If one looks at two San Francisco developments, one can see what it takes to develop and execute a uniform vision of what the developed area should look like.
And unlike the South Boston waterfront, with its maize of fragmented ownership and vested property rights and interests, the two San Francisco projects started with a single owner. Both are far larger than the South Boston waterfront as well.
One is Mission Bay, which I suspect if you don't like Fan Pier and the buildings on the Massport parcels, you won't like this development either. Mission Bay was intended and planned as a biotech center, and some bio tech companies have moved there. But now, another tech company, Workforce, has bought land that had been planned for biotech, and will build a 2 million sq ft HQ building. In doing so, that leaves only 500,000 sq ft of future space available for biotech. The result is that Mission Bay's original vision of becoming a counterpart to Kendall Square or Longwood with respect to biotech will be unfulfilled.
The other is the Presidio, which is being developed by a quasi-Federal agency, the Presidio Trust. Its powers are quite absolute. There was a recent proposal to build an art museum at the Presidio that ultimately came to naught. (Think of Harvard giving up its planned contemporary art museum on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, and multiply the antecedent controversy 25x. The Presidio museum re-design, like Harvard's museum sought to be unobtrusive.) People who love density and have little need for open space won't like what the Presidio is doing. But has the Presidio succeeded in executing its vision? Probably.
Below, the rendering for the redesigned art museum at the Presidio. It would have been privately funded, cost $150 million.
The original proposed design, that architect was sacked.
^^^ One of the lessons. Don't galvanize the potential opposition, which is what happened when the first design was unveiled.
Aerial view of the redesign.
