[WildCowboy]

John King on Arterra...

Mission Bay condominium complex stands out
Monday, August 4, 2008



Architecturally ambitious buildings - how can I put this? - tend to be terrible flirts.

They woo us with alluring images, brash and bold or soft and demure, depending on whether they're supposed to turn on the heat or settle into the landscape. Then comes the letdown - real life: The colors are flat, the taut lines sag, and everything that promised to be distinctive looks as generic as can be.

That's why the Arterra condominium complex in San Francisco's Mission Bay redevelopment district is such a welcome surprise. It's not a masterpiece, but it's a stylish newcomer with compact flair. And get this: It looks better in person than in the pictures.

The Arterra's centerpiece is a 16-story tower on Fifth Street designed as two squat interlocking cubes, one white and one dark blue. A six-story wing extends along Berry Street. A nine-story piece lines King Street where Interstate 280 touches down.

These dimensions aren't made for heroic architecture; they're dictated by the overall guidelines for Mission Bay's swath of former rail yards near the Giants ballpark. The guidelines were written to protect neighboring views and ensure well-landscaped streets, but they've spawned a procession of large residential buildings that range from mediocre to mundane.

The difference at Arterra is a mind-set that can be applied to any fast-changing city or suburb where budgets and zoning constraints rule out titanium-plated flamboyance: Keep things simple and make the details shine.

The tower by Kwan Henmi Architecture/Planning for Intracorp San Francisco doesn't fall into the trap of trying to make a stocky form look like a skyscraper - the type of illusion that works only in the make-believe of architectural imagery.

Instead, Arterra is all about solids and voids, notched recesses, contrasts that gleam. Literally. The outer layer of the building's skin is a European product, Trespa, made of resin and recycled paper. The blue is a deep blue. The white has a lacquered shine. Where windows pull back from the outer wall, the shift is accented by orange panels that stop just this side of lurid.

Trespa's green quotient is part of a sustainability push that's emphasized in Arterra's marketing (the roof of the Berry Street wing is covered in grasses, for instance). And by avoiding the district's beige and gray norm - greige? - Arterra is bound to stand out.

But sleek panels wouldn't matter if they wrapped yet another drab slab. That's where the contrasts add a tailored snap. Some of the windows are recessed 18 inches within the blue cube and some aren't. The white portions of the cube all have windows flush with the paneled skin.

The sense of depth is honest: Design architect Faraaz Mirza at Kwan Henmi took the seismic need for a thick concrete frame and treated it as a sort of grid, pulling some rooms out and nudging others back in. But the specific pattern is artifice - "just me playing," Mirza said during a tour of the project last week. "We went back and forth until we weren't allowed any more time."

That spirit is what the illustrations didn't convey. You search for rhythms in the set-back windows, syncopation in the orange strokes. The punched squares of deep blue make the white facades look streamlined rather than flat.

Is there a cost premium to all this? Not much. The Trespa costs more than a coat of stucco but less than precast concrete panels. The recessed windows mean slightly smaller units in terms of square footage, but they add to the individuality that might catch the eye of the target market, which is turning out to be child-free professionals who can afford a building where one-bedroom units with parking start at $587,500.

In other words, this is a 268-unit complex with a budget (and one where the $89 million cost of construction included 550 foundation piles driven as much as 200 feet into the Mission Bay mud). If the Trespa panels aren't as sumptuous as the brushed blue steel on the new Contemporary Jewish Museum near Yerba Buena Gardens, well, donors aren't footing the bill.

"There's a limit to what you can do - that's the reality of real estate - but we see the clear benefit" of making the effort to build something distinctive, said Michael McCone, vice president of development for Intracorp San Francisco. "If I can sell one or two more units a month, even at the same price, that works in our favor."

Ultimately, what sets Arterra apart from too many of its neighbors is a push to create something modest but memorable. Not all of it works - the syncopation gets fussy, and the nine-story wing along King Street is monolithic - but it never seems formulaic.

Arterra may prove to be an aberration, a bright spot amid the bland boxes that typify infill housing in San Francisco and other Bay Area cities. With luck, it will be something else: a signal to developers and architects that they shouldn't settle for something that just looks good on paper.

There's more at stake - the region we hand off to the next generation. We should strive for something that looks good in real life.

Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...DD2A121IVR.DTL