Competition looks at redesign for S.F. Bay as sea levels rises

Bay Area residents know how hard it is to get a full sense of the large and constantly shifting shoreline that frames the body of water at the center of this region.

Now imagine you’re an architect or landscape architect from outside the United States, embarking on an eight-month effort to conceive how different parts of the overall waterfront might function generations from now — not just ecologically, but also in terms of the people and cultures along it.

“I’m still overwhelmed by the scale,” confessed David Tickle, a principal at Hassell, an Australian design firm. “The different waterfronts, the communities, the infrastructures and potential disasters.”

Tickle’s firm leads one of the 10 teams that will be awarded $250,000 each to come up with design responses to the challenges posed by sea level rise in the Bay Area. The competition was organized by Resilient by Design, a local nonprofit that has support from several Bay Area government agencies and is funded in large part by a $4.6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

It’s an unusual challenge — a response not to a natural disaster but the scientific consensus that sea level rise will accelerate sharply in coming decades. Tides could climb between 18 and 66 inches within the bay by 2100, according to a 2012 study by the National Research Council.

The format is unusual as well, which is why Tickle and his peers are spending this week immersed in the region’s landscapes and politics.

In a typical competition, participants would know exactly what location they were to tackle. That’s not the case with what’s called “Bay Area Challenge.” Each team will be assigned a specific location in December, with their design responses to be unveiled in May.

Leaders of all 10 teams were on the Richmond waterfront Sunday for the festive launch of the endeavor. Monday was for scientific presentations in Berkeley as well as the teams introducing themselves to each other. The past two days consisted largely of visits to sites along the East Bay waterfront.

There’s a lot to learn.

The first stop Tuesday was the Bridge Yard, a gaunt but airy structure of steel and glass from 1938 near the Bay Bridge toll booths in Oakland. Built as a maintenance facility for streetcars, it now sits within an area dubbed Gateway Park.

The eastern approach to the Bay Bridge is extremely susceptible to sea level rise and storm surges, which makes it one of the potential areas to be tackled. The point of the two-hour visit was to see it firsthand — and to hear park boosters explain why a former construction staging area, noisy and stark, deserved the attention of one of the teams.

“This would be a park for things too loud, too raucous, too dirty for more pristine parks,” said landscape architect Sarah Kuehl, who has worked since 2010 on visions for the unusual strip between the bridge and the Port of Oakland. She was the last of a half-dozen or so Gateway advocates to speak. “I hope someone will pick this as their site. It needs the spotlight that a competition like this would bring.”

Then it was back to the buses for the various architects, hydraulic engineers, urban designers, community liaisons and environmental planners. There was a presentation over lunch and a bus tour of shoreline candidates, including the former naval air station in Alameda. Also, an evening seminar at the Exploratorium held by the San Francisco Estuary Institute.

Wednesday there were stops in such localized destinations as Arrowhead Marsh, where San Leandro Creek enters the bay. Thursday, the itinerary will include Martinez and Pittsburg, followed by a “community conversation around poverty and climate resilience” hosted by the Greenbelt Alliance.

If the multiday tour sounds daunting, get this: Three more are scheduled before sites are assigned.

To prepare the East Bay itinerary, “We spent an afternoon with maps and lists and figured out where we wanted to go,” said Amy Chester, who is working with Resilient by Design. She is managing director for Rebuild by Design — the competition held after Hurricane Sandy ravaged New York in 2012 and the model for the Bay Area effort.

For teams with firms based well beyond the region, travel expenses alone can eat into the $250,000 awards pretty fast. Yet far-flung participants on Monday said there’s value in the extended preparation before “real” design begins.

“There’s a DNA for us to discover in the different areas and complexities,” said Matthijs Bouw of the Dutch firm One Architecture, which shares leadership of a team that includes Denmark’s Bjarke Ingels Group and Sherwood Design Engineers of San Francisco. “It’s critical to look at everything.”

There’s a similar sentiment from architect Claire Weisz of New York’s WXY, which is part of a team led by Bionic, a San Francisco landscape architecture firm.

“Any urban designer or architect wants to be here, figuring out some new tools,” said Weisz, whose firm also took part in Rebuild by Design. “That’s really the issue here. There’s no immediate crisis — so can we tweak our systems with an eye to the future?”

More information

On the competition: www.resilientbayarea.org/

The Chronicle’s 2016 series “Rising Reality”: projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/sea-level-rise/