Alternate Ideas for San Francisco Span

In the spirit of breathing new life into disused infrastructure, UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design graduate students were given the challenge of thinking big about repurposing the trussed steel span from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island.

Their task was not “simply to recycle, but to renew the steel bones with cultural facilities, housing, parks and transit that would ‘highlight environmental concerns, historic preservation and social interaction.’”

In setting the challenge, Frederic Schwartz and Marc L'Italien were inspired by the High Line Park, believing that salvaging and re-using infrastructure needs more recognition as a viable alternative to dismantling or replacement. The span is to be “replaced after 2013 by a single-tower suspension bridge now under construction.”

It’s a topic we’re eager to explore at the upcoming Strategy Session in New York City, where visitors can see the High Line first hand.

Three of the student schemes “show the range of what-ifs:

• Nicole Lew's "A Park Above the Bay" turns the structure into an extension of the Bay Trail, with housing and shops lining the lower deck while landscaped paths of green weave up from Oakland's shore to cloak the linear community.
• Open space of another sort is offered by David Dana, who fills the spans nearest Oakland with barge-like platforms for agricultural production. At the west end, a nine-story hotel would be assembled within the current tower while housing and gardens would be suspended from the deck.
• The most eye-catching scheme might be from Lan Hu, who cloaks the west end with a streamlined hotel rising up from the bay and nosing toward San Francisco, as if an ocean liner was cruising into port.”

  

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