For my masters thesis in architecture, I designed a concept youth community center for San Francisco. I first became interested in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco because of the role it serves in a community near where I grew up. I frequently visited sites around the Bay Area, but I rarely ever saw Golden Gate Park. In those days, the park was considered dirty and dangerous, full of drugs and homelessness. So, I never got a sense of what the park is fundamentally about. I think many other California residents have this confusion, and this prevents them from coming to a consensus on ideas and objectives for this large spread of open space in the city.
A Park for the People
Now more than ever, San Francisco craves community. The park was originally established to attract more housing and community living. Built from a petition for a “pleasure ground,” Golden Gate Park was a place around which people could build homes and places of work. From my interviews for this project and from field observation at the park, it is evident that locals still value the social and recreational activities that build community. Each district in the city seeks its own identity, with local culture and neighborly relationships, and they all come together at the park. Today, despite the struggle with homelessness and drug needles, throngs of volunteers upkeep the green beauty, and various groups intermingle.
Golden Gate Park has less local visitors than it once had. About a quarter (47,000) of the city’s population visited the park daily, but today only five percent (35,600) visit the park. Its social activities have strayed from the local communities it was meant to serve.
Historically, the city park has often been restricted to certain classes or groups of people. In ancient times the typical park was often created as sacred territory. In medieval times parks appeared that were cordoned off as exclusive hunting areas.
Recently, the park has been introduced into dense urban conditions. The nature reserves have become more integrated with the built human construct as technical and economic needs have taken a greater role in the aesthetic, cultural, social and scientific design. As the city has become more built and impermanent, the park has become more natural and permanent.
Through this, Golden Gate Park has begun to break through the old class conflict and to bring relief. A fine network of streetcars made the park more accessible. A careful balance of activities for the rich and for the poor also led to high visitorship. In 1950 it was reported that “there is little occasion for the exercise of authority other than routine patrol. Unpleasant incidents in the park are few, and infractions in the law are rare.”
In this struggle today, to make the park significant to every person in the city, it is important to consider how the park might better serve their economic, social, spiritual, and cultural needs. Even still today, Golden Gate Park gets used only by particular segments of society. Especially considering the gentrification of San Francisco, lower-income people have little access.
A strategy to educate and motivate these sidelined groups should allow them to contribute to the park’s very fabric. Golden Gate Park was literally wrought from barren dunes, and the human foundation of this nature reserve is still an ongoing creation. Like any green space in the city, it is a permanent place that protects the people from the technology and wealth of city life, and thus is necessary for all. A transition into the park from the city should retain that community involvement, so that the park can be a permanent construct of culture. Neighborhoods need to retain their community identities during the transition into the park’s designed activities.
Balance Nature & Structure
A gateway into the park will connect the people to park activities. This community center will help educate the city’s community–especially the youth–to regard nature as part of their idiosyncratic cultural heritage It sacrifices this notion of a pristine natural world, apart from the noise and hustle of the modern city, because the park is artificial nature after all. My proposed community centers will transform the park into a permanent place for social concerns and collaboration, an institution that serves the needs of the people. Every group has something to bring.
People value the open space as decompression from dense urban situations. The balance of recreation and wilderness, hiking and car traffic, urban buildings and green nature requires much more critical thought than simply placing community center structures in the park. A community center needs to function as a portal between the city and park, which continually urges collaboration and creative input in the cultural and natural environment. I have solved this conflict by inserting nature characteristics in the building’s form and treating the garden as the central focus of community gathering.
This Community Center will add something modern to the Alvord Lake entrance into the park, to revitalize the area and to excite community involvement in the park. This gives the people control over this important public resource.
While San Francisco has no universal location for social gatherings, several neighborhoods may identify with Golden Gate park by considering sensory transitions, especially youth. Community entrances can begin to address specific community impositions that bring it down to a community-level identity. Each citizen of the city should have access and the pedestrian should receive accommodation.
For the location of the center, I diagrammed visitors’ travel time by mass transit, walking, and by automobile, considering topography. I looked at the proximity of nearby institutions that could be involved: elderly, youth, substance abuse help, and counseling locations. I looked at nearby park elements that could start to engage each community center to bring people into the park. As the site got narrowed down from these criteria, I looked at pedestrian, automobile, and mass transit access points to make each as accessible as possible to everyone.
The Youth Community center will be located central to younger populations. The east part of the park serves as a central point for higher populations of youth, and indeed central for the whole city. More schools, universities, and other places of learning can be found around this location. Well reputed youth centers, such as the Huckleberry House can be found around the panhandle. From there I considered parking in the park, recreational elements, and circulation paths in the park. Parking in the park can be found where Waller Street terminates near the Basketball recreational facility. Parking in nearby city blocks and on Stanyan street also is available to this project. Alvord Bridge is a main circulation point which pedestrians pass under to access the park.
Currently, segments of the population enter at various places and take many different paths through the park. With the Youth Community Center entrance, the community will have a main point of entry. From their residences, they will head to the iconic Haight Street where they will engage in commerce, socializing, and cultural integration. They will then proceed into the park through this edge. The design will carefully consider bother the transition from city to park and the transition from park to city.
Alvord lake was named after the Dutch designer of the park. It was once well-visited and beautiful with a fountain. Today it is run down and in need of revitalization. The March for Change and annual AIDS march pass through this entrance on to Sharon’s field for festivities. Alvord lake and the bridge beyond occur precisely on axis with the termination of Haight Street.
The design process started by considering how the Community Center strengthens that path into the park. It frames the view from Haight Street down the axis into the park. This framing device will gesture people through into the park while giving some indication of what happens there. Currently, this entrance into the park is adorned by decorative columns, which is typical for multiple pedestrian entrances into the park.
Diversity of Creativity
William Hammond Hall designed curved pathways for pedestrians and planted groves of vegetation in dells for the enjoyment of the visitors. Vegetation blocked strong winds and narrow curves discouraged the speed of horse buggies. This large open area grew in importance as relief from the city’s density and introduction to vegetation. Over the years, further natural elements and buildings established a green park from sand dunes, something Olmsted said would be impossible. The park is synthetic nature, man-made planting atop barren sand-dunes. Emphasis always came back to the creative input that all members of the city can add to the form that develops.
Industrial economy drives the city as a machine with ever-stricter rules that push the human experience away from natural rhythms. As we synchronize with an efficient schedule that demands a pace inconsistent with natural rhythms, we disconnect from nature and from each other. The park provides vital access to natural rhythms that are found in the natural elements. The park’s designer rectified the fast horse buggy’s pace with the natural elements.
The building architecture takes on a natural character and gestures the visitor under the Alvord Bridge and on to Sharon meadow and Sharon studio. Topography change opens up views to the Lake and surrounding foliage. The framed view opens up a formal garden where youth gather for nature interaction and group events. Building activities transition through obstructive concrete and open glazing to this point of convergence. The gallery is a special space with a flowing form that tilts the axis toward the Alvord Bridge. The organic form celebrates Youth achievement in art and cultural creation.
The street level ramps down to the Alvord Lake level to gesture the youth into the park. As the visitors return from the park into the city, the structure prepares them for that city condition. The Perforated Aluminum Skin is etched to take on the character of the foliage, to reflect and cloak itself in the nature. A heavier core structure contains private spaces and obstructs views. A variety of perforated metal skins provide daylight according to the program needs of each space.
This metal skin blocks direct sunlight from entering the upper building, while providing shelter at that walkway. But it gives way to open glazing for much of the lower building that filters into the central garden, making that a really daylit space.
The Fate of Animals by Franz Marc describes humankind destroying the diversity of nature. This Community center reverse this–not by denying humans to become involved in nature, but pointing to a new way of nursing this resource. As Fate of Animals greys as you go from left to right, we can increase color and interest by going from right to lieft. Genuinely celebrate diversity. Provide avenues from diverging paths of thought. Assume the character of the trees and bushes, not as mimicry but as inspiration. Provide hierarchy of space and activity. Finally, unite it all with sensory cross-continuation and total access to daylight.
(click for larger view)
Program of Spaces
This central outdoor space has gardens of various foliage sizes, a front courtyard, and ramps down at the Lake because of topography change. That topography change helps open things up to Alvord Lake and the park beyond. The most important spot is this grass space where children can play outdoor games, or where community festivals and celebrations can occur.
I looked at categories of goals from precedent Youth Centers to determine what can happen here. I categorized park activities and related each to what can happen here. The spaces need to be specific yet flexible for a variety of programs and schedules. The upper building, for example, has a gymnasium for volleyball, basketball, and other sports. A stage facilitates performances, like theater, music, dance and so forth, for community groups and school. And there is seating above the concrete service core.
The lower building has education help and workshops. Visiting schools and community programs can use these classrooms in a number of ways, from group therapy to summer camp. There is education help at the end, where kids can go to get help with homework, for study groups, for after school education, and to use computers and other technology tools and some kids might not otherwise have access to. In the second story above, there are more specific workshops: for music, painting, and other art. This has a balcony for collaboration and that connects the back to that central garden space. The idea is that things always opens up back to the garden.
Along each corridor, entire glazing walls slide open so that interior programs can start to take part in what’s going on in the garden. Like the service core in the building, there is a layer of benches, planters, and structural columns that run along either side.
The garden opens up to let more light into a garden layer below, which has picnic benches and is really designed around views of the lake.
It has space below for banquet events that might occur, like at openings for local art exhibits. This general lobby space opens up to outside sculpture exhibits which goes out below the actual structure of the gallery. This outside gallery relates to the lake and the main circulation from the garden. That main circulation ramp from the garden wraps around the gallery, even extending out over the Lake.
This is a site for future progress. More community centers will follow, and this one will change a little as the community changes. It boldly addresses the entrance to the park in a new way that I feel will enable people make it their own. It will be a refuge, a garden, not quite urban structure yet not quite park nature. People will come here to hang out, to study after school, for crisis intervention, for festivals and group events, for exercise, but when it comes down to it, to work towards a universal permanence in their community and environment.
