![]() ![]() A large street-side plaza marks the project entry with tall palms set on a mound of grasses. Unit entries are marked with tough, drought-tolerant plantings, suited to the exposed location. The second strategy was in the handling of the streetscape at grade, unit entries line every public face of the project, relating to the streets as the existing neighborhood houses do. The streets become pedestrian lanes on site, maintaining long views to the city and shipyard beyond. The first was to visually extend the two streets that terminate into the project in order to give a sense of the urban grid moving through the project, avoiding a cloistered, private effect. Two major design strategies in the project reflect the intention to relate spatially and socially to the existing neighborhood. The landscape design of Pacific Cannery Lofts arose from three primary objectives: contributing aesthetically and socially valuable spaces to the community, creating an oasis for the residents from the intensely urban surroundings, and evoking a sense of the cultural and sociopolitical history of West Oakland. The landscape architect has played a leading role in this process, providing landscape plans that span several residential projects, connected via pedestrian routes, designing pocket parks, and creating a unifying streetscape to characterize the Central Station project. Neighborhood residents were invited to a series of community meetings early in the process to offer input regarding the direction of the larger plan. The larger neighborhood project brings together a number of developers to build over 1,000 new housing units, parks, improved streets, commercial spaces, and an urban farm around the renovated Central Train Station, to be restored for use as a public amenity. Pacific Cannery Lofts is part of a vision to develop nearly 30 acres of brownfield land into the new "Central Station" neighborhood. A maze of raised freeways, frontage roads, and rail lines to the west of the site create a noisy din. The abandoned hulks of warehouses and the crumbling Beaux-Arts style Central Train Station cast a neglected atmosphere on the community for decades. Since its heyday as a working neighborhood of Victorian bungalows built to house the dockworkers, Pullman Porters, and warehouse workers of the early 20th century, the West Oakland neighborhood had lost vitality as these industries moved on. The landscape architect identified, refurbished and sited historic relics as sculptural elements throughout the project, reflecting the local labor past. The landscape architect provided both landscape design, landscape contracting, and custom fabrication services for the project, allowing for an ability to maintain design intent while responding to developing ideas and field conditions. Landscape plans include an entry plaza and streetscape along the public frontage, three social courtyard gardens designed within the preserved frame of the old cannery, and a fourth garden court grove of edible plants sited between the cannery building and a newly constructed row of townhouses. ![]() The location, a half-mile from Oakland's downtown, walking distance to the West Oakland BART station, immediately adjacent to major freeways, and minutes from the Bay Bridge, is a critically valuable site for increasing the stock of transit-oriented housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pacific Cannery Lofts brings 163 loft and townhouse units to a 2.7-acre site in Oakland's westernmost neighborhood. ![]()
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