San Francisco is a classic case study in the economic laws of supply and demand. Much of what gives the city its charm (geographic isolation at the tip of a narrow peninsula) limits the supply of real estate, so ever since the 1849 Gold Rush, homes have commanded a high price . Add to this the technology industry—plus the big business it takes to keep that sector humming—and San Francisco has become an intense real-estate crucible, with the cost of property surging.
A new development designed by Foster + Partners , the London-based architecture firm founded by Lord Norman Foster , is poised to become a release valve for some of that pressure. In what will eventually be among the tallest residential tower on the West Coast, the 910-foot Oceanwide Center skyscraper will provide 788,000 square feet of residential space (along with 1.08 million square feet of office space and a hotel, arrayed across two towers).
A view of the public garden within the building.
The firm’s new center is situated amid one of the city’s new real-estate hot spots: the area around the Transbay Transit Center, a multimodal transit hub slated to open in 2017. Located in the Financial District, the area is giving San Francisco a new look—more glass-and-steel than the painted townhouses for which it is so well-known.
Though the new towers will stretch the city’s skyline, Foster + Partners points to the way the development meets the sidewalk as one of the design’s most critical elements, calling the project an “urban room.” Working with landscape architecture firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the architects created glassy ground levels coupled with ample outdoor space, accessible to the public and designed to provide links between different areas of San Francisco’s downtown. It has not been announced when construction on the project could begin.
