Visit central Berkeley and there are sights you expect to see: the Campanile rising serenely from the heart of campus. Students on the sidewalks, even after commencement. Aging men and women dressed as if it’s still 1974.
And then there’s the unexpected — like a downtown housing boom that shows no sign of dying down.
At least 10 apartment buildings ranging in height from five to 14 stories are under construction in downtown Berkeley, most of them within a block of the district’s spine, Shattuck Avenue. An equal number are approved or under review, including a proposed 25-story housing tower that would be only 60 feet shorter than the Campanile — the city’s tallest building.
Architecturally, let’s be honest: None of them will make people forget Julia Morgan or Bernard Maybeck, whose atmospheric buildings of shingled wood and thick masonry enriched the local landscape a century ago. But as downtown’s character is transformed, its two newest apartment buildings are worth checking out for another all-important reason — to gauge whether the newcomers connect with their surroundings in meaningful ways, particularly where the structure meets the ground.
“The interface between a building and the sidewalk,” in the words of Berkeley architect and urban designer Dan Parolek. Or, as he also puts it, “the building from the knees down.”
The latest addition is Identity Logan Park, which fills eight stories with 135 student apartments at the corner of Shattuck and Durant avenues, replacing half of a now-demolished strip mall (the rest of the site will hold the second phase). The other, Aquatic Shattuck, opened last summer several blocks to the south at Carleton Street.
The latter is a much better fit, and not because it’s two stories smaller.
Identity Logan Park will line a block of Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley with eight stories of new housing. The first phase (back) opened recently, and the second phase is under construction.
Santiago Mejia/The ChronicleThe difference starts on the ground, where the first floor notches back beneath each broad bay, a saw-tooth response to Shattuck’s angled path that allows space for small patches of landscaping between the sidewalk and the building. Pulling back the ground floor from the property line also means the upper floors can extend over the sidewalk by as much as 3 feet.
All this sounds subtle, and it is, but the moves create an almost domestic tone for pedestrians along Shattuck. The building has a neighborly feel, no easy task at this scale, helped by trees that buffer the sidewalk from the street.
The floors above offer a contemporary take on Berkeley’s traditional stucco apartment buildings: The Aquatic lines up along Shattuck in four orderly bays above the strong recessed base, a vertical rhythm emphasized by black metal that frames the stacks of windows and extends out several inches from the muted tan facade.
The design by Trachtenberg Architects for developer Read Investments is subdued, no question. It also resembles five similar apartment buildings the team erected near the popular Fourth Street retail strip. En masse, things can get monotonous; here, next to a fire station built of concrete blocks, it’s a sophisticated upgrade to the larger roadside scene.
How you make a squat five-story building seem more vertical? At Aquatic Shattuck in Berkeley, Trachtenberg Architects used windows framed in black metal that pop out from bays covered in tan stucco.
Santiago Mejia/The ChronicleIdentity Logan Park, by contrast, feels arbitrary and detached.
This one’s flashier, with orange and white metal panels against a black stucco backdrop. It includes benches in a small corner plaza, a nice touch lacking at Aquatic Shattuck. Wonder of wonder, there even are retail tenants — a sweets shop and a bank that were retained from the strip mall.
Mostly, though, the building designed by Johnson Lyman Architects for developer Austin Group sits there like a crate of housing adorned with just enough surface “architecture” to get an OK from the city.
Retail spaces line the sidewalk with ample glass, but their flat design does nothing to pull you in. Around the corner on Bancroft, the final stretch of street frontage after the parking entrance is unadorned gray concrete, as if no one was paying attention.
The white and orange panels above were probably intended by the architects to break up the mass of the complex and add a little pizzazz. But the colored layers are so thin they look like applique; the depth hinted at in renderings is in short supply.
Quibbles aside, a colorful building at this scale fits downtown well, especially because Shattuck is a wide boulevard. With the campus two blocks to the east, and downtown’s BART station a few blocks north, it’s a natural place to add density and height.
There hasn’t been much fuss about the downtown boom, perhaps because the Bay Area’s housing crisis makes even die-hard Berkeleyites accept the need for change. There’s opposition to UC’s plan to build dorms on People’s Park, and the idea of adding dense affordable housing at the Ashby and North Berkeley BART stations, but downtown is moving forward.
If the pace of construction continues, such newcomers, in a decade, could look downright petite.
The Aquatic Shattuck on the south end of downtown Berkeley uses projecting bays and other design touches to add depth to a six-story building that is similar in scale to many being added to Bay Area cities.
Santiago Mejia/The ChronicleAlready, a 16-story hotel opened this spring at Shattuck and Center Street, downtown’s first tower in 50 years. Grosvenor, an international developer with offices in San Francisco, has cleared a corner at Shattuck and Berkeley Way to start work on 12 stories of apartments.
Those two structures are tall for a city of 124,000 people that has only two office buildings above 150 feet. But with the leeway given developers by the state’s housing density bonus, which allows up to 50% extra space and height when affordable units are added to a project, the old limits could be shattered. Trachtenberg Architects has designed what, if approved, would be a 25-story stab on Shattuck next to BART. Several other sites might also be able push this high.
That’s why it’s important to take stock of what’s coming up now. The two buildings on the south end of downtown offer pointers on how density can make an existing district more urbane — and what not to do.
Put another way: The more new buildings that come our way in the Bay Area, the more important that space below the kneecaps will be.
John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @johnkingsfchron
https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/Berkeley-housing-17203799.php
