The Salesforce Transit Center is Making Commuting More Enjoyable
Once you have used a multimodal transit center in a major city, you start looking for that convenience in every city. Sadly, that option does not exist in most. In many cities, there is one bus terminal for mass transit, another for inter-city buses, a commuter train station, and an inter-city train station. San Francisco is hoping to eliminate all these extra degrees of transportation separation with the Salesforce Transit Center, a multimodal hub for municipal and inter-city buses.
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.
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.