Downtowns in the United States are entering a phase in which their most pervasive inherited forms–office towers raised above retail podiums–no longer correspond to the ways cities function. The assumption that a CBD (central business district) revolves around concentrated office employment has collapsed in the post-COVID, remote working era, exposing the need to rewrite and redraw its spatial diagram. The accelerating wave of office-to-residential conversions, even in recent buildings considered too deep to adapt, signals a decisive shift: downtown is becoming a fine-grained composite of living, working, learning, making, exhibiting, convening, and performing. The question is no longer which single use can anchor it, but how multiple programs can coexist while recalibrating one another’s protocols.

This condition is especially acute in San Francisco, where the rise of AI enterprises and new civic initiatives introduce temporalities and operational logics out of sync with inherited retail and office structures. The former San Francisco Centre, a 1.2 million square-foot block in the center of downtown, currently on the market, offers an exceptional platform for speculating on a new synthesis of programs at the convergence of major commercial, cultural, and transit corridors.

This redevelopment will require structural interventions, both subtractive and additive, or large-scale new construction: cuts through deep floor plates to accommodate oblique paths of light and movement; terraced elevated commons; hybrid social and retail spaces; new stacks or aggregates of co-living units; and volumes configured flexibly for exhibition, performance, training, and collaborative work to serve a multitude of tech mini-communities.

The studio will be conducted in collaboration with GSD 5251 The Development Project and will operate on two coordinated tracks: teams will define the programmatic and organizational framework, while each student independently develops a distinct architectural proposal. Design students will work in teams of two paired with groups of Master in Real Estate students. Early in the semester, these combined teams will establish the program, build block models, and test massing strategies, while each student simultaneously pursues an individual design trajectory focused on the project’s most public and circulatory spaces.

Modeling in Rhino, students will produce 3D abstract studies of masses and voids coordinated with wide columnar elements, forming a methodological basis for new atrium types with branching spatial entrails and circulatory extensions engaging the cores. The form, structure, and scale of these experimental models will evoke approaches to preserving, transforming, adding to, or replacing the existing structure. After midterm, the individual studies will integrate with or strategically inflect the team proposals, culminating in two distinct design outcomes per team.

We will travel to San Francisco to meet stakeholders, civic leaders, developers, and architects, and to tour recent conversions and mixed-use projects where programmatic transformations are emerging. The ambition is to treat downtown not as a fixed morphology but as a montage of spatial forms requiring reintegration, and to derive from their synthesis a new urban figure capable of sustaining density, diversity, and civic life without reverting to obsolete geometries.