September 9, 2024
Mission Rock: San Francisco’s Waterfront Future
“It was about taking all these things and weaving them into a composition that is more than the sum of all these elements,” – Kate Orff, Landscape Architect
An Urban Connector
The newest piece, tying the project together and connecting it to San Francisco Bay, is the 5-acre China Basin Park, designed by New York-based SCAPE, whose local office is just around the corner. Their park, connected to the larger development via textured pedestrian paseos jutting between buildings, opens Mission Rock to stunning views of the stadium and the Bay Bridge— but it also protects it from quickly-emerging tidal threats via a soft, flexible approach that is slowly (perhaps too slowly) gaining steam in the U.S. “Business as usual is the sheet pile bulkhead,” says Orff. “How do you make that space between building and water something that is fluid and flexible, but understand that’s not a fixed edge?”
The park serves as the feature amenity for tenants of the new development, but it’s also a popular attraction for visitors, especially around game (or other event) time. (It’s easily accessible via an existing drawbridge spanning McCovey Cove.) So it does a lot of heavy lifting, via a lively mix of uses that are at once distinct and connected. Holistic, not overwhelming. It’s an Olmstedian approach brought to the present, and the future.
“It was about taking all these things and weaving them into a composition that is more than the sum of all these elements,” says Orff.
Her team’s unifying conceptual gesture, she adds, was a long figure 8 diagram, which pulled the pieces together and added a sense of movement and tension. On the ground, the key organizing components are the Central Plaza, an open hardscape in the park’s center, and the Great Lawn, a sculpted acre of grass, framed by Monterey cypress trees, looking out to the Bay, sloping gently two the water.
Woven around this core are a number of discreet, but linked places: Gathering Grove, an intimate bosque of Strawberry trees hung with catenary lights that helps minimize wind impacts for the western edge of the park; Stadium Seats, a terraced sitting area to watch the action of Oracle Park across the cove; a dog park; a statue and small plaza dedicated to Giants great Willie McCovey (McCovey Cove’s namesake); the Bay trail, a recreational path wrapping the outer edge of the park; and Shoreline Sands, a spacious spot inspired by local beaches, sloping down to the shoreline’s riprap, filled with sand and reclaimed eucalyptus wood benches.
A Case Study in Urban Resiliency
Managing tidal swells and other natural events is the Stormwater Garden, an 11,000 square foot green space filled with water-tolerant native species that helps treat, store, and convey runoff (It’s traversed by a boardwalk made of thermally modified ash). But Shoreline Sands—and in fact all elements located between the Bay Trail and the water—is designed to eventually flood, either temporarily or permanently.
“We just need to think about that as a realm of design and in between-ness,” says Orff.
“Our goal was to let the park be our strategy to accept a changing condition without impeding or restricting access to the waterfont,” adds Matt Biss, Senior Managing Director, Design & Construction at Tishman Speyer.
In addition to its natural resiliency, the park’s sustainable strategies include a native palette of plant species, ranging from sticky monkey flower and giant wildrye to California fuchsia; not to mention dozens of trees, including Cathedral Live Oak, Chinese Flame, and Fernleaf Catalina ironwood. The soil palette, developed by Massachusetts-based Pine and Swallow, shifts according to area, all the while maintaining a careful balance between rich organic life and permeable surfaces; able to keep plant life alive in the case of temporary inundation. Closest to the buildings, a “Promenade,” interfacing with Mission Rock’s buildings and retail, has a stormwater management system underneath, directing neighborhood runoff into the stormwater garden. (The entire Mission Rock development, which also features streetscapes designed by CMG Landscape Architecture, has earned a LEED for Neighborhood Development rating, with features like its own black water treatment plant.)
A New Generation of Construction Technology
Six feet of lightweight cellular concrete fill helped the team lift the entire park to a resilient elevation. That material has concrete’s compressive strength but allows for permeability and (at a third the weight of soil) does not cause settling. “It’s this weird brave new world of raising the edges of our cities,” says Orff. “We’re no longer destroying a mountain and carting carts of dirt to the site.”
The Giants, joined by Tishman Speyer in 2018, bought the site almost 20 years ago and spent years not only gaining approvals and funding, but researching how to make this into a real place; engaging locals and potential tenants to find out what they would and wouldn’t like.
The complex still has more open spaces (and buildings) to come. But China Basin Park will be the largest, and most recognizable, says Biss. It’s also, says Orff, a galvanizing symbol during a tough time for San Francisco, and an excellent blueprint for the future. “Advocating for a much softer and setback shoreline is something that we should be thinking about at a national scale,” says Orff. “We need to densify within the urban footprint we have. But we need to leave a lot of room for the water to have its space. That inter zone between buildings and water bodies is a magical space.”
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