Transbay Transit Center Design Competition: About the Project

In the summer of 2007, SOM’s San Francisco-based design partners Craig Hartman, FAIA and Brian Lee, FAIA, LEED® AP presented their vision for a new Transit Center and Tower for the City of San Francisco, as part of a design and development competition. SOM teamed with the Rockefeller Group Development Corporation® for the competition.

Signaling a new era for the City of San Francisco, SOM’s design for the new Transbay Transit Center would have preserved and enhanced the exceptional qualities of the City—the beauty of the light, climate, topography, bay, and City—as well as its people, while embodying a potent belief in the region’s future. The Transit Terminal and Tower as designed, made it a seminal model and symbol for global sustainability.

The design proposal made a simple but bold adjustment to the TJPA’s four-block-long overhead bus deck. The adjustment would have improved the transit operations, reduced annual operating costs, and radically reduced the emission of climate-changing carbon dioxide. Achieved by creating a double-deck bus platform—moving the eastern half of the bus deck to the west—the design would have effectively reduced the length of the bus deck by two city blocks. This innovation would have accommodated the entire transit program and improved operational efficiency, while freeing two full city blocks for two significant civic gestures: a light-filled Transbay Hall—a dramatic arrival hall equal in scale to that of Grand Central Station—and a city-block-sized “opportunity site” or Performing Arts Park.

SOM’s 1,375-foot-high, mixed-use Transbay Tower was equally bold. Its first full floor would have lifted 100 feet above a full-block urban plaza at Mission Street, creating a civic portal to the Transbay Hall. Its uses would have included retail, cultural, office space, a boutique hotel, condominiums, and, at the top, a publicly accessible sky room. The tower’s tapered, turning structure would have been unique among U.S. skyscrapers. Its form, which unfolded as it reached the sky, would have gracefully accommodated the different uses held within. Above the sky room two state-of-the-art wind turbines, combined with its photovoltaic crown, would have reduced annual mechanical electrical consumption by 74%. In addition to the proposed opportunity site, the project included a partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which would have provided a major digital arts program. In addition, the historic California State Library’s Sutro Collection would have been housed in the Tower. These partnerships added an extraordinary cultural dimension to an already advanced work of transportation infrastructure.

Through an intense collaboration with leading engineers and building technology experts, the Transbay Transit Center and Tower would have provided the highest level of environmental stewardship ever achieved in a major urban mixed-use project. The overall project would have harvested rainwater, reducing the burden on the city’s infrastructure, and made extensive use of natural ventilation, natural light, as well as energy in the form of advanced solar and wind power. After the first decade of operation, the project’s combined reduction in emissions, compared to a conventional design, would have been over 176,000,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. The Transit Center was designed to achieve LEED® Platinum certification; and the Tower, LEED® Gold and possibly LEED® Platinum.

Both buildings were designed to the highest levels of safety and security. The Transit Center’s base isolation structural system would have allowed the facility to withstand a “2,500 year” earthquake and serve as an emergency center in the event of a major seismic event. The Tower design fully incorporated next generation lessons learned in the 21st Century for security and life safety.



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