Building New Affordable Southern SF Neighborhoods

The Sunnydale Mixed Use and Affordable Housing Landscape creates a vibrant place for community from its at-grade pedestrian mews of turf mounds, with oversized animal sculptures, chess boards, and long picnic tables supporting family and neighborhood celebrations, to its more intimate podium-level communal courtyards,  where perimeter plantings frame social spaces.

Neighborhood Focused Design

The ground level is a service-rich mix of uses including space intended for a future market hall and grocery where two landscape terrace areas support food-related use with outdoor dining.  Across the Mews, a large office suite of housing management offers resident services for the larger Sunnydale development, including a Wellness Center and early childhood education center with a private outdoor courtyard.  The office suite has a lushly landscaped courtyard that provides light,  natural boulders and seating for lunch breaks and impromptu meetings.  At the western side of the site, the housing units face a future park and includes ground-level micro-retail spaces activating the street edge and providing opportunity for local residents to serve their community.

Public Facing Mews as Spine

The site design connects two new affordable housing communities creating a village-like pedestrian passage of vegetated, activated, and socially-oriented spaces.   This new San Francisco POPOS takes the form of a central Mews lined with retail, collective gathering spaces, and lobbies for the two residential communities, located as a public “spine” connecting the larger neighborhood-serving mixed-use perimeter and the community center to the north and housing community to the south.

Shared Green Courtyards

The podium level of each building parallels the ground-level mews and are enclosed garden courtyards that provide access to adjacent living units.  These second-level podiums are open to the street and sky. The internal pathways weave through these rooftop gardens to provide smaller intimate gathering spaces for residents, where they can dine outdoors, sit and enjoy the garden, or lounge with friends on larger furnishings.  Outdoor open bridges connect the wings across the central axis providing covered seating with views onto the long vistas over the deeply planted courts.

Outdoor Recreation

Games and dining areas are integrated into the surrounding landscape on multiple levels and the on-site child care has its own playful courtyard with carefully differentiated age groups occupying forest and meadow-themed play areas closely connected to the adjacent classrooms, cultivating an integrated creative environment for educational gardening, sand play, and imaginative partitions and furnishings to maximize cross-disciplinary learning and play.  A ceiling of festoon lights brings down the scale of the space and radiate from a central column, while a new tree provides additional canopy and shade for this safe and stimulating learning space for toddlers.

Sun Terrace

The south-facing upper terrace provides a warm and sheltered respite from the other more shaded court spaces and looks out over the street-edge plantings that surround the project maximizing porosity and groundwater recharge throughout the block of the 170-family unit housing complex. this space is furnished with picnic tables to accommodate family gatherings and celebrations.

 

• Landscape
• Public
• Urban Design