The Power of Transparency

Northern California’s beloved public media outlet, KQED’s newly renovated headquarters based in San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood. INTERSTICE is working with the architecture team led by EHDD to create a publicly oriented streetscape and a new lobby that welcomes the community, providing a new street-facing amenity to the neighborhood, visitors, and staff of KQED. Additionally, INTERSTICE designed an outdoor rooftop terrace with a sweeping view of downtown San Francisco.  It will be used 24/7 by staff as an outdoor informal meeting and break space, and will serve as a special event space for the KQED community.

Invitation to the Community

The new design transforms KQED’S presence at Bryant and Mariposa Streets to make this corner the focal point of the block and emblematic of KQED’s engagement with their community. A primarily glass facade provides visual connection between the street and the entry lobby, where this new bright lobby space features a stepped seating amphitheater that is open to the public.  The lobby is complemented by streetscape furnishings that reinforce the publicness of these two newly connected spaces.

Rooftop Hub 

The new roof terrace is created as an exterior environment for staff—an outdoor space for breaks, impromptu meetings, and staff events, as well as a place for the Board of Directors to gather, and for fundraising and public events. The roof terrace has a 360-degree view of San Francisco—including downtown, Twin Peaks, and Bernal Heights—with the design integrating wind protection, seating, native plantings, and colorful and moveable furnishings to accommodate various daily activities. The terrace’s design concept is to provide both smaller outdoor rooms created within a planted edge and a flexible-use central space for larger events and gatherings.

The primary design element is a lengthy, raised planter that runs along the east edge of the terrace, with a surrounding screen wall to separate the terrace visually and acoustically from the adjacent roof and its mechanical structures. The built-in raised planter has niches for seating and a raised terraced edge to the south that accommodates a stepped, amphitheater-like seating edge for small groups.  The screen wall has a sculptural, woven block texture and panels of vine climbing cabling to create a vertical green backdrop to the terrace.  Plantings have been selected to create bird and butterfly habitat with an emphasis on native flowering species. 

Public Geometry

With KQED being a public media outlet squarely at the intersection of art, politics, and culture, it seems fitting that their new headquarters are geographically oriented towards the intersection of two busy thoroughfares in the Mission District. With this reorientation in mind, the architects on the project decided to add details into the design of the building and the multipurpose terrace that are also oriented towards the corner of Bryant and Mariposa Streets including the terrace planter geometry, the rooftop pavers, the lobby and workspace lighting, and boardroom flooring, all of which are aligned on a 45° angle that brings the geometry to the corner of the building, and creates an outward-facing, thematic grain to the project.

Program/Use Study

Trellis Form Study

• CAMPUS/CULTURAL
• Landscape