Perkins&Will - SPUR Business Member Profile

Article appears in SPUR Urbanist Fall 2024 print edition

By Anders Carpenter, Regional Practice Leader, Perkins&Will San Francisco

Interviewed by Ren Steen, Communications and Content Director, SPUR

An architecture firm brings fresh thinking to what buildings can do for people and the planet

The San Francisco office of international architecture and design firm Perkins&Will has been a SPUR business member since 1950 and is an active member of both SPUR’s Urban Infrastructure Council and its Planning and Architecture Council. Regional Practice Leader of Higher Education Anders Carpenter spoke to us about how the firm is thinking differently to deliver buildings that are light on environmental impact and strong on community contribution.

Your project for UC Law San Francisco combines student and educator housing, classrooms, community spaces, and public retail space in the Tenderloin. What were the goals of the project?

Higher education has the potential to contribute meaningfully to the revitalization of cities, particularly in the case of urban campuses like UC Law SF. The relationship must be symbiotic to be successful, where the campus enhances the urban fabric and the city in turn enhances the campus. UC Law’s Academic Village is close to professional affiliation spaces like the state courts and other campuses like UCSF and leverages the potential to draw in tech industry partners from nearby mid-Market. Partnerships with the city and Urban Alchemy have allowed the ground-level public amenity spaces to become vibrant activators of the urban fabric.

Perkins&Will has a long history of projects that reuse existing buildings for new purposes. Tell us about the benefits of this approach and how you’ve used it in recent projects.

When we take on a project, we have two clients: One is the entity that hired us, and the other is the planet. Reuse of existing building stock and physical infrastructure is one of the primary ways that the building industry will be able to decarbonize new development by vastly reducing embodied carbon. Recent reuse projects include Building 12 at Pier 70, once one of the most productive shipyards in the country. The adaptive reuse celebrates local making and manufacturing with a grand market hall at the ground floor flanked by maker and fabrication spaces, with offices above. At the Potrero Power Station, a 130-foot steel power station will be converted into a boutique hotel, and the 300-foot-tall stack will be retained as a monument to the neighborhood's past with public indoor space on the ground level and an observation level above. In downtown Sacramento, we are converting the DGS office to housing. Reuse and conversions demand a balance of technical feasibility and potential for future uses. Striking this balance relies on the bones of the existing structure being capable of a seismic retrofit, leveraging a compelling location in the city, and meeting a public or institutional need while improving the immediate civic context.

What other innovations are you using or investigating right now?

We’re a research-based design practice, and that helps inform how innovation can contribute to decarbonizing new development and delivering projects better, faster, and more cost effectively. When appropriate for a project, we often advocate for mass timber structural systems, where cross-laminated timber is glued, doweled, or nailed together into a composite that competes well with concrete and steel for durability and fire resistance. This approach reduces carbon footprint, construction time, and cost. We completed the first mass timber office building in California at 1 De Haro St. in San Francisco, and we are currently designing and building several mass timber campus housing projects that also rely on modular pre-fabricated systems like wet pods for bathrooms and unitized mega-panel systems for exterior facades. We also collaborate regularly with our engineer partners on housing projects to provide modular MEP systems that reduce operational carbon and embodied carbon by eliminating the need for long runs of pipes and ducts.

You’re working to bring vibrancy back to cities not just through your projects but in how you operate as an employer. What’s keeping your teams energized?

As we have returned to the office post-pandemic, we have set up regular tours of under-construction and completed projects for our staff and clients. For staff, this helps put their current work in physical context, outside of a typical daily digital workflow. For our clients, seeing our previous work in person allows them to gather information for their own projects and to meet our other clients to hear how projects achieved initial design goals and how they have functioned post-occupancy. We also organize sketching tours for our teams across the city and tour projects by other architects to inspire and facilitate fresh perspective. The primary goal of our projects is to connect people through place, and this is best achieved through in-person collaboration in the studio and on project sites.