Hasta La Ideas

John King’s got a great article up at the San Francisco Chronicle this morning describing a few designers’ visions to revive the eastern half of the Bay Bridge, commonly viewed “as an aged structure that can’t be replaced soon enough.”

The projects come out of a recent graduate course at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Taught by Frederic Schwartz and Marc L’Italien, who were inspired by the recent conversion of New York’s High Line into a park, the studio asked its participants to rethink one of “the Bay Area’s most recognizable structures” instead of demolishing it, “retaining at least some of it for public use.”

Above are a few of the proposals from this course. Top, David Dana embeds the old span with gardens, housing and a small hotel. Below, another hotel proposal by Lan Hu, but this one skips the gardens and is only accessible by ferry.

Read the article here.

Thanks, Steve!

(more…)