My take: The Rogers proposal was the only one of real architectural merit.
The light and open (and cheap!) bus deck, losing unnecessary structure and opening out the street, is thoughtful and elegant.
The Rogers tower design is exciting, visually arresting, context-sensitive while context-challenging, structurally clever, functionally balanced, intellectually engaging, and would, if built after years of philistine NIMBY hell, have come to be seen as an iconic asset to the city.
SOM was technically right to have reconsidered the bus deck design, but technically right has nothing to do with (habitually grotesquely incompetent and ignorant) Bay Area public transporation "engineering." I would very much like to have seen something like the two-level bus design go forward (recall that the conceptual bus terminal in the original approved EIS/EIR was partially double level.) The "great hall" of the SOM design, funnelling all rail passengers though one choke point despite the fact that trains are inherently long, skinny objects, is superficially appealing, but, I suspect, would ultimately be under-used without some (quite feasible) repurposing.
The SOM tower design has obvious appeal, as evidenced by the drumbeat of cheerleading for it here. The structural solution at street level certainly attracts my admiration, but overall I find the appearance too easy to please and a little too ready to fit in among the almost uniformly undistinguished towers of our little urban backwater. I don't expect to change anybody's opinion.
The Pelli proposal has nothing to recommend it at all from my perspective, apart from the cash premium. The park will be unused, the pandering demonisation of evil bus exhaust (to be magically cleansed by the parklands) was irritating, there's such a thing as too much Ned Kahn, no obvious thought was devoted to any transportion or pedestrian circulation issues, and the tower is nearly entirely without merit. (I say this despite the fact that the Pelli-designed but SF-Planning-step-back-butchered tower further down Mission Street is one of my favourite buildings in San Francisco.)
The competition outcome was about what one might have expected, given that it was set up as a development contest, and that the real sources of excitement and innovation in architectural design, and
all global expertise in transporation engineering, were excluded from the process: the first by effectively limiting participation to the top tier of starchitects and mega-practices (no Finnish graduate students or small Taiwanese firms need apply; nor for that matter firms like
GMP with
real transportation engineering expertise); the second by setting in stone grotesquely incompetent TJPA/Caltrain/local-consultant "engineering" decisions made over the years and effectively disallowing putative terminal designers from doing design or engaging real experts -- in fact, deviation from sub-functional sub-mediocrity was actively punished by the jury and the agency technical team.
Oh well.
It's not like one can expect anythings in San Francisco to turn out optimally, or ever particularly well.
At least we will continue to have a functioning bus terminal in downtown San Francisco, something absolutely vital for the local economy and environonment, even if the hoped-for rail extension has been so catastrophically (and unnecessarily!) mis-designed that it may better remain unrealised for some time to come.
(At least we didn't get a self-derivative Calatrava toss-off...)