmarish buildings. Another was from a woman who lives on Bernal Heights and she sent me a very passionate email or two about the Salesforce Tower and the notion that the city height limit of 550 feet had been waived in the Trans Bay area. And then she also wrote about in respect to the market in Van Ness, now you're telling me they're going to put towers at Van Ness and market and start destroying our view of the bridge and the hills. The other hills, the only other hills, what do these people want? And she accompanied it with a photograph from her house in Bernal Heights where off in the distance you saw the towers now up around market in Van Ness and her saying was there are going to be even more towers in there. Flip side of that is I moderated a panel, or not moderated, did a Q and A a year or so ago with the woman who founded the Yes in My Backyard Group which pushes for housing development at all price levels in the city and Berkeley and Lafayette and elsewhere in the Bay area. And we were doing the interview and at one point she talked about how she had moved out here from Philadelphia and she and other friends who had moved out are people she'd gotten to know who were out here looking for jobs, the area is booming, no place to live and I said something like well what about the hills and all and she just kind of scoffed and then she turned to the crowd dramatically and said how many of you moved here because of you were attracted to the hills and the bay and the views? And this was a real estate crowd and probably three quarters of the people raised their hands. And so the reason I wanted to mention these and just talk real shortly to kind of pick up on this and then we'll go into the discussion is I think there is a generation gap right now in San Francisco between people of a certain age and I kind of fit into that. I grew up in Walnut Creek who defined the city by kind of the precept of the old city and the city of neighborhoods and the city of hills and essentially you had those buildings downtown and you'd made the deal with the devil because downtown paid for Muni or whatever but essentially San Francisco was neighborhoods, villages, it's the city of the outer sunset, it's North Beach, it's that kind of low slung European type of nature that attracted a lot of people here in the 60s and 70s. The flip side is a population, a younger population and again this is very much generalization that is drawn to loving the hills, loving the views, loving the park and things like that but it's more driven to the idea of this urban excitement density change innovation. And as one person I talked to said, it's like the issue isn't how tall the building is, the issue is does it have a great ground floor with a nice open space and good bike parking. And I do not say that to be facetious but it's a real interesting tension that I think gets to some of the tensions we have in San Francisco right now which is that this is a city and I think both of these presentations touched on this, there is a remarkable amount of really good architecture and urban design going on. There are attractive and distinctive new towers, there are attractive and distinctive examples of historic preservation. There are lots of infill housing projects be they affordable or market rate that provide needed housing but also strengthen the idea of the strengths, the street, strengthen the idea of retail, of pedestrian accessibility that you're not just walking by blank walls or the podium of a parking garage like you still get in many other cities in the US but you're walking through a neighborhood that's being filled in. And you get this, the kind of creativity we've seen with the plazas that are folded into commercial projects with the parklets that replace a parking space or two with the efforts to just revive just kind of like odd swatches of pavement into neighborhood gathering places or plazas or parks. At the same time, there's a real tension here because the one view of San Francisco that it's a wonderful desirable place people wanna live in runs into the problem that San Francisco is a beautiful desirable place that people wanna live in and certainly since 2012, there's been this pressure of the desirability of the place of the economic engine really grinding against the notion that it's not just a city of people with disposable wealth and new money and things like that. And so there's a real tension here and again, I'm generalizing to break it down to a generation gap because you also get the political gap of kind of the self-righteous politics of San Francisco which is just kind of the very self-righteous posturing on things like no market rate housing should be allowed because that just drives market prices up versus the we need to build as much as we can because that'll bring prices down. But we're at a real interesting tension where how do you remake a city that itself is such a cherished and alive and vital city? You know, nobody talks about this as turning into Venice as was the case in the 60s or 70s. And so it's an interesting but a real challenging time to write about architecture and urban design because the more kind of abstract almost aesthetic issues like I love the rippled facade of 350 Mission Street or I really like several of the Letty Made in Stacey projects especially the one that's the senior housing for low income people at risk of AIDS in Oakland where you've got this really, how do you take a basic rectangular infill piece and do this layering and this grid to break things up runs into the what is the need for housing? What is the transportation crunch in the area? Last year I did a lot of stories on sea level rise and how that affects Bay Area planning and we've got assuming that 95% of the scientists in the world kind of know what they're talking about there are some very problematic challenges ahead and those are also urban planning issues and those are also architectural issues and they run into a lot of the San Francisco values of just kind of how this city and how this region defined itself. And so what's interesting to me and what I think will be good in the conversation that we have is that it's very easy in this city and in this region to kind of get overwhelmed by the pressures and ignore the quality of what is here. It's also very real that that quality is at risk. It's at risk from traffic congestion. It's at risk from high prices. It's at risk from the environment. But it's also at risk I think from the fact and this has always been the case in the Bay Area and more and more so because of the strains caused by the economic good times. A certain sense on everyone's side that I am the right side of the position that the only way to save the Bay is not to do anything except preserve what's there. And blocking a view is not just putting up a tower outside my window. It's changing the view outside my window. And it is the let's just get rid of these stupid height limits in these silly neighborhoods and just build housing everywhere. Because under that theory we should have 16 story buildings marching up Columbus Avenue and we should have 50 story buildings framing Golden Gate Park. I mean, there are a lot of absolute positions in this city where everyone has their own definition of utopia and everybody sees the perfect as the only pursuit and they all define perfection differently. So I just wanted in my very casual and quick comments with that figuring we'll get into things and also I enjoyed the slide shows on both of them because I saw things I hadn't seen. So that's always fun. Well, thank you John. And if you ever wanna see that struggle happen in person in front of you just go to a planning commission meeting on a Thursday and you could definitely see the struggle between the future of the city and those who are not necessarily happy with the changes that we'll have. So thank you all of you for your presentations and your thoughtful comments. And I just wanted to open it up to the three of you and start off with a conversation about what is going to have the most impact on the future of the Bay Area from your perspective? Is it the tech industry? Is it transportation? Is it infrastructure? You mentioned 85,000 bicycles are now going back and forth to work every day. But at the same time, there's now all of a sudden all of these rideshare cars on the road that are exactly almost offsetting that benefit and people coming in from out of town for the week and earning their money by driving people around town. So what do you think is going to be sort of our biggest issue of impact as we, let's say for the next 10 years? Okay, I'll say something. Yeah, I like, everybody's like Craig goes first. 10 years. So here's the thing. Without question, the thing is driving the Bay Area and San Francisco is the incredible innovation and entrepreneurialism that's happening. And as it comes out of research, it comes out of new forms of economy that's not been seen before in the world. And what we like or not, San Francisco is the hotbed for this. And almost any other city in the world would love to have the problems that we have. I'm serious. It's unbelievable. And cities are, throughout history, they're made, the city form is episodic. It happens through waves of opportunity and capital that kind of wash over the city. And there are examples like 1873, Chicago, the great fire, and then after that, the steel frame and the elevator changed that city. Of course, in New York with the Industrial Revolution in the 1890s and then eventually the 1916, the zoning that came out of that, San Francisco, of course, 1906. But right now, what was happening here is equivalent to that. And so it is a very disruptive time for people to live through it. It won't last forever, it just doesn't. But it will last for a while yet. And I think the critical thing to worry about or to think about is so when that great wave has come and it kind of goes back out again, so what's left here on the beach? What kind of urban form do we have? What kind of architecture should we have? And I personally think that the city is going in a really good direction. And yes, congestion is really horrible. And we have to, you mentioned transportation, Jennifer, and we're way behind on that. We're way behind on investment. I mean, it's just terrible how far behind we are. But assuming that's gonna catch up, assuming we have more people living downtown, not fewer so that people are walking to work and bicycling as opposed to driving across the bridge or up one-on-one, these things incrementally will help. So anyway, just to answer your question, without question is the economy is driving this. And it's incredible that innovation is happening. And the innovation that's being done here is literally world changing. And it's not just social technology, it's also biotechnology. Many, many things are coming together. And it's because of the great creative place this is. And so you can't kill that. And you can't make, you could make if you tried, but San Francisco is not one of the cities in Italy or somewhere that's sort of preserved. And there it is, and there we're doing change. So growth change is part of urban life and we should embrace it. So I certainly agree with that, but I think that in the next 10 years, the housing issue has just got to be figured out because otherwise we're gonna lose the vitality of our city having grown up here and watched a lot of waves of innovation and booms and busts over the years. I think what has always made San Francisco in particular a magnet for innovation and change is the diversity of the people that have come here. It's a place of freedom and innovation. And if we don't allow everyone to participate in that, then we lose potentially some of the great minds and great innovations. So I think that it's absolutely essential that, and we are trying to deal with this, but it's a really tough nut. And we lose young people all the time that just can't make it in this community and they move. And we can't have that happen because we'll lose the best and the brightest. And Boy Austin and other Detroit, they're just licking their chops like, come on over. We'll take your best and brightest and your companies and your tech innovations. And even Los Angeles now is, what do they call it, the tech south? There's some catchy slogan. Silicon beach, thank you. I was just in St. Louis this week and it was really interesting. I've never been there before. It's a thriving, its time was in the 1800s as a center. Designed, it was bigger than Chicago, 850,000 people. It's now down to 325. Their city hall is bigger than ours and it was like, hello in there. When I went to meet with the mayor this week. So they have a whole set of different problems and each city has a unique set of problems but they're desperate to, they have more buildings than they know what to do with. So we're joking about having an exchange. But I think that for San Francisco, housing and economic diversity and allowing for everyone to participate is really a big issue. I would agree with Marcia that housing is the, that's the key challenge of the next 10 years. And how do we produce housing? Do we produce housing? And that's just, I wanna make this really, really quick point. That's part of the tension right now is that this is such an innovative region as Craig said and there are all these ideas kicking around but they run up against a protective process that for lots of good reasons has evolved over the last 50 years or so to put up lots of roadblocks and lots of check marks to make sure that bad things don't happen. And there's a, right now you see such a desire to try and crack the housing nut and I don't just mean throw up big towers everywhere but figure out group housing configurations or ways to sneak in more modular housing or whatever or just kind of crack these small nuts and they run up against the requirement for plans and environmental studies and various processes that turn, so in this innovative area where urban life is changing at a quicker and quicker pace you have projects that just kind of get spread out more and more and more. And that's, you know, and last thing just physically assuming the economy doesn't shut down in the next year or two, the shoreline of San Francisco is going to be really redrawn between Treasure Island, what's going on down in the Hunters Point shipyard area, pier 70, you know, I think people in about five years or so, again if the economy is strong we'll just find themselves saying what on earth? What is all this stuff? You know, good or bad or both? Well, and you guys kind of opened it up for a little bit of a conversation on housing which we drew some questions from Facebook that some of the people who are interested in this particular session provided us some questions in advance so I'm going to go to one right now from Ismail Chamu. And the question is about development and all this urban development that's happening and how it may further impact low income communities and will new development help or harm? What are the consequences of the rapid gentrification and pushing out of marginalized groups in the Mission and Soma area, et cetera? And I guess that this can continue to, you know, those service providers, you know, are firemen's police officers, teachers, et cetera. And, you know, are you of the mind that more housing will make housing more affordable or that it will continue to escalate? I think, I'll start with Marcia on this one. Okay, again I'm, the city of San Francisco has a lot of plans and policy in place to address this issue and I don't begin to wanna present myself as knowing what they are, but in our practice, I think the efforts by the city to figure out how to do these different types of housing like first time home buyers at risk youth, you know, really working with the mission. I think we all, voters in San Francisco, we all passed that ballot measure this year to make sure that there was specific targeted funding to help deal with the gentrification and the mission. And we're actually working on one of those projects with a local developer there to make sure there are spaces for that, you know, incredible neighborhood and community to continue and to support the artists that have been there for a long time. So I think that we need to, the city needs to continue to develop this multi-prong approach. And I think the question is correct that we don't want to lose what has made San Francisco terrific. However, we need to be practical and realize that the pressures are so great that there will be change. That is the one constant in life. And so we just need to be doing it in a really innovative and thoughtful way. And it's tough because, I mean, the challenge of gentrification, which I did a series on the hills of San Francisco back in 2013, what seems like a long time ago. So I didn't have to deal with all this directly, but I kept hitting on it. But I found a piece on Alamo Square from the early 70s about people buying the houses on Alamo Square and starting to rehab them. Basically a very early example of gentrification. I think the word might even have been used, but at that time it was this very simple, here's this horrible blighted, torn down, drugged up, run down area. Someone's actually spending money on these abandoned urban buildings, and isn't that a great thing? But it's interesting, you know, so now since then we've seen all these voids get filled in and we've seen all this real disruption of families and everything, but it's tricky with development because you look at the infill housing now on Valencia Street, the five story corner buildings with the fancy condos above the fancy restaurants. Those didn't cause the gentrification, those developers came because of the gentrification. And so this is where it gets simplistic to say that well if you allow the housing it's gonna gentrify things. It's, the developers are looking to pick up on what's already there and that's why I do believe I'm enough of an optimist to think that things like Rincon Hill and the Trans Bay Area or Mission Bay to some extent can be a bit of a relief valve that you are creating lots of new market rate housing that's generating affordable housing. The Trans Bay Area is gonna be 35% affordable in all those new buildings there. And at the same time maybe that does pull a little bit of the pressure away from other areas. Yes, well in the end it's like gravity, there's a law of supply and demand and if you cannot build housing and if there's a big demand which there is, prices will never go down. And we are so far behind, for example Vancouver, Seattle have built thousands more units over the last 10 years than San Francisco, it's just, we're not even close. And it is absolutely a political, the political process that stops it. And it's the forces of, it's the question about gentrification, about the change of city. People wanna slow this down and that's fine but the consequence of that is really high prices. And so we have to, that issue has to somehow be resolved. Yeah, both from the home owner and just from a renter perspective, it just escalates from both perspectives. What kinds of models, we were talking a little bit about European cities and the feel of San Francisco. What models can we look to in other cities when we're visioning San Francisco's future? And are there any cautionary tales from other cities that we should learn by example? You have a favorite? Let me think about that. Okay. San Francisco has a lot of good models to draw on itself. I mean, like the work of LMS, we have really good affordable housing that's been done serving a variety of needs that reinforces the fabric of the neighborhoods around it. Like the sixth and Howard project or the project on Folsom Street at the foot of Renko Hill. I mean, there are a lot of good models here. And to give planners credit and to give voters credit and to give citizens credit, there is a concern about the overall physical form of the city. We will not have the kind of thousand foot super skinny Russian trillionaire condo buildings that have popped up in New York the last few years that just kind of well, if you pack together enough transfer development rights, sure you can just go to the heavens. I mean, that is, does not happen here. So I think one of the, there's been a lot of talk about sea level rise and the impact on San Francisco. We are, we have another big issue to deal with and it's coming quick. Yeah. We're getting to that one, that question. Oh, did I jump the gun? Well, I think it's interesting to look, there's been a lot of presentations with cities in the Netherlands, for example, that have been dealing with this issue for a long time. So I think that's a really good place to look. I think our waterfront, although it's been transformed in the last 10 years, think about it. Well, probably a lot of you didn't live here before the freeway came down, but I mean, it's a, okay, there are shaking heads. So, you know, that was a game changer for us and we were able to reclaim our waterfront. And so looking to cities like Barcelona that had an equally amazing transformation of their waterfront, maybe 15, 20 years ago. I mean, I think these are great models to look at and, but I do think we need to really roll up our sleeves and get serious about what we're gonna do as a city about our incredibly fragile coastline because the impact on that is gonna be huge. And, you know, infrastructure. We need to, I was just at a meeting with the National AIA this last few days and we were talking, spending a lot of time talking about the definition of infrastructure and that we really need to think very broadly about that. It's not just asphalt and potholes and bridges, but, you know, for every city is gonna have resiliency issues that are really gonna be challenging. And, you know, we all need to work together to come up with solutions and make the proper long-term investments. That's just what we're gonna need to do. And so we need to get that message to Washington that infrastructure also includes schools and libraries and, you know, smart thinking about resiliency. Yeah. Yeah, infrastructure is vertical and in addition to being horizontal. Or sub-grade. Yeah. Yeah. Greg, anything to add to that one? No, I think, back again to the question about models. So, I mean, it's interesting, probably many people here read the Spur magazine that comes out once a month or so and they publish, I think, a really interesting and insightful set of commentary about the city and how our city compares to others like Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, Boston, several. And they're very, very thoughtful pieces. And all these cities, of course, are very different and have different kind of problems. And we thought, we look, I just mentioned, to Vancouver and Seattle that have addressed their housing problem in a very different way and seem to be successful in at least keeping housing stable. And San Francisco has simply taken a different tact, which is, again, a political construct. But I think there are also, in many ways, San Francisco is a model for other cities. And the things that John was talking about earlier, the parklets, the idea of a sort of a temporary urbanism that where to get around the problems of approvals for long-term massive investments of cost to make new public spaces, about finding ways to reuse, sort of disuse public spaces or the two parking spaces that may be not used in front of a grocery store. The work that Doug Burnham is doing, I think is really interesting about, again, you can see it over near Octavia. And I think these are really interesting models that are coming from this city. So we're not exactly laggers here. I think our city planning department also, despite the kind of inertia about getting things approved, that there's some very, very enlightened policies about the nature of public space, privately-owned publicly accessible open spaces, the nature of ground floor of our buildings, the city, I think it's very a pre-enlightened city in that regard. Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, and all three of you have touched a little bit on issues of resilience. And San Francisco has been a really strong leader in this area in terms of having, being selected as one of the first 100 resilient cities by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013. We were the first city to hire a chief resiliency officer in 2014. And so now, based on the success of the Rebuild by Design competition in New York that was launched post Hurricane Sandy, there's a Rebuild by Design Bay Area Challenge that's issued an open call for interdisciplinary teams to proactively address the city's chronic stresses and acute shocks associated with resilience. The regions. The region's shock. Yes, oh yes, oh yes, of course. But resilience goes beyond sea level rise. It also discusses issues of economic challenges. It includes things like fire. And so it really is those shocks and those ongoing stresses. So the ongoing stresses being things like infrastructure and it's sort of wearing out and those shocks are of course, you know, things like seismic activity and seismic shocks. And there is a question, and Craig, I'm gonna have you start this off, related to, this comes from Rick Hopman from earlier on Facebook, who asks how the Treasure Island Master Plan might be impacted by sea level rise. I wonder how the three of you feel our future in the Bay Area might be impacted by these shocks and stresses and how, as designers, as residents, that we can prepare for these particular issues. So I'd say Treasure Island is ironically a much easier problem than our seawall and our urban edge where San Francisco meets the coastal edge. It's easier because, well, first of all, just simply the elevation of Treasure Island compared to the elevation of the Arcadero is actually higher. So much of San Francisco, if nothing were done, would flood before Treasure Island. But the reason it is actually an easier problem to address is that Treasure Island has a very large setback around the perimeter so that nothing is built right up against the edge. And so that allows a very nice situation where incrementally over the years, as we have more king tides with sea level rise and storms, that as seawall gets higher and these become more acute, simply more free board can be added around the perimeter of the island. And so eventually, second and fourth will be much better than first because you'll have to look over this thing. But that'll be maybe next century. But the point is that this can be done incrementally and it can be done in a way that's financed by the ongoing development of the island. San Francisco is a much more challenging problem. I think the port's about to start on a project to strengthen the seawall itself. But the bigger question is, beyond strengthening the seawall, is how do you deal with a rising tide and rising water with historic structures that are attached to a certain elevation to the Arcadero? And eventually there's gonna be a real crisis of policy about how to deal with those historic structures. Can we keep them or not? What is the price we're willing to pay to keep them? And how does that affect our relationship with the coastal line? So it's gonna be a very, very interesting challenge. And hopefully the research resilience by design program will focus at least some efforts on that question. That to me is a really significant one. Oh, great. Marcia, go ahead. Well, I think I began, in the last question, to get into this topic. But I think the edge of the bay is the obvious candidate. We're being asked what we're doing about resiliency. We're in the process of designing the Commonwealth Club right on the Arcadero. And there was discussion about that. But what you do on your building is only as good as what your neighbors do. So it really does have to be a comprehensive approach that the city is gonna have to steer and come up with solutions. But I do think that in terms of resiliency, I think San Francisco has spent a lot of time thinking about earthquake resiliency, but we certainly have a lot more to do on that with regards to that. And I think that making long-term investments in our buildings and thinking about how we build them for the long term is really important. So that's another part of resiliency here in San Francisco that I think is essential. And we need to be thinking about every aspect, every plane of the city. I know the city has come up with a better roof program, much like they have a better streets program. And so I think that that's another opportunity. We need to look at the resources that are around us and think about how they can be more productive, useful, enjoyable. So urban gardening has been talked about, photovoltaics on all the roof, stormwater, collection and management, all these things that are achievable and doable that will all add up to a more resilient city. That's a primary point. Yeah, you're good. All right, so we do have some questions from Facebook. And then we're also going to open things up to the audience in just a second. So someone from Facebook would like to know how do you remake a city that's already cherished and vital? Doesn't it make sense to add a very high percentage of the needed density elsewhere in and around the Bay Area, not just on San Francisco? Can you speak a little bit to what's happening in and around the Bay Area? Yeah, that's a really fair comment except that I live in Berkeley and believe me, Berkeley thinks it's precious enough. And you look at the Lafayette, I grew up in the Contra Costa County. You go through the tunnel and you're in Lafayette after Rinda and the poor city of Lafayette is getting sued simultaneously by affordable housing activists in the Yimbis who are saying you're not allowing enough housing and it's being sued by residents who are saying you're allowing too much housing and it's too big. I mean, the fact is every city in the Bay Area with a few laudable exceptions thinks that it is being put to a unique strain. And so it's a tough... We really do need a regional solution and a thoughtful regional policy, but it's tough because this is also an era and a region where insularity is seen as a civic right. It's interesting that, you know, we have like a hundred and more... Man, you live in Marin talking about it. Yeah. I live in the city. I'm an Oakland. I'm a little less... But it's true, we have... There are 101, I think, towns and cities around the Bay Area and every one of them has complete land policy rights in themselves. The state cannot direct a city or town what to do. So we have a real patchwork of policy around the Bay Area and some towns... I mean, I think it wasn't at Brisbane who wanted to build a big commercial development and they said, well, we don't need building housing. San Francisco can take care of that. And so it is a uniform issue around the Bay Area. It's not just San Francisco's problem, but there certainly are cities that have incrementally developed over the years and really, I think, done beautifully. And a lot of people don't like the tall, the new tall buildings in London, but if you put those aside for a moment, there are some really beautiful new interventions in that city that preserve the historic buildings while very clearly and straightforwardly making contemporary new buildings. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful city and they've allowed that kind of development to happen. So I think there are plenty of good models out there for how to do this. Yeah, He's Valley. He's Valley is a great model of a transformation, again, from the benefit of the Loma Prieta earthquake and taking down from the freeway. I think those comments are all really valid. John mentioned earlier the newfound real estate, like Mission Bay, that was all rail yards. It's so great to go down there now that it's filling in and there's an academic campus and the hospital and housing. You're right, in the next 10 years, Pier 70 and the Navy Yard and that part of town is, could take a lot of density. It's great weather. And I think that looking to those resources that have been underdeveloped, that are served by transit, is the way to go. There are enormous tracks of San Francisco being developed right now. I mean, Mission Bay is just an extraordinary thing. You may not like the buildings, but a lot of transformation in like 20 years. And the same is true around the Soma area, that around, well, you were born in gardens. I can remember when I first came to San Francisco 25 years ago that that was literally like a moonscape. Now there were some really bad things that had been done in San Francisco in the late part of the 20th century. Obviously clearing the Western Dition, the clearing of that area of all the single SROs that were around Fort Down, Mosconeas, Golden Gate. Those are some real travesties in the name of redevelopment. But now I think the reuse of some of this disused industrial land, Mission Bay is a great one, Hunter's Point, Candlestick. I think it's really amazing and positive what's going on. It's almost like you get transit to really work there. Exactly, yeah. Why don't we open it up for questions from the audience? I think that we have a microphone here, so if you can wait until the microphone gets to you. Go ahead and you can just. Two things I'm really curious about. One is, I don't know if I'm right, but I think Paris is requiring vegetation on facades and roofs and all new buildings. I didn't see any of that on your slides, and I'm wondering whether that's something we should consider or it's just pines, weaves in the sky. One of our projects did have a green roof, and it works. I saw that, yeah. Yeah, it works for stormwater management. So I think that San Francisco, I think, is going to see more and more of that as the technology is getting better. They're doing it really big time in many places in Europe. Yeah, and Chicago is too, in the same way. The green roof movement. And the other thing I'm curious about is, is there a conversation about what's going to happen in the sunset and Richmond area? This has all been about the northeast corner. There might be secret conversations, I don't know. There's been, the planning department, which has really seen creating housing as being a top priority, has looked at neighborhood rezoning just to kind of allow beefing up zoning along commercial areas, commercial strips, transit strips, really ran into a buzz saw from kind of the political left and the old school neighborhood groups. It was then retooled and has passed, but it's, you know, you can kind of add two or three extra floors to allowable zoning if like half of them are affordable and things. So it's a different scale of change. Oh, I'm sorry. I was just going to mention that San Francisco's school district is going to be, it's in the process of looking at doing teacher housing on one of their sites that they control in, I think it's the Richmond or the sunset, sunset. So I think there is efforts afoot to try to create more development densely there. I think the only large one I know in the West Coyote is Park Merced and that's going to be made more dense but also made more open park space as part of it. And with that project there'll be a massive investment in transportation. So Muny will actually come into the site and that project that it was to do all the pay for. And that has spurred government investment, at least it was, I don't know, our current government, what's going to happen, the federal government, but on also redoing the whole Muny side on the West side over there. So I think it's very positive. There were some other hands, I think. Testing one. Yep, that's on. Yeah, that's on. You guys talked a lot about transportation. What's the communication between your firms and the contracts that the government's putting out and the transportation department? Well, I'll just start by saying that that is a little bit outside the sort of billiwick, at least of my own, maybe Mars is involved in it more but in, I mean, the transit in the city is really almost an entity of itself but we are working very hard, for example, on the Treasure Island project and the Parker Sedd project I just mentioned in making sure that transit is part of the equation. So for Treasure Island is the aquatic transit as well as buses, the aquatic transit ferries is only a 10 minute ferry ride between the two. Parker Sedd mentioned that we proposed the developer agreed to bring the rail line actually into the site but we need major, major, major investments in BART, I mean, mostly and that's really a massive investment needs to be made there and so that's something that we can all vote on at some point, hopefully. Yeah, well, and the Mechanics Institute did just have a program about transportation and I think that it mentioned that the average speed of public transportation within the city of San Francisco is eight miles an hour, which is a little bit bananas. I think we have a question back over here. Hi, so speaking as a young architect, I would love to hear what each of you might have to say about the future of the role of the architect in the city. I think we look, in school, we look towards the architects of the 60s and maybe the 60s as the kind of visionaries of utopian cities with public spaces that sort of create a new life and then another star architects and then now we're moving towards something that's more collaborative but at the same time, public space is now in the internet and now we live in this sort of augmented sort of half virtual, half physical society so how do you think the role of the architect is going to evolve maybe past like the next 50 years? I'll take a stab at that. I mean, I think interdisciplinary collaborative work is where it's at. I mean, it's a very complex world that we live in now as you mentioned and so we need to be smart about who we partner with and who we bring in to solve these problems so I think the architect can really be the connector and can be someone who has, we've all been trained as generalists and thinking in terms of possibilities and so I think that that's our strength as a profession and now everybody wants to be an architect. We have the architect of the computer technology and architect of the internet. Architect of the internet and but we architects. I do think that there's a lot to do and we need all the great minds that we can get in working on these issues and that one thing our profession can do is help bring people together and think about new ways. Design thinking is all in the buzzword these days and I feel like every architect has been trained with that for centuries and so we can bring that to the table. Yeah, there's a lot of questions up in the front we can get and then I think that there's one over there. All right, we got one going live over there. We got a whole bunch right here. Okay, well I have a question and that is thinking about disruptive technology and in this case I'm thinking about self-driving cars. I think we're approaching a peak of individual transportation and so I'm looking beyond that and saying what are the opportunities that self-driving vehicles will provide to us and how do we plan for the land use, huge land use changes and opportunities that that will bring about? We won't need individual garages for our cars. We won't need parking garages. We won't, cars will be operating 24 hours a day so there won't be as many of them that we have to house. How do we plan for that future in light of the fact that right now we're in the middle of some of the worst congestion and it's gonna get worse before it gets better? That's one of the stories on my to-do list. Yeah, but that's also one of those tough things where I think a lot of architects and planners are really starting to think about this. I'm sure you guys have a lot to say. And so then you think about how does the city plan for it but then it does run into this buzz saw of you can imagine a scenario where by the time the city process has moved its way to a policy on self-driving cars, it's five years after it became a major political problem. Craig's been working on Park Merced in Treasure Island. Those projects are both more than a decade old and construction maybe starts next year. Yeah, so it's hard to say what that's gonna do with autonomous cars. It really is hard to predict because you probably reduce traffic to some extent just like currently I think culturally that people are much younger than me are much more interested in not owning a vehicle at all and ride sharing and everything else. So I think that has a major impact. The city of San Francisco I have to say has had now for some time a very aggressive policy around trying to limit the amount of parking within the city. So it's, I don't know if it's been successful or not based on what we see. Of course, part of what we see right now the problem is aggravated by the many entrepreneurs who are now driving their cars for Lyft and Uber and others circling the streets to try to pick up passengers. So whether it's 7,000 cars or something like that right now I think that's the number. And at San Francisco Airport, they went from three years ago. I think they had like, they said they had something like 30,000. Now they have like, I think maybe close to 150,000 rubers. So that's why the congestion's so great there. And maybe Uber, maybe self-driving cars will help reduce that. But I think more is sort of the cultural question about people not wanting to drive anymore. Maybe that congestion will help that. But just an answer to the question about the change. So San Francisco's already been reduced in terms of parking requirements and maximums you can do. So I'm doing a project now in Houston, Texas and it's really interesting, the cultural difference. And to say the least. And they're still building these man with parking garages but the project we're working on a mixed use project with the office and hotels and residential, the developer is very clear that he wants to make sure the parking garages are easily converted to housing. And that's definitely a trend we're seeing too. Yeah, it's interesting. Thinking about not doing ramps everywhere so that you end up with floors that you can convert. Yeah, it's interesting. I was visiting with a firm that's working on SFO and it's interesting that this autonomous vehicle conversation is already getting baked into the plans for all of the redevelopment. So it's already being planned for and there's conversations of how that central parking garage will change into potentially being the area where public comes out of the terminals and that it will be gardens and things like that and that the place where the cars will turn around will be located in one particular area. So do you guys have any plans? Like well, I mean the housing things but do you have any clients that have that sort of thinking already in your? Yes, I think that as I mentioned thinking about garages is definitely a part of every developer's idea but as a person on the ground, our office is located right next to the hidden shed warehouse where this is all been going on the last year and a half. And it's a whole interesting story about that. Security guards 24-7 on this alley and I saw my first truck go in there. So the autonomous semi-trafter trailer is on its way. Oh yeah, definitely. So think about I-5. It is. Questions in the front? Question. With sea level rising and you had mentioned that you had worked on the new commonwealth while building, did you do anything in particular that was new, thinking about the sea level rising? Well we did think about it and thought a little bit about how our infrastructure was working but that's the building is a historic structure. Very important labor history event happened at that building. So we were not gonna be changing and raising and doing all of that. And it's right next door to the Audiford building, one of the great San Francisco landmark. So again, it's not an individual building by building solution. It's gotta be done collectively. But I think everybody in the city is making everyone think about where their infrastructure and their transformers are going. Used to be a lot of that was in the sidewalk vault and so they are thinking about that which has a whole host of issues. But I mean I think there's a lot of different levels both city-wide, building-wide and maybe neighborhood-wide that needs to be considered. This woman in the second row has been very patient. Thanks everybody. Oh yeah, I think that that might battery might be dying out but we can hear you. I think it's on. You're very close. I think it's on. It's on? Yeah it is, there you go. I was struck by the comments about the street life and the streetscape and I'm very struck by the buildings, the new buildings on market rolling up toward the Castro and in Civic Center where I work that are despite my own opinions about the buildings themselves, the designs and how that affects the street life, the ground floors are mostly virtually empty and I understand lag time between concept design and build, they may have been a great idea to have a retail residential combination at the time that they were conceived of but at this point we have ghost streets and I really like some of what I saw about the idea of the active street. The reality is we have ghost streets. People are streaming by them and there's nothing to go into and I'm just wondering if you have some ideas about either how to guard against that going forward because I know that it's a big economy issue, it's not a design issue necessarily, it is an economy issue about brick and mortar businesses but here we are faced with empty storefronts, are they getting turned into residential units perhaps? Can they be converted or something but right now they are a drain on our Civic life. But this is some of the challenge of the changing, this is a challenge with the changing economy versus planning. Planning is all about having an active street. You don't, you want stores along the street, you want the pedestrian realm to really be interactive. Meanwhile, everybody is ordering from Amazon and things like that. Just look at how the retail scene has withered even in a city like San Francisco that cares about this more than most cities and we've learned there's a finite number of places that can charge $15 for a cocktail and six course dinners for $100 and so it's a real dilemma. Does it go back to housing, things like that? The obvious answer would be offices but offices are seen as kind of a blight that kills streets so you don't want offices on the street and it's very, very difficult. So one thing and some of the projects we've done we try to think of what other activities could be on those ground floors because retail is just always hard. Mission Bay was, those guidelines were written 20 years ago probably and so there's a mandated floor-to-floor height mandated having retail along those streets and third street, it's not really happening so there are a lot of empty storefronts there but with some of the people that we're working with we're trying to think of ways to integrate maybe that's artist space or something that's supported maybe there's nonprofit space that has some sort of community building in it so that's not going to solve the whole problem but it could be a part of the solution. Okay. So, I think you- It's a strange microphone. Yeah, yeah, okay. My question actually is a little bit related to that. I was wondering if you could talk about the role of the community in development and planning and actually I was thinking one of a positive example a positive example from history in San Francisco centered around the community engagement and that was the fact that we don't have a freeway going through the city and that was because of very fierce organizing by communities across the city that were intervening and I think that community engagement could be really important in addressing things like what you do with empty storefronts now that the designs no longer are as they didn't pan out the way we thought they did and then also related to that and you've mentioned a couple of times these very terrible histories of quote-unquote redevelopment and again I think those are examples where the community intentionally was not engaged because this wasn't for that community but maybe we need community engagement to understand how to bring those groups of people back in a way that's meaningful to them and almost in a reparations kind of way so I think there, I guess my question is how do community interests and community organizations fit into all these different issues that you're trying to deal with as individual architects when these are really interconnected social community problems? Well, every single project that we're involved in has community engagement, community and community benefits that come out of that are part of that conversation and are often very, very effective in shaping the project and that was certainly true, for example, the Moscone Center expansion I mentioned there are some very, very people I really admire who are involved in advocating for either senior citizens or for other groups around that area and almost every single project with a couple exceptions maybe downtown where there really is no organized neighborhood that the community is involved in the work in San Francisco and it's really affected the way I personally think about architecture and the way that I go about architecture and the question about how will architecture change in the future and what's about with the fact is maybe there are a few, there have not been very many so-called black cape architects in history maybe a few, maybe Frank Lloyd Wright considered to be one and I know that Frank Gehry certainly does not consider himself to be one but everyone in the future going forward who involved in design in the public realm has got to be engaged with the community and community process and it can be pretty frustrating sometimes because they're conflicting demands, conflicting requests and very strongly held positions the worst of course is when it becomes a NIMBY issue and there are examples here even downtown of there were no real tall, there were no tall residential buildings here downtown until about 12 years ago with the four seasons and now there are a number and a lot more being planned and it's really interesting that sort of the first urban pioneer is very strong urbanists moved into that tower and then instantly tried to stop the tower going up across the street because of bottom of your views so there's a downside to community engagement but by and large it's a very, very important and I think it's kind of a part of the process for us as architects it's actually mandated by the city we have to go on to the next question because we've got to wrap up in a few minutes so I'm going to take a question here and then our youngest attendee over here so my question, okay my question has to do with equity and so the other day I went on a Tunderland walking tour and that community in Tunderland is very different obviously from some neighborhoods that are perhaps more affluent I'm just saying that there's a huge income gap in very close neighborhoods in San Francisco and I was wondering what your role as an architect or a city planner is in kind of forming an integration or trying to integrate these different communities together so the Tunderland is a really interesting neighborhood and it's in transition again that's one thing about San Francisco neighborhoods they just keep changing and we have an incredible group of nonprofit housing developers here in San Francisco and Tunderland is a great example that the TNDC Tunderland Neighborhood Development Corporation, company corporation has done a great job of trying to keep that neighborhood together and most people don't know how many families live in that neighborhood and gosh, 15 years ago there was a new public school built in that neighborhood and I think that the Tunderland has been making great progress there certainly needs to be more but just in the last two years there's been a small community theater that's kind of opened and revitalized in that neighborhood and I think that without sacrificing without moving out the individuals and families that have lived there the neighborhood is definitely building itself up so I think it's a good example of how nonprofit development, city planning and just businesses in general and entrepreneurs like the theater guy coming in can keep the neighborhoods together last question, who gets to be that? So the really short version of the question comes from Hamilton which is why do we need more buildings and then I'll amplify on that a little bit we moved here two years ago and we moved to Excelsior so technically we're part of the gentrification problem but as far as this tension between people who love the neighborhoods and people who want more buildings we wound up coming down firmly in the side of we love the neighborhoods we moved here two years ago we've driven five times since we moved here because the transit is just incredible kids know, people know our kids by name and four different neighborhoods we live in a neighborhood where everybody is already down on the street so the question is why are, it seems like the de facto solution is build more housing but we have lots of people in Excelsior who could take tech jobs if instead of doing housing we did a right angle turn and put more money into education thought about taxing our tech companies more thought about requiring tech companies to hire locals when they came in and start programs to train them into those jobs so I guess the question is why are we not doing that and are there any efforts to do that? I'm just an architect these are the ones that build the buildings I mean there are efforts to do that I mean and they tend to be controversial because do they do enough? Are they monitored enough? I mean it was interesting there was the Twitter tax break as it is called where in around 2011, 2010 when the economy here was in the slump along with everywhere else the city allowed I don't remember the exact details but like a tax break on a business tax for tech companies if they located right in the mid market area which had been seen as really troubled and it was kind of a catch of these are companies that would be going IPO and they were saying well gee your tax is gonna knock us out if we go IPO so we'll go IPO somewhere outside the city unless you let us stay and so that was done but part of it was the idea that there had to be a neighborhood compact where any company coming in had to in turn be doing job training had to be doing direct benefits into the mid market community and it was one of these things it was very controversial it wasn't that controversial at the time but certainly then the economy went red hot and then it became controversial so it is kind of there are efforts but there's always such a gap that it's hard to say how effective they are so I was half kidding about being just an architect I think of myself as a citizen architect and so I think that all of us have a role to play in making our voices heard and helping to craft policy we're really fortunate here in San Francisco in that we live in an incredibly we call it hyper democratic city everybody can participate often and you know as much as they want so I think we need to take advantage of that and let your voice be heard and I think it's also a time that we need to all pull together and you know reinforce how important education is to the thriving of any community but particularly in San Francisco because education completely feeds into providing new opportunities and keeping our economic diversity and keeping our workforce moving forward so I think we all need to be citizen architects and make our voices heard Great, well let me do one last rapid fire question and this is a little bit of a hybrid so one last like half question from Facebook which is what makes all of these new developments San Franciscan and what makes it different than other areas in the United States that are also experiencing this development and then finally what can and I think you know maybe Marcia kind of hinted at this answer a little bit what can members of the audience here do those that are watching us online do to contribute to sort of the urban fabric and make an even stronger San Francisco and how do we leave here today and help shape our city? Well I think that Marcia said very well about being a participating citizen and it's true that everyone's voice really does count and in this city there's really a genuine effort to really hear the voices and I think that's where it starts in terms of what we can do individually to shape our urban realm and as far as what makes these buildings San Francisco I mean that's really a good question because we live in a globalized world in some ways and so try to hold on to what's authentic about the city and try to express this in new kinds of buildings is a challenge but there are some things that really do define this place and it's the light for sure and the climate and things that inspire I think many of us and I think it's what makes our buildings different than say a building in Chicago or New York would be. There's sort of a delicateness about this but I think one really defining difference that I think we all try to get at is sort of the publicness of these buildings of trying to make buildings that are really favor the public realm over the private and that's not easy to get at. There are problems, you know, retail, everything else but that's I think something that really does define San Francisco is this sense of the public. John, wanna? Just real quick in terms of what makes some San Francisco I mean the problem is some of them aren't San Francisco they're generic global capitalism product which is a problem. That said I think that Craig is right there is if there's a distinctive thing about San Francisco buildings today it's that real effort to plug into the street and it's a problematic thing given how the economy changes and all but there is a real interest here to not just wall off the sidewalk and ignore the sidewalk which again go to most cities and you'll see how different and how attentive in the real effort here. Last thing in terms of just going from here I mean the city really does try to have a public process and people in San Francisco have very busy lives so you go to a lot of these citizen advisory committee meetings and you see a lot of the same faces showing up in neighborhood after neighborhood as they're probably well off retirees who love being in going to public meetings, bless them. So I mean I really encourage you if you care about the city find a way to make some time to go to the neighborhood meeting to go there just to change the mix and the petri dish of activism here that can only be to the good. Marsha closing comments. Well I think I already said it I think San Francisco is a really unique and wonderful place because of the topography the light and the connection to nature and that we really can be a model for how to address these challenges that we're facing in the coming years and we can be a national model for how we deal with this so I would really encourage everybody to participate and take our civic role really seriously because it's a very exciting time and San Francisco has always been a leadership position and that's what we need to continue to do. Well fantastic so everyone I'd like to thank our panelists here today. Craig Hartman, Marsha Maydom, John King. I'd like to thank everyone at the Mechanics Institute and everyone at AIA San Francisco for helping put this together. Thank you so much. Join us for a drink downstairs and we'll see you next time. I'm impressed at how many of you stuck around. We are. You guys almost be starving. And much thanks to Jennifer Jones from AIA SF for moderating, beautiful, thank you. And you can join us at the data bar downstairs. Thanks for coming and we look forward to seeing you very soon.