Want to design a bus shelter? Well, get in line.
By Bustler Editors|
Tuesday, Jun 5, 2007
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There’s a competition going on right now that could change San Francisco’s physical landscape—and it has nothing to do with iconic towers in the sky.
Quite the opposite: It’s the jousting match between three bidders who want to install and maintain between 1,100 and 1,500 new bus shelters in the city for the next 15 years. They’d also build as many as 150 advertising kiosks, and maybe even place rain screens over subway entrances.
In other words, this is the stuff of daily life—the street-level terrain that shapes the experience of anyone who doesn’t use a car to get from one place to the next. And if you think that architects would brush aside the chance to design “street furniture” likely to endure every conceivable type of abuse, think again.
“It’s every architect’s dream to take on a project like this that is easy to handle but has all these urban design angles,” says Charles Bloszies, one of a half-dozen San Francisco architects who did work for one or the other of the competing teams. “It’s not an exclamation point in the city, but it can be the perfect comma or colon.”
In terms of transit shelters alone, there are 24 schemes contained in the proposals, all on view on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Web site, www.sfmta.com/shelters. Bloszies’ has a clean, modern look and a sustainable twist: The roof looks flat and thick, but behind that roofline, the surface is the equivalent of a shallow, upside-down umbrella, with solar panels on the upper sides. When it rains, water runs across the panels and goes into a drainpipe concealed in the hollow metal column that supports the roof.
Bloszies was asked to contribute designs by Clear Channel Outdoor, which is competing for the contract against Cemusa, the offshoot of a street furniture firm in Spain, and the pairing of CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux, the French firm responsible for San Francisco’s Parisian public toilets.
The heartening thing is that each team has made a genuine effort to incorporate sharp-looking designs and far-thinking sustainability principles into their approach.
In the case of Clear Channel, all the designs it submitted to Muni last month are by San Francisco architects; besides Bloszies, the company presented shelter prototypes by BCV Architects and Lundberg Design. If you’ve been to the Ferry Building, you’re acquainted with each firm’s work: BCV designed the ground-floor retail arcade, while Lundberg designed the ever-jammed Slanted Door restaurant.
Neither firm has designed shelters or kiosks. Both signed up in a flash.
The firm BCV submitted three prototypes by architect Hans Bauldauf. One is extremely transparent, lots of glass with a detached roof supported by lean metal trusses. Another has a rear wall of glass but a solid side and roof that forms a sort of tipped-over L—it can even support a corkscrew-like wind turbine rising from it like a marker. The third, designed with older settings in mind, has a dark green frame that hints of Market Street’s historic light posts.
The Lundberg scheme is the most abstract in the competition, essentially a glass container with a sublime red squiggle on top. I call it a squiggle; the design’s accompanying text by Olle Lundberg likens it to “a seismic shock wave, a pattern of surf, or even just a ribbon fluttering in the wind.”
The other bidders mixed the local talent with items out of the catalogues or crafted from afar. Cemusa’s prototypes include one by Michael Willis Architects and the San Francisco office of Gensler. That team has glass that swells up and over in a broad curve they liken to a cupped hand, with portions of the glass decorated in an etched pattern.
Perhaps to beat X-ACTO Knife-wielding vandals to the punch?
The CBS/JCDecaux team presented an in-house Norman Foster model that, like much of the English architect’s work, is taut and elegant. They also had Robert Stern do a faux-historic shelter for Market Street (though it seems more suited to fin de siecle Vienna), and local architect Ian Birchall delivered a design using recycled materials and a roofline meant to suggest a bird in flight.
I’m not naive enough to think that Muni—aptly described by our Rachel Gordon as “perennially cash-strapped”—will choose a team by virtue of design alone. The annual payments and maintenance deals are sure to get in line ahead of aesthetics.
Not only that, Muni is free to choose one contractor team and then nudge it to borrow design tricks from its rivals. That’s why a comment board on the Muni Web site asks people to submit their thoughts about each project, rather than vote on a favorite.
Still, it’s terrific that Muni has included architectural quality as one of the ingredients in the deal. And the quality of the submissions makes for an abundant buffet. I’ve got my favorites, but only two or three of the 24 schemes made me cringe.
Muni hopes to select a contractor this month, with the goal of having a signed 15-year deal approved by the Board of Supervisors this fall. If all goes smoothly—a rarity in San Francisco—new shelters could begin appearing by next summer.
By which time, maybe, we’ll know which team of developers and architects will have the right to build what could become San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper. Appearing perhaps in 2012.
Sure, towers get the attention and the postcard space. But San Francisco is defined by ground-level urbanity. Sidewalks, trees, landscaping—even bus shelters—frame each step we take. And, in the long run, they make the impressions that last.
- John King
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