As a latecomer to San Francisco's performing-arts district, SFJAZZ, a 30-year-old concert series, had to figure out how to fit into the Hayes Valley neighborhood. Working against the backdrop of the Beaux Arts'styled San Francisco Conservatory of Music and War Memorial Opera House, Mark Cavagnero Associates set out to design a modern building for the jazz center that would look as if it had always been there. 'We wanted to lock it into the street,' says principal Mark Cavagnero, 'and to have the sidewalk and the lobby and the caf' all open up into the public realm.' Pointing out the center's diaphanous glass facade, he adds, 'There's no opaque wall between you and the SFJAZZ Center. It's as transparent as we can make it.'

When the new building for SFJAZZ opened in January, it became the first stand-alone venue specifically built for jazz in the U.S. (Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall in New York is part of the Time Warner Center.) This musical arrival to the neighborhood replaced a muffler shop that had not extended all the way to the sidewalk. To integrate the center into the streetscape, the architects massed the upper two levels of the three-story building to align with those of neighboring structures and pulled back parts of the top floor to echo, in an abstract manner, the pattern of a mansard roof next door. Along the building's south side, a concrete wall bookending the upstairs balcony juts out in front of a neighboring church. To avoid blocking the sun on the church's facade, the architects added a slotted opening that lets daylight through.