For Fort Mason Center, the notion of spontaneous urbanism is not new. From the Food Truck Round-Up to the Panhandle Bandshell, the site has embraced the energy and unpredictability of the San Francisco Happenings culture. The vision for the center must provide a framework capable of embracing various forms of programming, including the continued success of spontaneous forms of urbanism.

The Sasaki team includes a number of cultivators of spontaneity in the urban landscape—including Off the Grid, Rebar, and Envelope A+D. The latter led Proxy, a temporary two-block project that created a centralized, ever-changing experience in the heart of a San Francisco neighborhood in transition. A new model of urban development, Proxy transformed vacant lots on the former site of an elevated freeway into a thriving cultural construct of events, retail spaces, art, and even food offerings, rotated through an open framework of temporary structures, invoking a flexibility between people, architecture, and the city.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our ARCHITECT featured on the team page.

Fort Mason’s military legacy has created a sense of an urban island—perceptually isolated but strangely close. To increase legibility of the site, promote increased visitation, and enable continued reuse, issues of mobility and access are critical. This includes connection to public transportation, like the emerging F-Line project, as well as improvements to the site’s roadways, gateways, parking, wayfinding, and pedestrian and bicycle systems. Increasing the site’s mobility will redefine the site as welcoming and public.

At Treasure Island, Nelson\Nygaard worked on a similar challenge with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Base Reuse and Treasure Island Development Corporation: to develop a multimodal transportation plan for the island that aligned with the site’s innovative land use proposal. To minimize congestion while supporting development viability, the plan included extensive ferry and bus service, pricing changes, and a comprehensive management plan.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our MOVER featured on the team page.

Sited at the edge of one of the world’s great waterfronts—the San Francisco Bay—Fort Mason Center feels strangely disconnected from the life that swirls at and beneath the surface of the water. Though challenges exist in the powerful forces of the bay, opportunities abound to better engage the bay programmatically, symbolically, and ecologically. The vision must capitalize on this asset in an exciting yet feasible and safe way.

The southern edge of the Chicago River’s Main Branch presented much the same scenario to Sasaki, who was commissioned to reimagine the six blocks of riverfront from State Street to Lake Street. Lacking a continuous, connected system of circulation, each space between the iconic Bridgehouses is disconnected from both the life of the city and the life of the river. Sasaki’s plan, in construction documentation now, creates continuity for pedestrians and enables interaction with boating, water transit, and human-powered craft.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our URBANIST featured on the team page.

As an estuarine ecosystem, the San Francisco Bay has undergone transformative changes with human settlement that has minimized its ecological function. With over 3,500 linear feet of waterfront, Fort Mason Center can create dynamic new relationships between the land and water’s edge. The possibilities of aggressively reimagining the urban shoreline—as a model of the future, not a restoration of the past—are exciting.

An example of this type of forward-looking ecological intervention is Kristina Hill’s work at Swann Park in Baltimore. The vision was to create a new set of environmental conditions at the water’s edge to embrace sea-level rise and ground subsidence. To do so, a number of wetland palettes and a volunteer workforce adapted a turf-dominated shoreline park to a richer and more resilient ecological edge. The strategy also enabled the containment of soil contaminants, minimization of soil erosion, and the reestablishment of healthier site soils.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our ECOLOGIST featured on the team page.

Fort Mason’s designation as a National Historic Landmark stems from its pivotal role in a series of significant military, cultural, social, and political events–from World War II to the Great San Francisco Earthquake and beyond. The fort is now amidst the next evolution of its legacy, as a center of arts in culture in the Bay Area. The challenge at hand is to balance the continued reuse and life of the center with respect for its rich military and maritime history and context.

Sasaki undertook a similar challenge at the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool–opened in 1922 and today, one of the nation’s most iconic landscapes. Here, the task was to balance respect for the character-defining elements with 21st century security and maintenance concerns. Under construction now, the renovated site will improve accessibility, sustainability, resilience, and security, all within the historic context and framework.

Though reuse and redevelopment efforts have been successful at Fort Mason Center, large areas of potential remain abandoned or underutilized. With magnificent views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island, ample parking and nearly 46,000 square feet of space, Pier One, for example, currently serves as storage but is wildly suited for an imaginative reuse strategy. The challenge is to align highest and best reuse opportunities with economic and technical feasibility.

Envelope A+D undertook a similar renovation of a historic San Francisco Pier 24 structure. The program included housing a private photography collection. The design respects the raw warehouse quality while interweaving active storage, gallery, and public spaces. Pedestrian entry is via a warping plane off the Embarcadero Promenade into the space of the defunct rail-spur between the piers. The bayside corner of the warehouse is open, creating a living room with a stunning panoramic view of the Bay Bridge.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our ARCHITECT featured on the team page.

Though programmatically linked to the life and action of the city, Fort Mason Center’s physical boundaries still resonate with its military past. The vision for the center’s future must reconnect the site with its adjacent urban, recreational, and natural conditions, breaking down the psychological and physical barriers that make the center seem like an urban island.

Words Pictures Ideas has been making similar physical and symbolic connections between the city and its infamous Bay Bridge through multiple forms of innovative communication. WPI is championing a two-year, iconic light sculpture called the Bay Lights, a monumental celebration of the bridge’s 75th anniversary scheduled to shine in early 2013. WPI also created an interactive website to enable real-time connection and information about the bridge and its seismic interactions, and facilitated a book of poetry, Everything Indicates, to capture responses to the engineering feat.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our COMMUNICATOR featured on the team page.

Fort Mason Center has been a unique community destination for nearly forty years, providing an unparalleled setting for many of the city’s art and cultural events. As a model of the repurposing of a former military site by programming the abandoned piers and buildings, it is exceptionally successful. The task at hand is to maximize the site’s arts-related programming potential, to increase the center’s visibility and legibility to a broader audience, and layer in new and symbiotic uses.

Sasaki created the vision and urban framework for a similar arts and reuse district at 798 in Beijing. Sasaki’s plan for the 798 Arts District transformed a series of abandoned factory buildings and fallow courtyards into a rich sequence of galleries, work spaces, museums, cafes, and outdoor sculpture spaces. Now the third most visited site in Beijing–just after the Forbidden City and the Great Wall–the 798 Arts District is the epicenter of China’s emerging modern art community.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our DESIGNER featured on the team page.

With its constant calendar of fairs, festival, events, and shows, Fort Mason Center is recognized as one of the city’s greatest arts and culture venues. Still, the challenge to increase visitation and broaden visibility of the center’s offerings persists. With nearly 437 parking spaces—and acres of asphalt—opportunities to increase the site’s vitality could leverage into new and unexpected audiences and a stronger sense of connection to the broader Bay Area community.

San Francisco’s streets and public right of way make up 25% of the city’s land area, significantly larger than all the city’s parks combined. Parklets reclaim these under-used swaths of streetscape, especially on excessively wide streets and at prominent intersections. The idea developed with Rebar’s first installation of Park(ing) Day in 2005 and has since spread to cities across the globe. From 2009-2011, a collaborative between Rebar, the Mayor’s Office, and various city agencies developed Parklets and the permit process that enables cities to create them.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our MAKER featured on the team page.

The landscape of Fort Mason, from the sloping lawns to the planes of parking lots and piers to the water sheet of the Bay, provides an exceptional diversity of opportunities for imaginative park programming. The life inside the reused pier buildings is begging to extend more often and more seamlessly into the site’s exterior spaces. The challenge is to identify where opportunities exist to increase fixed park programming opportunities—and where more flexible or temporal events are more appropriate or feasible.

Once a brownfield of parking lots and fallow land, the Wilmington Waterfront Park now hosts a broad range of fixed programming for the adjacent community within a reconfigured landscape of water features, green fields and sculptural landforms. A ten-year initiative of the Port of Los Angeles, the park is also an ecological buffer, minimizing noise and air impacts of the active port from the adjacent neighborhoods, introducing a native ecosystem of grasses and tree groves, and managing stormwater sustainably.

To learn more about the brain behind this project, see our DESIGNER featured on the team page.