Design III: The San Francisco Waterfront Project

The Spring 1979 design studio course was an experimental project on the San Francisco Waterfront. The experiment consisted of a simulated process of urban growth, carried out by about twenty people. The simulation included 90 projects, to be developed on a 30 acres area in the San Francisco Waterfront area, just north of the Bay Bridge, over a period of about five years. A physical model of the whole project at a scale of 1/32″=1′ was made in unpainted hardwood, with detailed models of the Bay Bridge, existing buildings, piers and streets. Each new step of the development was always represented by the addition of some physical piece to the overall growing model, just like construction in a real town. The pieces varried in size, sometimes large representing a building complex, and at other times small, representing a row of bollards or a bench, always contributing to the creation of larger urban wholes.