San Francisco, California
Located in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, Pierpoint Lane is an urban garden project designed by Roderick Wyllie, Tim Kirby and Tyler Chandler of Surfacedesign together with this year’s American Architecture Awards laureates, SHoP Architects, for Uber that includes a public park, a major streetscape, and a public amenity roof-level terrace.
The site is organized around a linear park that connects 3rd Street to Bridgeview Way.
What was originally intended to be solely an EVA route, the project team came up with a strategy to utilize this infrastructural space as a vibrant park amenity for the public.
The project is situated along a transit corridor and adjacent to the recently completed Chase Center arena.
For its ecological and inclusive design, Pier Point Lane has recently been awarded a 2022 American Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The project’s key goal is to bring this developing area into step with the successful, human-scaled environments for which San Francisco is so famous, providing a catalyst to transform the district into a dynamic and pedestrian-friendly neighborhood.
A variety of paving types meander through the landscape, each carefully considered to compliment the use of the affiliated space.
A strategic selection of materials and layout promotes intuitive circulation while planting provides for a varied, immersive experience.
Gathering spaces such as seating nooks, stone outcroppings, and a lawn amphitheater are interspersed throughout the site providing the Mission Bay workforce, community, and visitors alike places of respite amid the energetic context.
Through a sequential procession of the landscape, colorful groundcover plants harmonize with the spatial arrangement of trees and shrubs.
The open space planting is the people’s garden—a point of leisure and respite from the surrounding urban pressures.
With the seasonal transformation and floriferous display of the upland slopes, and the lawn bowl framing the sky through the ring of Cajeput Paperbark trees, this portion of the campus planting includes the most diverse palette of trees, shrubs, groundcovers, grasses, and perennials in the project.
Integrated seating alcoves complete the Cajeput Paperbark tree ring, dappled with flowering perennial plants amid structured shrubs and trees.
Cracks between eruptive stone blocks are planted, calling on the serendipitous feats of nature.
Boundaries of Pierpoint Lane are intentionally mysterious, expanding the open space experience while refining the plant species palette down to essentials of overwhelming green.
Defined formations of flowering shrubs and creeping groundcovers serve as cohesion through the lane.
Canopy trees provide shade, understory trees present color, form, and density, while the columnar trees provide emphasis at the project crossroads below the architectural bridges and third street frontage.
Streetscapes and road frontages seamlessly connect the active adjacent streets to the park, enticing passersby to interrupt their walk along 3rd Street to experience this new typology of greenspace in Mission Bay.
Project: Pierpoint Lane
Architects: Surfacedesign Inc.
Lead Architects: Roderick Wyllie, Tim Kirby and Tyler Chandler
Associate Architects: SHoP Architects
Contractor: Truebeck Construction
Client: Uber Technologies
Photographers: Marion Brenner
