Developer Related California has won out over two other contenders for the 42,625 square foot plot of land at Transbay Block 8. Related will employ starchitect Rem Koolhaas to design a 550-foot residential tower there. Related offered $72 million for the land, besting Millennium's $70 million bid and Golub & Co.'s distant $49 million. The deal will mean the first Koolhaas building for San Francisco after one fell through more than a decade ago. His last proposed building for the city was Union Square's Prada store, which was to be a controversial 10-story building with 8,000 portholes in the place of windows. The building was scrapped after the attacks of September 11 and the burst of the dot-com bubble. The 69-year old Koolhaas has won architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, and been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People.
The future tower will be a mix of rental and condominium housing, with approximately 740 units, and 27 percent of the housing offered must be affordable to households making 60 percent of area media income. The terms set out in the city's RFP required developers to partner with a nonprofit for the below market rate housing, and Related California has partnered with Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. There will also be street-level retail space in the building, which will sit just two blocks south of the future Transbay Transit Center. Money received by the city in the deal for Transbay Block 8 will be put toward the construction of the transit center. The Koolhaas tower will sit between two other new residential developments: 556 units on one side at Blocks 6/7 and 570 units at Block 9 on the other side. In addition to the main tower, Block 8 is set to include a 50-foot residential townhouse development, open space and an underground parking garage. Koolhaas' firm OMA will be the primary architect on the project, handling the tower and master plan, while the secondary architect is local firm Fougeron Architecture, which will create the podium and mid-rise buildings on the site.
· Rem Koolhaas picked to design S.F. residential tower [SFGate]
· Transbay Block 8 is Back and Looking for Development Love [Curbed SF]
· Block 8 Request For Proposals [Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure]
· Proposals for Transbay Block 8 Include Potential Starchitect [Curbed SF]
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