Sunset Parklet

Rethinking Topography

The Sunset Parklet is a public parklet hosted by Other Avenues Food Store and Sea Breeze Café on Judah Street between 44th and 45th Avenues just a few blocks away from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Constructed of sustainable and reclaimed materials in compliance with Department of Public Works Guidelines, this new addition to the popular and growing San Francisco Parklet program challenges the notion of a café patio to produce an elegantly articulated work of sculptural mass that remains whimsical and engaging for all of the neighborhood’s diverse constituencies. The Sunset Parklet consists of four strips of material that undulate along its length, providing built-in seating, tables, and native plantings. The ambitious program performs as a community gathering space, bicycle parking, and children’s play area, while maintaining durability with low tech construction.

Articulated Around Undulations

INTERSTICE Architects explored the common sculptural aspects of the city to create this neighborhood parklet. San Francisco’s topography often stands in stark contrast with the regular city street grid—this became a guiding metaphor for the project’s development. Despite a deceptively regular street grid, San Francisco’s topography is famous for its undulations (like waves or sand dunes). Four streets cut from different parts of the city’s fabric would hardly matchup when placed next to one another. Rather, they would create juxtapositions along their sectional edges, and this became the operational device for how the Sunset Parklet would be articulated. The pro-bono design project is a monolithic riff on the diversity of the city’s street sections, by which four adjacent streets undulate and double back to create a rich interplay of ground, seats, tables, and planters for community use.

Diverging and Reuniting

The entire 50-foot-long site was conceptually divided into four equal 18-inch parallel strips which align at the uphill eastern edge in order to create an MTA-approved bike parking platform. Like a coastal edge, they continue flat and beach-like until these strips suddenly diverge vertically to follow seemingly independent programmatic objectives. Each of the four “street” strips undulate and double back upon themselves to become seats, lounge chairs, tables, benches, planters, and accessible areas. All of these elements reunite to form a raised planter that shields the windward western edge like the prow of an ancient longship.