Considering that the minimum wage hasn’t kept pace with inflation since 1968, what’s the average resident to do? An unprecedented number of unhoused people have no choice but to sleep on the streets. While some city governments are simply sweeping the houseless population from one park to the next like a game of whack-a-mole, groups like DignityMoves are focusing on building communities of tiny homes as a temporary measure until more permanent housing can be secured.

DignityMoves announced two inaugural communities in San Francisco and Santa Barbara last month, which cost about $30,000 per room (including all communal spaces) and took just a few months to build. Architecture firm Gensler joined tiny home builder Boss Homes to design prefabricated panel systems that could be assembled on sites secured by DignityMoves – typically vacant land or sparkling lots. Each project offers 70 rooms as well as shared bathroom and shower facilities, dining buildings, computer labs, clinics, and community spaces. The 33 Gough Street community in San Francisco has already begun welcoming residents.

“Central to DignityMoves’ vision is that everyone receives a private room with a door that locks,” the group explained in a press release. “Many experiencing homelessness are reluctant to accept beds in traditional group shelters. DignityMoves believes offering this sense of security will make clients more willing to engage in the critical supportive services needed to address the barriers to stable housing. One resident shared, ‘When I was living in my tent, I felt like I was constantly in survival mode, worried about my safety and where I might find my next meal. Now I am warm and dry and can lock my door at night.’”

These temporary, portable tiny homes are designed to last about 20 years. For structures that need a longer lifespan, DignityMoves partners with other manufacturers like Connect Homes, who built a 60-room community on city-owned land in the city of Rohnert Park. The group also collaborates with local agencies who provide supportive services like case management, mental and behavioral healthcare, job placement, and housing placement support. Private philanthropy and impact investors provide the funding.

San Francisco’s tiny home village will replace a city-sanctioned “safe sleeping village” full of tents. Though not exactly luxurious, the tiny houses are certainly an improvement over fabric shelters, especially in winter.

Crucially, DignityMoves sees them as just one tool in a toolkit for addressing homelessness; they’re not an all-in-one solution. What comes next is much more important. Organizers need only look to the spectacular failure of another recent attempt at offering temporary-to-permanent shelter to see why.

After authorities cleared an encampment at Echo Park in Los Angeles and provided transitional housing under a state program called Project Roomkey, only 17 people received long-term housing out of 183 displaced campers. Some of those people reported being placed in a prison-like environment with strict curfews, no-visitor policies, and requirements that they come with no personal belongings. Some rules, like mandatory daily room checks, made it hard for people to find work. Some got kicked out, some chose to leave, and only a few ever received housing vouchers. Those who did reported being unable to find landlords who would take them.

Ultimately, the project demonstrates that automatically treating unhoused people like criminals isn’t the answer to the homelessness crisis. Housing needs to be more affordable for everyone, and achieving that is going to require massive systemic changes in the way we monetize real estate, compensate employees, and structure wealth in this country.

The post Can a New Tiny Home Village Help Address California’s Homelessness Crisis? first appeared on Dornob.

The exhibit, featuring works from 27 artists, is now open to the public at the historic Cliff House, a former restaurant and ballroom built in the mid-19th century that looks upon the former Sutro Baths and the Pacific Ocean. Presented in conjunction with the National Park Service, which now owns the neoclassical building, Land’s End features works from big-name artists and designers like Andy Goldsworthy and Iris van Herpen, emphasizing just how much we are affecting the health of our planet and how dire the situation truly is.

“On the Horizon” by Ana Teresa Fernández brings an installation of 16 transparent cylindrical pillars to the beach outside, each measuring six feet tall and filled with water from the Pacific to demonstrate how much sea levels are expected to rise in the next century.

For his 2008 film “migration (empire),” artist Doug Aitken created a series of surreal vignettes in which North American migratory animals take up residence in vacant motel rooms, exploring the relationship between wilderness and the sprawling built environment. He explains: “Filmed across the United States in roadside motels — ubiquitous structures that present powerful allegories of transience, mobility, and the westward expansion that has dramatically displaced and reduced animal populations in North America — migration (empire) asks us to consider our own infringement on the natural world.”

A series of sculptures and videos by Finnish artist Tuula Närhinen transform plastic trash that has washed ashore into strange aquatic specimens, mimicking organic sea life with the substance that threatens its existence. “For better or for worse,” the artist says, “plasticity is a testament to life’s metamorphic capability.”

“Geophagia” by Andy Goldsworthy features Cliff House’s former restaurant tables spread with white clay, producing cracked and fissured surfaces that call to mind the historic drought now ravaging California. The FOR-SITE Foundation’s website describes his “barren tables and dried earth” as “serv[ing] a poignant reminder of land degradation and increasing water and food scarcity.”

Fashion designer Iris Van Herpen, known for her innovative futuristic experimentations with textiles, also adds her “Blue Marble Dress” into the mix. Its hand-cut spheres are gradient-dyed from aquatic blue to white, layered and hand-stitched to create an optical illusion of floating. These spheres are made from Parley Ocean Plastic, itself sourced from upcycled marine debris in collaboration with Parley from the Oceans.

Cliff House proves to be a resonant fit with the works on display, and not just because the crashing ocean waves outside the windows are impossible to ignore. The installation was delayed in October due to record-setting rainstorms, and the roof springing a leak. The building itself is at risk of being claimed by the shifting geology of the setting.

“This is not a tranquil site,” says FOR-SITE founder Cheryl Haines. “You do feel quite raw and exposed on this precipice. I really felt beleaguered [during the installation] and it made me even more conscious of the fragility and violence that exist in nature and how important it is for us to respect that and do our small part to not aggravate it further.”

Land’s End is free to the public with timed entries for COVID safety, 11am to 5pm Thursday through Sunday until March 27th, 2022 at 1090 Point Lobos Ave., San Francisco. If you can’t visit in person, check out the virtual tour on the FOR-SITE website.

The post “Land’s End” Installation Brings the Urgency of Climate Change to SF’s Cliff House first appeared on Dornob.

Set beside the entrance to the nonprofit theater and gallery Artist’s Television Access (ATA), a beheaded human-sized stuffed honey bear lies beside a guillotine, a pool of blood-red satin streaming from its neck. Anti-gentrification activist group Gay Shame wrote a message on the glass outside, the first letter of each word spelling out its name: “GUILLOTINE ALL YIMBYS SINCE HONEYBEARS ALWAYS MEAN EVICTION.”

The group explains that “fnnch’s ‘cute art’ is not the innocent beautification of the urban landscape; its autonomy as art-for-art’s sake is illusory and deceptive,” the group writes in an artist’s statement tucked into the flyer box beside the door. “It’s all a public relations smokescreen disguising dispossession, displacement, and destruction that benefits investors, developers, and other capitalists (AKA YIMBYs, the State’s BFFs.) Artwashing is a direct product to the complicity of people like finch and his fans [/stans] in the weaponization of art by real estate interests. They do this to increase property values, which forces out low-income renters of color; many of them trans or queer.”

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San Francisco has changed a lot in the last two decades, largely as a result of the tech industry that has sprung up around the Bay Area. The influx of wealthy transplants drove up the cost of living, instigated a housing crisis, dramatically worsened homelessness, and resulted in the displacement of many long-term residents, especially low-income minorities. Now the most expensive city in the U.S., San Francisco is rapidly losing the culture that made it an interesting place to live and visit in the first place, and the effects are bleeding into adjacent cities like Oakland.

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To activist groups like Gay Shame and other locals, mainstream (read: white and wealthy) LGBT people are part of the problem. The honey bear motif was already spreading through the city before the pandemic, but became even more prominent in 2020 and 2021, with mask-wearing bears appearing on buses and transit shelters; in March, fnnch sold a non-fungible token of a honey bear portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for $64,000. Then the San Francisco LGBT Center commissioned fnnch (a straight artist) to paint a large mural of three bears on its exterior wall, and the backlash exploded. In a recorded confrontation with another local activist, fnnch said “I’m from Missouri. I immigrated here. I’m an immigrant to San Francisco.” Needless to say, these comments didn’t help; his mural was defaced and then painted over with works by queer artists.

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Gay Shame first formed as a protest against the corporatization of Pride (hence the name), and is known for calling out instances in which the mainstream Bay Area LGBTQ+ community is complicit in gentrification and displacement. Their window display will remain in place through September 1st at 992 Valencia Street, and you can read more about their perspective at GayShame.net.

The post A Beheaded Honey Bear Illuminates Anger Over San Francisco Gentrification first appeared on Dornob.

Beginning back in December 2020 as one of 40 of Illuminate SF’s annual Festival of Light installations, “Entwined” is comprised of three synthetic trees and 16 bushes, all topped with thousands of LED light cubes. Colors chromatically flow in and out of the “leaves.” The San Francisco Recreation and Parks describes the variety of LED effects as “building a sense of awe,” fashioning “raindrops on the pavement, lighting and thunderstorms, wind blowing tall grass and flowers, and ripples on a pond.”

The mystical combination of darkness and glowing nature gives visitors the impression of being transported to a futuristic enchanted forest. Says San Francisco Recreation and Park General Manager Phil Ginsburg: “a twilight stroll through the park’s east [is] truly magical this winter.”

“Entwined is an immersive light experience for Golden Gate Park visitors to explore, engage with, and enjoy,” explains Entwined creator and industrial artist Charles Gadeken. “What does the ‘tree of life’ look like in the world, post-nature? The installation is my latest exploration of this question, blending timeless natural objects with abstract forms and modern technology to evoke wonder, magic, and joy.”

Situated in Golden Gate Park’s Peacock Meadow, Gadeken’s trees range in height from 12 to 20 feet, with their glowing canopies stretching as wide as 30 feet. The trunks and roots were constructed from steel plates using a combination of CNC-cut and hand-rolled strips to generate both organic and boxy shapes. He included both four and eight-inch plastic cubes for the tops, each with 16-channel programmable LED lights, allowing “millions of colors [to] move through the trees’ leaves in hypnotic waves,” according to the artist.

While new to Golden Gate Park, Gadeken has showcased a five-tree version of Entwined in several venues since 2017, including Las Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival and the Toronto Light Festival. In years past it was intended to be more hands-on, with visitors encouraged to climb around on the roots and have “a direct physical interaction with the piece of art.”

Due to the pandemic, however, this latest installation is a socially-distanced affair, spread out over an acre of land with more looking and less touching involved.

As an artist, Gadeken has been producing copper, bronze, and steel pieces in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 years. Inspired by the objects, structures, and processes in the world around him, he says his work “depicts natural objects in fantastic ways and realizes the potential for serendipity in everyday life.” He also hopes to “instill a sense of play into the environment.”

Gadeken uses his imaginative inventions to encourage others to be creative as well. From 2019 to 2020, he was an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University in the Electrical Engineering Department, where he taught his students about kinetic light art sculptures.

The lights of “Entwined” come on from 4 to 10 pm daily. Although originally slated to run through February 28th, the exhibit’s popularity has yielded it an extension through Sunday, April 4th.

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Already in use by governments around the world, surveillance software like Amazon’s Rekognition draws from vast databases of private citizens’ faces in an effort to identify criminal suspects, find missing children, and prevent fraud. At this point in its development, however, it also has a high failure rate. Studies by researchers at MIT and Georgetown have even found that the technology is significantly less accurate at identifying people with darker skin, potentially reinforcing preexisting racial biases.

Aaron Peskin, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, said while introducing the measure in January that he had “yet to be persuaded that there [was] any beneficial use of this technology that outweigh[ed] the potential for government actors to use it for coercive and oppressive ends.”

Facial recognition technology can be integrated into surveillance cameras, police body cameras, and other electronic devices, enabling real-time identification of individuals within large crowds. According to Georgetown University researchers, if you’re an adult in the United States, there’s more than a 50 percent chance you’re already in a law enforcement facial recognition database — and it’s not clear exactly how those images are being stored and used.

Given that the San Francisco police department says it doesn’t currently use facial recognition, the city’s ordinance can seem a little preemptive. It also doesn’t apply to places like airports and ports, which are already overseen by federal agencies. But its supporters say the ordinance ensures that citizens have a say in how they’re watched and policed. While you can choose to keep your location-tracking iPhone at home or stay off Facebook in order to protect your own privacy, you can’t really opt out of facial recognition surveillance.

The ban doesn’t affect the technology that unlocks your iPhone or cameras owned by businesses and individuals, of course. Instead, it specifies that private individuals can still share tips or footage from private facial recognition cameras with police, but agencies can’t actively solicit information known to come from a facial recognition system. Critics of the ordinance worry that it’s too broad, permanently banning a technology that could soon play a key role in fighting crime.

“We want to use the technology to find missing elderly adults,” says Daniel Castro, Vice President of the Technology and Innovation Foundation, in a recent interview with NPR. “We want to use it to fight sex trafficking. We want to use it to quickly identify a suspect in case of a terrorist attack. There are very reasonable uses of the technology, and so to ban it wholesale is a very extreme reaction to a technology that many people are just now beginning to understand.”

Cities like Oakland, California and Somerville, Massachusetts are considering facial recognition bans of their own now, and Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem has even introduced an ACLU-backed bill that would impose a moratorium on facial recognition software in the entire state until accuracy concerns were adequately addressed. Meanwhile, as other cities and towns across the country continue buy into the technology, the government’s “facial biometrics” market is expected to grow from $136.9 million in 2018 to $375 million by 2025.

Images courtesy of Amazon Rekognition

The post San Francisco Votes to Ban Police Use of Facial Recognition Tech first appeared on Dornob.

Founded in 2016, GrokStyle is a San Francisco-based company that allows users to take photos of furniture, upload them to a visual search engine, and receive a list of matching items that can then be purchased online. It’s easy to see why this technology is useful to shoppers: virtually all of us have, at some point, spotted an amazing piece of furniture in person or in someone else’s photographs and wished we could own something similar. It’s the next logical step in the age of accelerated consumption, taking a whole lot of time and effort out of the process of identifying things we like and later acquiring them for our homes.

For Facebook, the appeal of GrokStyle lies in its artificial intelligence technology. The company is investing heavily in AI and computer vision, as well as its “Marketplace” (the built-in furniture shopping search engine connecting individual sellers to buyers in their areas). It’s easy to see how the acquisition could add another layer of functionality to Marketplace, but the technology behind the process could potentially be used in other ways, too. It’s not too far off from the sort of facial recognition tech Facebook is already working to develop, mapping data points in photographs to find matches within its sprawling databases.

No terms of the deal have been released as of yet, though GrokStyle has indicated that it will be winding down its operations without acknowledging Facebook’s involvement.

“We founded GrokStyle to reimagine the retail experience,” reads a message on the company’s website. “We built state-of-the-art AI and visual search technology to help consumers readily find, explore, and decide on purchases. We partnered with major retailers, demonstrated revenue lift with our technology, and improved the lives of consumers across the globe. We are incredibly proud of what we have built — and believe we have only scratched the surface of what is possible with computer vision.”

“Today, we are excited to share that we are moving on as a team. Our team and technology will live on, and we will continue using our AI to build great visual search experiences for retail. As part of this next chapter, we are winding down our business.”

Earlier this month, Facebook purchased the team behind blockchain technology company Chainspace, suggesting that it’s pushing forward with reported plans to build a cryptocurrency that would have a steady value relative to a global currency like the United States dollar. This “talent acquisition” was carried out for an undisclosed sum, but we do know that the startup was in the middle of seed funding when key members of its team got hired by Facebook.

The post Facebook’s New Furniture Shopping Startup Uses AI to Help You Buy first appeared on Dornob.

The Largent House at 49 Hopkins Avenue was designed specifically for the clients, as was commonly the case with Neutra’s projects. Although it had been deemed by the city not to be architecturally significant enough to warrant preservation, the house, which was recently demolished by a new owner, has already been ordered to be rebuilt.

Ross Johnston bought the two-story property for $1.7 million in 2017, at which time he was given permission to alter the house as long as the first floor was retained —presumably so that the house’s signature white flat roofs and staggered volumes would still be visible. Nonetheless, Johnston all but completely leveled the house, leaving only an internal stairway and door frame intact.

After the demolition was reported to the relevant authorities, the city of San Francisco’s Planning Commission ordered Johnston to “reconstruct the structure to its original footprint and massing,” and to use the same materials that were used in the initial building (in this case, white shingles and a lot of timber).

As is turns out, Johnston demolished the existing property to make way for a three-story, 4,000-square-foot house on the site that would better accommodate his six-person family. He tried to receive retroactive approval for the demolition but was eventually denied. Lucky for him, he will be allowed to continue his work as long as he recreates the Largent House’s original exterior in full — the interiors can be remodeled entirely at his own discretion. He’s also been ordered to erect a plaque outside the house upon its completion to give passers-by a chance to learn a little more about its original construction.

The San Francisco Planning Commission’s decision is as much about deterring other property owners from carrying out such illegal demolitions as it is to preserve the city’s architectural history. This type of “mansioning,” in which people purchase small plots and then redevelop them into extortionately expensive homes, is something that has increasingly been seen in San Francisco as of late. This phenomenon directly contributes to the city’s rising property values.

This is not the first time a San Francisco house of historic architectural significance has been demolished. It also happened in 2016, that time with a house by Willis Polk in Russian Hill. City Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards says: “We’re experiencing an epidemic of cannibalizing housing stock. I’m saddened by what our city has become.”

The post Man Ordered to Rebuild Demolished Richard Neutra House in San Francisco first appeared on Dornob.

The first phase of this $2.3 billion project was just completed in August of 2018, connecting the city’s new Salesforce Tower to the transit center itself. Of course, Salesforce is also financially connected to the project. The company pitched in $110 million to have their name put on the transit center — a practice more commonly seen with sports arenas and stadiums. Nonetheless, the Salesforce Transit Center is very much a public building.

The idea for the transit center was first proposed in 1999, followed by 10 years of planning and another 10 of construction. The underground concourse will be for Caltrains, with municipal buses running through the ground floor and regional buses the second. A 5.4-acre-linear rooftop park will be used to top the whole thing off. Buses can access the center directly via a bridge on the second floor bridge, which will effectively keep them off of surrounding city streets. The choreography of how this works is a lesson is shared transportation spaces.

The exterior of the building is a rhythmic façade of aluminum panels, with perforations allowing natural light to pierce deep into the building all throughout. From the street, the building’s inner white columns can barely be seen through the screens, stretching out at all kinds of angles to support the roof. Still, the first true impression of the interior comes in the form of a spacious 125-foot high central hall. The building was designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, while PWP Landscape Architecture was responsible for designing the linear park above.

Spanning five city blocks and a ton of connecting stations, the transit center will soon be a focal point and social gathering place for everyone in downtown San Francisco. The site of the park was in desperate need of good public space, and now, it’ll contain a playground, a 1,000-seat amphitheatre, a picnic area, and a café. Any mechanical systems coming out of the center’s roof will be hidden away behind berms in the park.

Some people see the Salesforce Transit Center as the “Grand Central Station of the west,” comparing it to the historic New York City train station made famous in film and television. In reality, the new hub is more akin to the inverse of New York’s Penn Station, a monumental neoclassical gem that was demolished in 1963 and replaced with Madison Square Garden. Today Penn Station exists beneath the arena, a situation that led one leading architecture historian to famously say: “one entered the city like a god. Perhaps it was really too much. One scuttles in now like a rat.” At the old San Francisco Transbay Terminal, the opposite is true. The old one scuttled in like a rat, but the new one enters triumphantly like a royal.

The post The Salesforce Transit Center is Making Commuting More Enjoyable first appeared on Dornob.

If you haven’t already used (or at least heard of) the acclaimed home rental website that’s been storming the traveling world and disrupting the hotel industry, we’d be very surprised. Founded in 2008, AirBnb has changed the accommodation game for good, allowing those on a budget (and also those not on a budget) to experience incredible cities all over the globe by offering affordable homestays and apartments rented out by YOU, the people of the world.

Find or list unique homes in quaint towns or bustling capitals, partake in exciting events and activities that you might not hear about from your local travel agents, and seek out adventures in distant lands or right on your doorstep. AirBnb aims to bring travelers and tourists closer to the people who want their area of the world to be explored, experienced, and thoroughly enjoyed.

The Concept

Inspired by all the different listings that were up on the website, the AirBnb “Environments” team collaborated with San Francisco-based architecture firm WRNS Studio to create some office spaces that reflect the aesthetics of 16 different cities from around the world! The warehouse-like building, situated at 999 Brannan Street in “The City by the Bay,” has undergone a complete cultural transformation, showcasing themes from places like Buenos Aires, Kyoto, Jaipur, and Amsterdam on each of its four stories.
The concept emulates the company’s “Belong Anywhere” ethos, featuring conference rooms that have been influenced by real-life listings. One room has taken on the look of an English castle, embodying the Victorian era with its lavish tufted Earl sofas and 19th-century window treatments. Another office owes its materials to 1880s Montana, furnished with rustic lanterns, animal skins, and a wood burning fireplace.

“We want it to feel like a custom home to every inhabitant.” — Aaron Taylor Harvey, Executive Creative Director of AirBnb Environments.

The Office Spaces

Each of the 16 workspaces houses a conference room, a phone room, and large communal tables, and all of the offices are linked together by a space referred to as “The Castle.” On the top floor is “The Boat,” a structural wooden piece reminiscent of a simple ship that’s been built with cubby holes to allow for private work. The office also boasts a yoga room, a wellness center, and storage areas for employees’ personal belongings — everything needed for a creative, bright, and thought-provoking work environment.

The first-ever listing to be advertised on AirBnb was, in fact, an apartment in San Francisco, so one of the rooms’ designs was created to be an exact replica of it. Sourcing various items from all over the world in order to achieve uncanny resemblances, the team even fitted this office with a bed to remind them of how it all began! Other spaces mimic the likes of Paris, Bali, and Reykjavik, further reinforcing the ideas of travel and adventure in the office.
“Simply having photos of listings and far-off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there.” — Brian Chesky, AirBnb Co-Founder and CEO.

The post AirBnb HQ Creates New Office Spaces Based on Site Listings first appeared on Dornob.

Architects and clients alike are having to get creative when it comes to building in the “City by the Bay,” especially since the Silicon Valley tech boom has caused the price of rental properties to skyrocket to some of the highest in the United States. Such insanely high prices mean that it could make more sense to buy or build in areas like this rather than throw so much money away, so it’s no surprise that dwellings are beginning to pop up in some unlikely places, such as, for example, in people’s backyards.

People have been building properties in the backyards of other homes for years now, but it is still strange to find architectural gems gracing the gardens of existing houses. This is what the San Francisco-based construction firm Thomas Building Group pulled off upon being given the challenge of constructing a modern family home in the leftover space behind a house in the Bay Area.

The narrow site, coupled with the presence of the existing house on it, presented a unique set of obstacles for the contractors, but they were more than willing to meet them head-on. By doing so, they created a spacious, light-filled home that takes full advantage of its privileged setting in the northern Californian metropolis.

The architects explain, “A unique project, the property was in the backyard of the home, which gave us some new challenges and exciting options. Vertical siding added to the overall height and varied level structure of the home. The project has an open floor plan with incredible views of San Francisco. The main features of the project are extra large windows that provide stunning views of San Francisco, as well as hand-picked vertical exterior siding that wraps into the home and all around.”

This overview encapsulates the main features of the house, and from the photos of it, you can see that the split-level volumes break up the massing (it could be a little problematic if the house looked like a single oppressive volume). Glazing on the roof over the dining area brings light into the home’s interiors, and its facade also makes use of large sections of fenestration.

The exterior timber cladding is echoed internally via the use of wooden boards on the ceiling and floors, creating warm and inviting spaces that are offset by clean white walls for a fresh and modern environment. Circulation has been pared back thanks to the incorporation of metal ladders in place of built-in staircases, which allows for a lighter feeling inside and unobstructed views of the surrounding cityscapes. The kitchen is fitted with white linear units that complement the walls and fit perfectly into the open-plan living space.

The post Beautiful Backyard San Francisco Home Capes for Urban Density first appeared on Dornob.

A section of San Francisco’s disused, half-demolished Bay Bridge could be recycled into a multipurpose structure called the Bay Bridge House, functioning as both a museum and an apartment rentable through AirBNB. The bridge, which has one of the largest spans in the world, links the city to Oakland; earthquake damage and other safety concerns led to the replacement of the eastern span in 2013.

The original Bay Bridge opened in 1936 and is on the National Register of Historic Places, but most of the pieces taken down during the three-year disassembly process will go to China as scrap material. A number of artists, architects and designers are gunning for pieces of the bridge, including local entrepreneur David Grieshaber, who dreamed up this project.

Bay Bridge House would use the 504 section of the old bridge to create a modern, self-sustaining eco housing and co-working space. The former pavement of the bridge would be used as the foundation, with the steel portions as the frame. The house would be placed in Oakland to preserve a little piece of the city’s history and keep it with the people. Will it ever really get built? Who knows – so far, the city hasn’t revealed any plans to release the materials for anything other than a new park planned for the east end of the new bridge.

“A piece of our history will be gone forever,” states the Bay Bridge House website. “Some of the bridge should remain behind for future generations to enjoy. There are plans for pieces in Gateway Park, maybe a pier with a view where the bridge once was and even talks of pieces in a museum. We think that something more creative should be done with some of the scrap. Let’s use a few small sections and create the most modern self-sustaining housing and eco multi-use space in the world.”

The post AirBNB Bridge: San Francisco’s Old Bay Recycled into Home first appeared on Dornob.