How “Peak Experience” is Inspired by The San Fransisco Hills

Peak Experience, by Atlas Lab, Market Street, San Francisco. What does a main street in your city or town look like? A streetscape is typically a stretched linear entity that encourages circulation and has common elements such as street lighting; lanes paved in an orderly fashion for cars, bicycles and pedestrians; landscape planting; and some street furniture. One finds great diversity in a streetscape, and every street has a separate identity. However, we don’t always find streets that encourage us to partake in any activity besides fast-paced walking. As part of the Market Street Prototyping Festival, the unique streetscape prototype installation of the Peak Experience is driven by a desire to integrate play into traditional street models and provide opportunities for connection with others.

Peak Experience

For the people of San Francisco, Market Street has always been a passageway, not a destination. The city itself is built on rolling waves of hills. Besides the Golden Gate Bridge and the stunning views across San Francisco’s bay, the city is famous for the hilly topography of its peninsula, making it distinctive among American cities. The city’s iconic terrain has curated and framed its diverse neighborhoods. Market Street has been a different story. Built on a rare flat land, the area lacks the iconic views of San Francisco’s landscape. Although the main thoroughfare provides links to the vibrant surrounding neighborhoods, it lacks the character other spaces in the city provide and does not support a platform for community engagement.

Inspired by the Existing Topography The Peak Experience preconceives the hills of San Francisco into a collection of undulating mini-mounds that vary in elevation, just like the real hills. What better way to know San Francisco than to know its hills? If hiking up one of the original hills is not your idea of fun, then a new challenge awaits those who come in contact with Market Street — and that is simply to conquer each mini-mountain-like structure of the Peak Experience. The fuchsia-colored mounds invite a mix of uses, including offering a playful form of an interactive discovery, educating users about the city’s geology. Related Articles: 

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What are the hills made out of? The streetscape prototype for the festival involves the installation that occupies a 15-foot-by-15-foot site. The surface of the pedestrian route is transformed into an expressive display of the topography of three of San Francisco’s hills: Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and Telegraph Hill. The hills are made out of milled foam coated in the flexible play surface. The interesting addition to the design is that the mini-mounds also correspond to the primary street grid overlaid on the surface of each hill. Looks Can Be Deceiving… Don’t let the simplistic appearance fool you. The design process for Peak Experience consisted of extensive research of the hills of San Francisco. Through the collection of topographic data and mapping, each hill was assigned a vertical elevation on AutoCad to recreate the city’s hills accurately. The computerized models were then used to vertically exaggerate the surfaces to represent the true forms of these hills, stripped off from the urban fabric. Why not have this everywhere? The true benefit of the project stems from the engagement of the community with the public art installation. You can take a look at Atlas Lab’s Instagram page that shows children performing parkour like movements to see the vision of the project come true, while the adults snap pictures on their phones and the braver adults have a go at testing out the middle peak as a seating structure. The children’s interactions present a valid question of why our journeys down long streets have to consist of plain walking when we can spice it up with some kicks and flips in between? “100 percent unique to San Francisco” Peak Experience is simple, context-sensitive, and interactive for all ages. What is great about this project is that it is 100 percent unique to San Francisco, turning the city’s natural landmarks into rubberized mounds. The soft and flexible pedestrian zone within the street responds to the often static streetscape elements with a malleable street typology that ultimately breaks up the linear form of the thoroughfare. A Shift in Focus The recreational corridor introduces play into people’s daily lives, allowing passers-by to shift their focus from getting from point a to point b and realize that the journey can be quite an exhilarating experience. That being said, can you think of ways to recreate the streetscapes in your towns and cities to benefit community engagement and change perception?

Full Project Credits for Peak Experience

Project: PEAK EXPERIENCE – Deploying San Francisco’s iconic terrain as an agent for interactive discovery, play, and community engagement Project Type: Juried Competition – Temporary Installation Competition Name: Market Street Prototyping Festival Designers: Atlas Lab Location: Market Street, San Francisco Area: Around 20m2 Client: The public engaging in the 2015 San Francisco Market Street Prototyping Festival Year: 2015 Team Information: Andrew tenBrink and Kimberly Garza (ATLAS Lab)

Recommended Reading:

• Landscape Architecture: An Introduction by Robert Holden
• Landscape Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Manual of Environmental Planning and Design by Barry Starke

Article by Win Phyo

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