Photo: Perkins&Will
The San Francisco office of international architecture and design firm Perkins&Will has been a SPUR business member since the 1950s and is active in both SPUR’s Urban Infrastructure Council and its Planning and Architecture Council. Regional Practice Leader of Higher Education Anders Carpenter spoke to us about how the firm is thinking differently to deliver buildings that are light on environmental impact and strong on community contribution.
Your project for UC Law San Francisco combines student and educator housing, classrooms, and community and public retail space in the Tenderloin. How did you envision the effect of these amenities?
Higher education campuses can help revitalize cities when they enhance the urban fabric. UC Law’s Academic Village is close to professional affiliation spaces like the state courts and other campuses like UCSF as well as to potential tech industry partners in the mid-Market area. Partnerships with the city and Urban Alchemy have allowed public amenity spaces to become vibrant ground-floor activators.
Perkins&Will has a long history of projects that repurpose existing buildings. Tell us about the benefits of this approach and how you’ve used it.
When we take on a project, we have two clients: the entity that hired us and the planet. Reuse of existing building stock and physical infrastructure can decarbonize new development by vastly reducing embodied carbon. Recent reuse projects include Building 12 at Pier 70, once one of the most productive shipyards in the country. The adaptive reuse celebrates local making and manufacturing with a grand market hall at the ground floor flanked by maker and fabrication spaces, with offices above. At the Potrero Power Station, a 130-foot steel power station will be converted into a boutique hotel, and the 300-foot-tall stack will be retained as a monument to the neighborhood’s past, with public indoor space on the ground level and an observation level above. In downtown Sacramento, we are converting the DGS office to housing. Reuse and conversions demand a balance of technical feasibility and potential for future uses. Striking this balance requires finding an existing structure that can be seismically retrofit to meet a public or institutional need in a compelling location while improving the immediate civic context.
What other innovations are you using or investigating right now?
We’re a research-based design practice, and that helps inform how innovation can contribute to decarbonizing new development and delivering projects better, faster, and more cost-effectively. When appropriate for a project, we often advocate for mass timber structural systems. In these systems, crosslaminated timber is glued, doweled, or nailed together into a composite that competes well with concrete and steel for durability and fire resistance while reducing the carbon footprint, construction time, and cost. We completed California’s first mass timber office building at 1 De Haro Street in San Francisco, and we are currently designing and building several mass timber campus housing projects that also rely on modular prefabricated systems like wet pods for bathrooms and unitized mega-panel systems for exterior facades. We also collaborate with our engineer partners on housing projects to provide modular mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems that reduce operational carbon and embodied carbon by eliminating the need for long runs of pipes and ducts.
You’re working to bring vibrancy back to cities not just through your projects but in how you operate as an employer. What’s keeping your teams energized?
We have set up regular tours of underconstruction and completed projects so our staff can think about their work in a physical context, not just in a digital workflow. We also organize sketching tours for our teams across the city and tour projects by other architects to inspire fresh perspectives. The primary goal of our projects is to connect people through place, which is best achieved through in-person collaboration in the studio and on project sites. ✹