A Green Roof for San Francisco
Sourced from Domus
Salesforce Transit Center sets a new paradigm for urban design in the United States. Located in San Francisco’s Transbay District, the new transit center illustrates how a dense, downtown, transit-based development can provide a sustainable alternative to a suburban, car-focused lifestyle. The transit center was developed to consolidate operations of 11 bus systems in the Bay Area and to serve as a future rail terminus for the Caltrain commuter rail and California High Speed Rail connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles. Anticipated to serve over 45 million people annually, the transit center has become a transportation hub and catalyst for a new, vibrant, built-out Financial District in a once underdeveloped neighborhood in the city.
Connecting neighboring city districts
The old Transbay District became encircled by a large, elevated ramp that led from the Bay Bridge to the original 1939 Transbay Bus Terminal. The ramp enclosed the transit center from the surrounding blocks and stifled neighborhood growth. Its removal in 2010, before construction of the transit center, gave the design team an opportunity to reinvent and restore the neighborhood into a vibrant, mixed-use one.
Humanizing infrastructure
At its essence, the 1.5 million square feet facility is a large-scale piece of infrastructure designed to accommodate multiple transportation modes. Humanizing infrastructure became the critical design challenge to create a functional yet visually appealing cornerstone for community building and socio- economic development. Given the complexity of the site and scale of the project, the design team provided solutions that demonstrated ways that large-scale infrastructure projects can be humanized, making it open, friendly, supportive of the public realm, and welcoming to a range of people and interests.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
