M is for Mission Bay

Neighborhoods exist in both mind and soil, creating atmosphere through expectation and personality through experience. So what will distinguish UCSF Mission Bay? Teaching and collaborative research. Yes. Urban amenities. Yes. Opportunities for bio-science partnerships. Yes. A generally sunny San Francisco microclimate. Yes again. But ultimately, ideas — preferably audacious ones — are what transform wasteland to dreamscape. And in daring to dream on its 43 acres of the 303-acre development known as Mission Bay, UCSF has dreamed big.

From its conception, Mission Bay has always been about changing the physical landscape, about buildings and benches, walkways and roadways, greens and gardens. After all, scientific ideas may be electric, but they need a home from which to generate and a charged atmosphere in which to flow. And as the construction of this new university neighborhood continues, the transforming scale of the project has registered on San Francisco's civic consciousness.

The first building, Genentech Hall, encompassing 240,000 square feet — and by itself larger than the Salk Institute — now rises five stories at the corner of 16th and Owens, the southern gateway to the campus.

It will open officially in early 2003. The second building, which will house neuroscientists and developmental biologists, is rising across the quad from Genentech Hall.

The third building, a community center — replete with athletic facilities, a restaurant, a bookstore, offices and an auditorium — will soon break ground. Student housing, a child care center, and a fourth building that will contain the Institute for Quantitative Biological Research, known as QB3, are part of the first phase as well.

Together they will encompass 9 acres and 950,000 square feet, a complex of bricks, brains and bedrooms within easy streetcar distance of downtown San Francisco and easy walking distance of the Embarcadero's waterfront promenade.

by Jeff Miller