Fault Lines - It’s high time for SoMa to soar above San Francisco’s skyline

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It’s high time for SoMa to soar above San Francisco’s skyline

POSTED May 5, 10:35 PM

Taste is not a matter of dispute — though one would be hard-pressed to see that as an accepted truth in San Francisco, where the positions of four people can block a museum project or steer citywide transportation policy.

So it will be interesting to see whether the visions of the past will determine the skyline of the future, which holds promise for San Francisco during the next half-century.

I have always had an affinity for the Transamerica Pyramid — a building that helped launch the neighborhood protest movement in San Francisco and drew poison from the pen of a former columnist named Herb Caen. Yet that tower has come to define San Francisco nearly as much as the Golden Gate Bridge, and even those who find the Transamerica building aestethically challenged might wonder what all the fuss was about nearly 50 years ago, when it was being built.

The latest cycle of debate was stirred last week upon the presentation of the new Transbay Terminal tower plan, which would allow a number of new skyscrapers to scale beyond the current 550-foot height limit around a signature spire that would rise approximately 1,000 feet next to the proposed transportation hub.

Now I’m not a proponent of the school that bigger is necessarily better, but there’s no reason that San Francisco’s skyline — which is unusually flat for the standards of major American cities — couldn’t use a bit of a dramatic, vertical push. The City’s limited land mass has created a dynamic where just about the only place to grow is up. The fact is, if San Francisco planners can find the right balance between density and livability, some new high-rises might lift The City above the level of drab design mediocrity in which it has long existed.

It also makes sense from a planning standpoint. As long as San Francisco’s policy is driven by transit-oriented development, any expansion must occur near its central business core, and the only place left for that type of growth is in the South of Market area that has long been zoned for it.

That should hardly ignite cries of “Manhattanization,” though in some quarters it undoubtedly will, but five to seven towers could add some architectural zest to a city clearly lacking it.

“It’s not like there’s going to be a dense forest of new towers,’’ said Dean Macris, San Francisco’s recent planning director who oversaw The City’s rezoning effort. “What you’re struck by here is how little change there has been physically over the years. But the planners here aren’t interested in height for its own sake.’’

Macris notes that there are good reasons to increase the height of some new buildings in San Francisco — namely growth projections and the need to increase office space to meet future demands. In addition, he said, global-warming issues will require planners to concentrate on increasing public-transit access.

The new skyline proposal also fits in the pattern of San Francisco development, in which height issues seem to spring up every 30 or 40 years. The Russ building and the Shell Oil building, both constructed in the late 1920s, were the tallest structures in The City until the mid-’60s. The Transamerica building, still the highest skyscraper in San Francisco, was completed in 1972.

The soon-to-be finished One Rincon Hill condominium tower has been a target of some criticism because it seems so out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood. But that’s in large part because it stands alone — a South of Market architectural orphan — and it would fit in much better once the rest of the cluster of buildings in the Transbay Terminal plan were added to the landscape.

Of course, designs for those buildings will go a long way toward redefining the skyline, and San
Francisco doesn’t have a great track record for selecting architectural gems. Still, that’s not a reason to resist attempts to remake the South of Market area into the new downtown core as long as planners can figure out the right mix of light and shadows cast by the buildings and still make the streets around them user-friendly.

“I think people understand that density, if carefully planned, makes sense for a city of our scope,’’ Macris said.

Yet logic and good planning won’t stop the naysayers from trying to block the future — you only have to think back to the fight over the new de Young Museum to understand that. But progress has a way of surfacing with its pointy head. In San Francisco, it just takes a few years longer to make its presence felt.

The original plan for the Transamerica building called for the pyramid to be much taller and slimmer and more elegant. But some personal tastes intervened.

A proposed 1,000-foot-high Transbay Terminal tower could be good for The City’s stagnant skyline.
(Courtesy rendering)