Developer Related California has won out over two other contenders for the 42,625 square foot plot of land at Transbay Block 8. Related will employ starchitect Rem Koolhaas to design a 550-foot residential tower there. Related offered $72 million for the land, besting Millennium’s $70 million bid and Golub & Co.'s distant $49 million. The deal will mean the first Koolhaas building for San Francisco after one fell through more than a decade ago. His last proposed building for the city was Union Square’s Prada store, which was to be a controversial 10-story building with 8,000 portholes in the place of windows. The building was scrapped after the attacks of September 11 and the burst of the dot-com bubble. The 69-year old Koolhaas has won architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, and been named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.
The future tower will be a mix of rental and condominium housing, with approximately 740 units, and 27 percent of the housing offered must be affordable to households making 60 percent of area media income. The terms set out in the city’s RFP required developers to partner with a nonprofit for the below market rate housing, and Related California has partnered with Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. There will also be street-level retail space in the building, which will sit just two blocks south of the future Transbay Transit Center.
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World Architects
