It is often referred to as “the Grand Central of the West.” But while San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center won’t look anything like New York’s Beaux-Arts commuter palace, it has been designed to be an impressive public amenity, not just a functional one. The 1 million-squarefoot Transbay facility, which replaces an outmoded and shabby 1930s station, won’t have a limestone facade or a ceiling depicting the stars. Instead, it will have a billowing, veil-like enclosure and expressive skylight-topped structural elements that the architects call “light columns,” which will allow daylight to penetrate the structure’s lowest levels. But the new station’s most unusual feature will be a publicly accessible garden over the entire almost-fiveblock- long building. “We were the only firm that proposed covering the station with a 5.4-acre park. This is the reason we were chosen,” says Fred Clarke, senior principal at Pelli Clarke Pelli, referring to his firm’s winning entry to a 2006 international competition.