At India Basin, GGN and Jensen Architects Revamp a Once-Industrial Stretch of San Francisco Shoreline

San Francisco

By Clare Jacobson

Photo © Bruce Damonte
India Basin Waterfront Park. *Photo © Bruce Damonte*

Architects & Firms

GGN

Jensen Architects

India Basin Waterfront Park is designed not to attract people from across San Francisco but to bring people across the street. The latest link in a chain of bayside parks along the city’s previously industrial eastern shoreline, the 10-acre project sets aside look-at-me aspirations in favor of a long-term commitment to its community, Bayview-Hunters Point. This historically Black neighborhood has long been geographically isolated from the rest of the city, and the hillside housing abutting the site was separated from the bay by speeding traffic and a chain-link fence. Shannon Nichol, cofounder of Seattle-based landscape architecture firm GGN, recalls the attitude her firm brought to their 2016 competition-winning proposal for India Basin. “Instead of coming in and talking about some fancy green thing or big civic landmark,” she says, “we thought, what if we focus on connecting people’s homes to their place, to an unusually well-preserved piece of shoreline, through a beautiful framework of an old main street?”

This “main street” is anchored by an existing building, a shipwright’s cottage built around 1875, when the site was a boatyard for scow schooners. San Francisco–based Jensen Architects, who joined GGN on the project in 2019, and a preservation team renovated this historic landmark to include a street-side visitors’ center and a bay-facing meeting room/classroom. Up the road from it, they designed a new food pavilion with a commercial kitchen. Between the two is a trellised deck with potted plants, tables and chairs, and two porch swings. “The street presence both respects what’s here today,” says Emily Gosack, principal at Jensen, “and echoes what was here before.” These roadside structures frame a view down a steep slope, cascading with native plants including manzanita and California buckeye, to a new pier-side shop building. A maintenance structure completes Jensen’s trio of new construction at India Basin.

Steps (1) and a ramp (top of page) adjacent to the food pavilion lead down a planted slope to a set of piers and the shop building (2). Photos © Bruce Damonte, click to enlarge.

These buildings are both simple and stunning. Their seemingly straightforward shapes are transformed when their multiple garage-style doors open, offering views to the street, landscaping, and the bay. White aluminum cladding perforated with polka dots is a playful and durable response to a request for security grills. At night, light pours out through the holes. To form this facing, Jensen worked with panels from a Bay Area fabricator but flipped them inside out to expose their folded edges, which are meant to evoke the ribs of a boat.

India Basin’s buildings—and the entirety of its design—were guided by an Equitable Development Plan generated by the community to ensure the park’s cultural relevance. “During the course of the project,” Nichol says, “partnerships were being made, businesses were being recruited and scouted, and then programs were being identified to make sure that the folks working on the project would be local as much as possible.”

One result of this process was the design of flexible structures that could respond to on-the-ground experience. The food pavilion, outfitted with a kitchen designed for a brick-and-mortar restaurant, is currently being used as a pop-up location for multiple local chefs in response to the need for community businesses. It’s also used for cooking classes. The shop building has become the home to an organization that teaches high schoolers to repair and build boats. The site design includes movable furniture that park users can group as they like and a plaza that can serve as both a lunch spot and an open-air dance floor.

Now that this first phase of India Basin is complete, the project’s next phase—remaking adjacent underutilized parkland—begins this summer. The design includes restrooms, a boathouse, a playground, basketball courts, a cookout terrace, and a long field that slopes down to the water’s edge. As the park reaches to the bay, its designers and community partners are studying ways also to reach across the street and improve pedestrian access from the hillside housing that faces it. “It’s not just about opening up,” Gosack says about India Basin’s re-formation from an industrial area to a place for recreation, “but also finding ways to really connect people to this place and make it meaningful.”

Click graphic to enlarge