Civic Duties
San Francisco’s Public Architecture forges a model for fitting
pro bono services into a firm’s regular practice.
By Andrew Blum
The Metropolis Observed
April 2004
Architecture has had its saints, but for most designers everyday pro
bono work—the equivalent of a lawyer’s counsel to the
neighborhood choral society—remains quietly absent from their
practice. John Peterson, proprietor of the small San Francisco firm
Peterson Architects, wonders why. “Architects have been very
squeamish about combining pro bono services with a business agenda,
while law firms do it all the time—very successfully,” he says.
Unable to find an established structure for pro bono work, he started
Public Architecture, a nonprofit currently “incubating” in his
office. The firm seeks out architectural projects in the public realm that
don’t have paying clients, then does the design work and advocates
to get them built—both in the service of the public interest and to
establish a method other firms can follow. Unlike the efforts of the late
Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio or Bryan Bell’s Design Corps,
Public Architecture is working within the politically dense urban
arena—and the parameters of a typical design practice. “I
didn’t come to Public Architecture from a deep need to do socially
relevant work in and of itself,” Peterson admits. “My interest
was as a designer in the world.”
The project began a few years ago when Peterson was busy designing homes
but looking for ways of keeping a more balanced practice—something
with, as he puts it, “a broader client.” Entering a
competition was one option, but the return seemed frustrating: hundreds
of firms putting all that work into different submissions, resulting in
one choice that might not even be built. “What if you took all of
those hours and put them toward fifty different projects that might be
important to their own community?” he wondered.
Soon a group of Peterson’s staff began work on a plan for their own
neighborhood, San Francisco’s South of Market district, a
light-industrial, commercial, and residential community still reeling
from the rapid boom and bust brought on by the dot-coms. The resulting
SoMa Open Space plan, as it came to be known, offers a small-scale
solution that can exist independent of the ongoing neighborhood battle
over gentrification and change: replace street parking a few spaces at a
time with paved sidewalk pop-outs programmed inexpensively with seating,
a skate park, a small dog run, an outdoor community gym, or a bus stop
café.
It’s a proposal that seems more responsive than prescriptive.
It’s also meant to be prototypical—an architectural solution
easily exportable to transitional light-industrial neighborhoods across
the country.
While the plan’s implementation is far from a sure thing, it stands
as an example of the contributions architects can make, even within the
parameters of their practice. Public Architecture has other projects
under way, such as a center for day laborers and a program called the
“one percent solution” that helps firms structure their pro
bono efforts and encourages them to devote one percent of working hours
to public service.
But the question nags: who put them in charge? Tim Culvahouse, editor of
ArcCA, the journal of the AIA California Council, and a Public
Architecture advisor, has an easy answer: “We want to do the
work,” he says. “It gets tiresome, as architects, to wait for
people to ask you to take on a project.” |
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Nonprofit firm Public Architecture’s first proposal, an open-space
plan for San Francisco’s industrial South of Market neighborhood,
incrementally replaces street parking (below) with “pop-out”
functions such as trees, seating, and play structures (above). |
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Courtesy Public Architecture |
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