Three years ago, at a two-day retreat in the Presidio, San Francisco architect Craig Hartman appeared before a crowd of urban-planning types at a meeting organized by his well-known global architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to give a talk on “holistic urban ecology.”
Self-effacing, trim, and unrumpled, Hartman is as low-key as they come. Even when expressing frustration over getting something built in this town—Hartman has been at SOM’s San Francisco office since 1990—he sounds as if he were posing a mild complaint about weak coffee. But behind his Clark Kent demeanor lies a passionate proselytizer. On that day in the Presidio, Hartman laid out a future in which companies such as his will design not just great-looking green buildings but whole neighborhoods that are so technologically advanced and well planned, they can actually begin to repair the damage we’ve done to the planet.
At that point, Hartman’s office had already won awards for green buildings, including one for the library on the new UC campus in Merced. His colleagues were aware of “smart growth,” known to some as the New Urbanism, which promotes putting high- and midrise residences in city centers, within walking distance of public transit, markets, and shops. They may even have realized that homes and workplaces consume more energy and emit more carbon dioxide than anything else, even the cars and buses we use to travel between them. If we live closer together in more intelligent structures, Hartman argued, it will not only have an effect on global warming, but also inevitably lead to more and better ideas for change. “Cities can be citadels of great intellectual capital,” Hartman told me recently, echoing his Presidio speech. “Most patents and other metrics of innovation come from places of high-density living. It’s possible to make environments that help to elevate and enrich this.”
Hartman wanted to see every building his office worked on “advance the cause” in some way. “It was very exciting,” recalls San Francisco managing partner Gene Schnair, who says Hartman was one of the reasons he moved here from SOM’s Chicago office. “He’s the one who began articulating the broader view, who said, ‘Let’s think beyond sustainability to regeneration.’”
When the books on 21st-century urban forms are written, Hartman will surely have a prominent place in them. He has already received acclaim for his architectural work. In 2001, his California colleagues in the American Institute of Architects gave him their Maybeck Award, presented for sustained achievement over at least 10 years; at 51, Hartman was the youngest recipient ever. Over the past decade, he has designed a number of other greatly admired buildings, most of them in the Bay Area. Two recently completed masterpieces—the awe-inspiring, sunlight-filled Cathedral of Christ the Light, in Oakland, and the serene yet dynamic U.S. Embassy complex in Beijing—put him in a class with starchitects like Frank Gehry.
But Hartman is more than an architect with a singular vision. He’s an urban philosopher on the same plane as influential writer Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). After taking on four massive redevelopment projects in the past decade—two in San Francisco and two in China—he has become a master of neighborhood reinvention.
You’ve seen the renderings for the post-Navy Treasure Island? Hartman came in after the original plans, which proposed spreading housing across the entire island, were nixed. As his office’s design partner, Hartman led work on plans for a much denser mini-city of up to 20,000 people, who would live in buildings from 3 to 65 stories high, nearly all located less than a three-minute walk from ferries, buses, or shuttles, with dry cleaners and cafés also footsteps away. His proposed revamp of Parkmerced, the 1950s housing development just south of San Francisco State University, involves creating a much more compact web of pedestrian- and bike-friendly streets; replacing aging apartments with three-to-six-story buildings and midrise towers to nearly triple the population, to around 21,000; dramatically increasing access to public transit; and developing a major organic farm.
Hartman’s work in China is even grander in scope. In Beijing, SOM’s master plan turned 11 million square feet of industrial land into a new Wall Street, complete with 24 buildings, in seven years—well in time for the Olympics. And along the Pearl River, in Guangzhou, a high-speed ferry ride from Hong Kong, Hartman is overseeing work on an epic, 13.5-square-mile project that involves 8,800 buildings (5,600 of them new), a realigned subway line, and new canals to mitigate flooding.
For each of these projects, Hartman organized teams of architectural designers, structural engineers, and landscape architects, and he seems to be equally engaged in every aspect of the work. For instance, the design for an office building at 350 Mission Street, near the someday Transbay Transit Center, calls for using concrete instead of steel. But how to use less concrete more efficiently, so the ceilings can be higher and more light can come in? This is the type of thing Hartman thinks about. In this case, he prompted SOM’s top structural engineer, Mark Sarkisian, to try tightly binding bales of plastic bags and pouring the concrete around them, which dramatically reduced the amount of concrete needed and reused millions of plastic bags. “I just sort of said, ‘Wouldn’t this be an interesting idea?’” he adds modestly. “Mark was generous enough to share the credit with me.” Now there’s a patent pending.
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