View from San Francisco: San Francisco may be suffering because of the collapse of the e-industry, but its ambitious infrastructure projects are a fair bid to make it the most civilized city on the US Pacific Coast

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2002 by John Ellis

What a difference a year makes. Last year San Francisco was experiencing all the irrational exuberance of Silicon Valley's Internet boom. The Bay Area economy epitomized the good times of the Clinton-era policies promoting globalization and high technology. The local real-estate market was white-hot; commercial vacancy rates in the city were less than 1 per cent; freeways were jammed with dot.com commuters from 5am onwards and you had to book reservations at the smartest restaurants months in advance. Now that the Internet bubble has burst and following the tragic events of 11 September, the city is returning to normal and a more sober reality. Commercial vacancy rates have risen to 25 per cent, thousands of former Internet workers are unemployed, restaurants throughout the city have closed and you can zip along the freeways and park practically anywhere. There is a sense of the end of an era.

Both the boom and its inevitable bust have been enormously disruptive to the social and economic life of the city. The spike in rents caused the displacement of thousands of small businesses and the transformation of San Francisco's older working-class neighbourhoods such as SOMA, Potrero Hill and the Mission District through gentrification and the construction of thousands of live/work lofts. The Planning Code, as a way of retaining blue-collar artists, permitted the construction of high-density loft units within mixed-use, formerly industrial neighbourhoods, but because of house price inflation they are more likely to be inhabited by hip Internet entrepreneurs. Some of the new loft projects have been quite spectacular contributing to the dynamism of the context they were built in, including those by San Francisco architects Stanley Saitowitz and Jim Jennings. San Francisco became the most expensive city in the US, and the shortage of affordable housing created a homeless population of nearly 10 000 (inciden tally almost the same number of homeless people as during the Great Depression in the '30s). It will take some time for the full impact of the bust to sink in. In the Financial District and SOMA there are at least 3.5 million square feet of office space still under construction, having been approved and started while the going was good. Stopping projects like these is like trying to slow down an oil-tanker.

The building I worked in until recently mirrored the whole saga. A 1925 era concrete-framed warehouse building near the Transbay Terminal, with no air-conditioning, one slow elevator and lousy lavatories, it was full of architects, graphic artists and landscape designers paying rents at less than $1 per square foot. With the boom, rents zoomed up to $7 sq ft and all the small design firms were kicked out and replaced with dot.com start-up companies. Now, after the bust, the building is half empty, rents are down to $2 sq ft and the largest tenant on the second floor is a company called Bankruptcy Services Inc.

In the 12 years since the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989, San Francisco has undergone an astonishing transformation, rivalling the reconstruction after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Huge amounts of public investment have been spent on new museums, public buildings, seismic retrofitting and improvements to the transportation infrastructure. The '90s was an era of growth and prosperity rivalling the first Gold Rush of 1849. Unlike previous booms, this one produced some important investment in the region's infrastructure and many new public buildings. Seismic retrofitting of public buildings started the economic resurgence with over $2.4 billion being spent on the renovation of the Beaux Arts era Civic Center alone.

Star out-of-town architects have designed many of the new projects still in the design stages, so that San Francisco will have a selection of new cultural buildings by the usual suspects. Herzog and De Meuron for the new DeYoung Museum and Renzo Piano for the reconstruction of the Academy of Sciences, both in Golden Gate Park. Daniel Libeskind and Ricardo Legorreta will contribute to the Yerba Buena Gardens architectural theme park with their Jewish and Mexican Art Museums.

Waterfront restored

One of the greatest recent achievements has been the restoration of the city's waterfront. The former double-decked elevated Embarcadero Freeway, which was built in the late 1950s and disfigured the city's access to the Bay, was badly damaged in the 1989 earthquake and has been torn down to be replaced with a fine boulevard, lined with stately rows of Canary Island palm trees. Contrary to all the worst fears of the traffic experts, the removal of the freeway did not cause gridlock or back-ups across the Bay, but has dispersed traffic easily along surface streets. Most importantly it has allowed the city to regain its waterfront and given access to the splendid Ferry Building and pier buildings. Along the new Embarcadero are two new light-rail lines, which expand the city's already extensive network: the expansion of the Market Street F Line heading north to Fisherman's Wharf which uses historic 1930s streamline era streetcars; the other heading south running the sleek new Italian Breda cars to Pac Bell Park l ocated at China Basin. Like many American cities in the '90s, San Francisco built a new downtown ballpark. Pac Bell Park is the new brick-clad retro-styled, privately financed baseball stadium, designed by HOK Sports. It is superbly sited within walking distance of Downtown and the nearby Caltrain Depot and faces the Bay so that players can hit a homerun into the water.