On a sloping lot, with views to the west, the architects were asked to design a house for a family in an urban setting that would express the client and designers’ shared love of simple materials and clean detailing, and the desire for well juxtaposed spaces.
A single-story, 6,300-square-foot public library on a residential street, with stacks and periodicals along the south wall and a children's room, a program room, and staff offices along the north.
As a tagline, “building better libraries for stronger communities” might be a little trite, but it does sum up San Francisco’s ambitions for its branch-improvement program — an ongoing building campaign funded in part by a $105.9 million bond passed by city voters in 2000.
The Sava Pool, designed for both recreational and competitive functions, is situated at the southern end of a public park between a vehicular thoroughfare and a residential neighborhood.
Lorcan O’Herlihy and Stephen Kanner refer to the checkerboard wall snaking through their Performance Capture Studio (PCS) north of San Francisco as a “strange loop,” a term used in film and other arts to describe something that breaks down the usual hierarchies of time or space and ends up where it started.
When the Energy Foundation, a partnership of philan-thropic investors that promotes clean-energy technolo-gies, outgrew its offices in a former military hospital on San Francisco's Presidio, it saw an opportunity to recreate its headquarters not only to accommodate its rapidly growing staff, but also to better reflect its mission.
Daniel Libeskind, by happenstance or design, has practically become the official architect of Jewish museums worldwide, but that trajectory was near its beginning when he received the commission, in 1998, for San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM).
The building relies not only on the sharp-edged diagonals—sometimes a shortcut to dynamism and architectural self-assertion—that have been a mainstay in Libeskind’s work, but also on abundant calligraphic symbols, some more convincing than others.