San Francisco 1900-2100

San Francisco Pier is a sunken and sinking Pier. Sunken metaphorically because culturally and historically, we have lost one of the busiest port in the world. That sense of identity it gave to the ferry building. With the introduction of the bay bridge, the significance of ferry building being the point of arrival and departure diminishes and now normalized into commercial usage. Sinking physically because rising sea level is going to engulf close to 1 kilometers of land into the pier in 100 years time. San Francisco pier’s identity morphed tremendously throughout the past few decades and will continue to change in years to come. 

The project seeks to pursue a new typology that addresses these two conditions as an effort to make San Francisco city a continuous city culturally and physically. As a reminder of what has been the image of San Francisco Pier, the architectural mass floats and sinks according to sea level tidal changes, creating a visual ephemerality of ships docking and un-docking at the port. Spatial function dictated by the variability of tidal changes provokes a way of rethinking how we can co-inhabit with water in near future. Programmatically, this intervention incorporates a maritime aquarium museum. The nature of the museum resurfaced traces of the past to project possibilities into the future.