Peak Experience

“San Francisco is defined by its hills. They give rise to, even are, its landmarks: Coit Tower, Nob Hill, the cable cars. They are the mirror image of the neighborhoods into which they divide The City. They shape the fog, guiding it away from sunny districts and into others. What better way to know San Francisco than to know its hills?” — Dave Schweisguth

Source: Schweisguth, Dave. “How Many Hills Are There In San Francisco?” SFGazetteer.com: Bits of San Francisco Geography

Drawing from the nearly 53 hills that frame San Francisco’s most diverse and engaging neighborhoods, Peak Experience reconceives the hills of SF into a series of varying and undulating mounds that frame a mix of uses that promote the integration of play into traditional street models. Situated along the stretch of Embarcadero and Fremont, Peak Experience builds upon the recreational corridor of the waterfront to establish a strong identity for Market Street through the augmentation of the flexible sidewalk zone to create an active corridor that supports interactive discovery, play and community engagement. Responding to the lack of views of SF’s landscape and often static streetscape elements, Peak Experience proposes a soft and flexible sidewalk zone that seeks to introduce a malleable street typology that provide a platform for varying community experiences, while educating users of SF geography.

Project Video: Peak Experience

Project sponsor: Miracle Play Systems

Materials List:

Geo Foam

Company: AEH Foam

Block size 36”x48”x96”

Quantity: 3 blocks

Rubberized Surfacing

Company: Miracle Play Group

Quantity: 250 SF

Color: Beige

Paint

Company: Sherwin Williams

Type: Exterior

Color: Tokyo Pink, Eggshell White

The design was derived from the 53 hills of San Fransisco.

The vision for this installation was to adapt the topography of these hills into a series of varying and undulating mounds that promote the integration of play into Market Street. Situated along the stretch of Embarcadero and Fremont, Peak Experience builds upon the recreational corridor of the waterfront to establish a strong identity for Market Street through the augmentation of the flexible sidewalk zone to create an active corridor that supports interactive discovery, play and community engagement. Responding to the lack of views of SF’s landscape and often static streetscape elements, Peak Experience proposes a soft and flexible sidewalk zone that seeks to introduce a malleable street typology that provide a platform for varying community experiences, while educating users of SF geography.

Given the space and budget for the project, we limited the scope to 3 hills: Telegraph, Nob and Russian hills. The hills were selected based off of community input.

We used Rhino, AutoCAD and ArcGIS to create the 3D models of the hills and developed them to be interesting, interactive 3D elements in along Market Street.

We worked with Krysler Associates to mill the geofoam blocks into the 3 hills. The time spent milled was approximately 2 days. Those mounds were shipped to Miracle Play Group where the rubber surfacing was applied.

Once the mounds were milled and surfaced, they were shipped back to our facilities to be painted.There we used an exterior paint to apply the pink color and a graffiti grade egg shell white spray paint, with stencils, for the notations.

The installation of the project was fairly straight forward. After fabrication was complete, the mounds were shipped via a flat bed truck to the site and placed.

We imagined that kids would be the primary user of this installation, and the design process was really built around that concept, from the slope of the hills, to using the exciting "tokyo pink" color. And the kids more than met our expectation! While their parents asked us if they could touch the installation, they were already climbing all over it.

What was most interesting, was the way the adults interacted with the installation. Most often, with hesitation, they would touch the rubber surfacing to figure out what it was, and then, with a very academic look they would study the names of the hills and the contour elevations. But a few of them, had some fun with it! We saw some back stretchers, cool hipsters, newsmen(!) and elegant ladies chilling on San Francisco's amazing hills.