photo: Cesar Rubio

The San Francisco Architecture and the City Festival commences next week and we’re pleased to invite participants  to both take a tour of our Mission:House, as well as view our newly completed Urban Interstice Gallery’s inaugural exhibit.

As a part of the San Francisco Living: Home Tours weekend event, guests will be able to tour some of the city’s most architecturally distinctive residences.  The Mission:House will be one of the homes included on the tour, open for viewing on Saturday, September 12th.

The Mission:House is an 1100 sqft. “hybridizing” residence and living laboratory for a family of four (architect, landscape architect, and two daughters), who have made it their personal trial grounds for materials, light and unorthodox construction techniques. Experiments range from floors of expansive steel plates, walls of thermal plastics, and magnetic closet/display walls, to integrated passive energy strategies, ingenious waste-stream material reclamation, and high-tech thermal & solar power collection.

On the street a façade of shingled glass, built entirely of reclaimed material, creates an unusual “Greenskin” of refracted light through superimposed frames.  Inside a 50-foot long wall of sliding doors reconfigure the ground floor studio while upstairs an operable skylight stretches across the house to let in the sky (and rain). A 30-foot rear façade of sliding corrugated thermal plastic, looks into the timber bamboo canopy.  Translucent & luminous materials imbue the small home with a sense of volume and openness. Green magnetic walls slide and swing to absorb program, while the roof integrates an organic vegetable garden, hot tub, and a 4 kilowatt photo-voltaic array into a terraced topography of modular wood tiles.

If you are interested in learning more about the Mission:House, you can find more images and descriptions on our website.  You can obtain more information regarding the Home Tours and reserve your spot by visiting www.aiasf.org/hometours.

Downstairs from the living spaces of the Mission:House will be the inaugural exhibit of our newly completed Urban Interstice Gallery, Public Networks of Urban Access.  Relating to the Festival’s theme of  “Investigating Urban Metabolisms,” the exhibit showcases the emerging network of pedestrian access and pedestrian-centered environments that have been designed, built and improved upon in the last two decades in San Francisco.

The emerging pedestrian network is one that highlights the changing priorities of urban dwellers.  Priorities that are increasingly calling for the design of artifacts and architectural elements that bring us in contact with lost ecological systems, habitats and wilderness, and shelter us from the effects of the automobile.  Through Design we are reclaiming sidewalks, streets and parking areas.  Designers are finding creative ways to gain universal access to more wild landscapes, sensitive areas and the surrounding bay.  The exploration of these projects will be presented in photographs, drawings and narrative falling into the following topical areas:  Topographic Access, Pedestrian Streets, Water Access, Access to Sensitive Habitats.

We will be curating this exhibit which will showcase a number of public space projects in San Francisco.  The opening reception will be Tuesday, September 14th at 5:00 pm, with the exhibit open through September 25th.

The Urban Interstice Gallery is located at 3443 26th Street, between Bartlett and Mission Streets (Google Map Link).  Hours are from 2-6 pm Thursday – Saturday.