Common Places: Anything But Simple [Forum]

American Institute of Architects Regional and Urban Design Committee Common Places: Anything but Simple Todd w. Bressi Common places, architect Gianni Longo has written, bring people together lor the face-to-face contact that is essential lor a healthy society. But with the explosion of telecommunications media, are these everyday interactions — and the places that support them — all that necessary anymore? This is the challenge that RUDG chair Don Miles, PA1A, an associate partner with Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, issued at the committee's lorum in San Francisco last March. But the forum left no doubt that San Francisco's common places are. still going strong. If anything, the range of common places in the city is becoming increasingly diverse, he demands on them are ever more complex, and their design ever more sophisticated. The forum considered a diverse landscape of common places: traditional parks like Washington and Union Squares; reinterpretations of historic types, such as the new Embar- cadero boulevard; inherited places, such as the Presidio, the huge in-city military base that is becoming a national park; and integrated networks, such as the streets and squares pro­ posed for the Transbay Terminal redevelopment area. These places range in scale from the most intimate community playground to celebratory, civic spaces that are central to the city's identity to regional networks that stretch around the bay and along the oceanfront. Designers must be attentive to how common places are woven into this wider landscape. 'I'he forum also probed the. complexity that can be found within each one of these spaces. Even the most straightforward common place, such as a neighborhood green like Washington Square or a regional street like the Fmbarcadero, is a space of many uses, with many con­ stituencies and countless nuances in its design and occupation. The challenge for designers is to negotiate the complicated, often contentious, process of embedding common places with the ability to respond to this diversity. The forum revealed the ways in which common places are in flux. A city's common ground may start with a grand gesture, like platting streets or subdividing blocks, dedicating a green or a civic square, or preserving a valued landscape. But over time, common places require constant tinkering, adjustment and, sometimes, reinvention. The richness and complexity the forum observed in San Francisco's common places reflects the richness and complexity of the city these places serve, and the acquired reverence San Franciscans have for the places thev hold in common. Perhaps the greatest revelation of the forum was the remarkable amount of change San Francisco has seen in the last decade. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake unleashed a chain of events — from the razing of the Fmbarcadero Freeway to the closure (for seismic retrofitting) of many of the Beaux Arts buildings in the civic center — that have triggered subsequent urban design projects. Other legacies of the 1980s are coming to fruition: the collapse of the office market ironically jump-started the long-delayed Yerba Buena Gardens mixed-use rede­ velopment project; projects to move the main public library and the Museum of Modern Art have resulted in architectural icons that are catalyzing broader changes in the public realm. Links in a Regional Chain Perhaps the most remarkable changes have occurred along San Francisco's waterfront. The earthquake so damaged the Fmbarcadero Freeway — an elevated, double-deck struc- P LA C E S