Once exciting rainbow-striped Mission building cuts back on colors

In June, we saw a peek at the proposed new mixed-use building on the corner of 16th and Florida streets, with its bedazzled facade of brightly colored vertical stripes scoring it up and down.

It was an unexpected direction to take the 50-unit, seven-story project. The window placement was all over the place, and the prismatic spray of colored accents seemed almost arbitrary in placement.

Still, we kind of liked its tooty-fruity vibe, if only for upending the more rote designs you see popping up elsewhere.

But if you were one of those people who found the original look proposed by San Francisco-based D-Scheme too outlandish, you’ll be relieved to hear that the latest round of renderings reveals a much more traditional presentation.

As you can see, the latest renderings (featured on BuzzBuzzHome and the D-Scheme site) keeps the racing stripes, but they now look more like accents than the centerpiece visual element.

While the colored strips do now run the entire height of the building, their palette has become smaller and more muted, and their position alongside the banks of windows makes them appear more uniform and less haphazard.

The old riffled, graphite-colored facade is gone too, replaced by those much larger and more evenly spaced windows.

This is almost certainly a more practical design, although it’s a bit less exciting too. No one at D-Scheme was immediately available for comment, although their site says that the building’s look is “influenced by the diversity of the surrounding neighborhood.”

D-Scheme

(Which would seem to explain the previous design a bit better than this current one.)

Previously we noted that the neighborhood affordable housing developer, Mission Economic Development Agency, objected to this project, arguing that nine affordable units out of 53 simply doesn’t serve the neighborhood.

The total unit count seems to have come down a bit (to 50) since then.

• Riffled and Striped Building [Curbed SF]
• 2445 16th Street renderings [BuzzBuzz]
• 2445 16th Street [D-Scheme]