South Park Ave, east of Jack London Alley
Condition 3: What once blended in becomes hybridised When a new building grows out of an old one Re-inhabitation vs revitalisation It may be that in light of conditions 1 and 2, architecture in the SoMa district sometimes tries to run an adjacent path down the middle, between the two conditions of something that stands out and something that blends in . By renovating older buildings by preserving the shell, or ‘existing landmark façade’ to use the common nomenclature, a good deal of the SoMa is being gutted. Space in this area is being actively reprogrammed from commercial warehouses to lofts, offices and studios, with new housing complexes physically sprouting out of a previously programmed warehouse. The façade of the old building remains merely as effect or pretence , which could possibly be seen as poetic, if was not at the same time grotesque.The existing building, for whatever purpose – structural damage, decay, real estate pressures – is fundamentally changed into something else, something that reduces its history and place in the urban narrative to its façade alone. This presents us with a question:Are buildings merely differentiated only by their shells? Over time, if these kinds of projects continue, would we only be able to read our past structures like layers of an onion, going further back in time as you move outward, devoid of any architectural value except as mere shading for our contemporary use? In an absurdist sense, akin to the work of Superstudio or Archigram, this new city typology could become a graveyard of shells, dense with existing landmark façade systems.
Condition 2: What once stood out now blends in When a novel building loses its uniqueness Homogeneity overwhelms the exceptional
The South Park area of the SoMa district has recently seen a wave of renovations and new construction including quite a few individually provocative apartment and mixed- use buildings. However, the experience of these buildings is not one of individuality at all. Often situated closely by other provocative designs, the experience is one of a block-like, congregative unit like a horizontal urban totem pole, indicating a contemporary design shift for the area. A provocative and admirable work of architecture can no longer remain a singular work of art in an otherwise uninteresting landscape, at least not in an urban setting, for as the Bilbao effect has made clear, unique buildings when situated amongst non-similar structures become agents of revitalisation in their environments. The Web 2.0 phenomenon is centred on South Park Street, S0Ma. Many new Internet start-ups dot this section of San Francisco, along with new shops and restaurants throughout. With this phenomenon came new money and new works of architecture which set a trend and resulted in similar structures popping up around it. If left uninhibited, this process would potentially create occurrences of condition 1 (above) through the homogenisation of the city block. Condition 2 highlights the transformation of a building into something larger than itself – a block or community of buildings, interdependent on each other for identity.
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