Fletcher Studio is a landscape architecture and urban design collaborative, based in San Francisco. We believe design matters, and that people deserve to find value, meaning, and possibility in the places they encounter and occupy. We work with city makers, communities and other visionaries to realize evocative and appropriate concepts, designed and constructed to ensure social vitality and integrity. We leverage technology to work faster and smarter; people, ideas and culture are the drivers of our process. From biologists and foresters to musicians and neighbors, we collaborate with a host of partners to skillfully integrate sustainable infrastructure and meaningful experiences into enduring, evolving spaces. Our studio and collaborators bring a wide array of experience ranging across science, design, art, horticulture, construction, and politics. Collectively, we are able to distill complex spatial analysis into high-functioning built environments that connect communities to places through inclusion, delight, and recognition of their capacity to best steward the places and objects we design.
The Ropewalk is located in the San Francisco’s Historic Dogpatch Historic District. The site was once home to the Tubbs Cordage Company, a maritime ropemaking factory, whose pier extended far out into the waters of the bay. The site once mediated the boundary between water and land. Taking inspiration from the site’s industrial past, ecological past, and maritime history, we designed an engaging public passageway that offers the opportunities to interact with its history. The design consists of a meandering elevated boardwalk, which floats over a constructed bio-retention wetland and connects two distinctly different public plazas. These plazas feature an outdoor museum, interactive art, and a variety of custom designed furnishings. The Dogpatch Ropewalk is a series of engaging community spaces, green infrastructures, and a celebration of maritime history. A meandering elevated boardwalk, which floats over a constructed bioretention wetland and connects an interactive plaza with an outdoor museum.
The design for Mariposa is inspired by a creek that was once located on the site, and still flows beneath it. A new public mid-block passage meanders and flows through a mixed-use housing development, The Mason on Mariposa. This passage includes a series of “social eddies” and confluences, plazas and spaces that support a range of activities. The paseo walkway borrows its form from a creek that used to flow above ground years ago. The creek, now underground, meanders through the site often colliding with the basalt stone. The space features a grand row of cherry trees, running down its spine, to add texture and seasonal color to the space. Two paths vary in size as they run from south to north, cutting back and forth between the trees, creating two independent path “tributaries”.The Mariposa Street and the 18th Street plazas, act as “spatial deltas”, and feature custom lighting and cut stone. At the intersection of the greenway and the east/ west Passage is the heart of the development. The logjam occurs in the heart of the paseo where two different tributaries come to a confluence. The continuous north-south flow is interrupted and scattered to create an opening. Several massive basalt columns fall over and break apart to create spaces for people to meet and gather.
Fletcher Studio was honored to have been selected to reimagine San Francisco’s oldest public space. The award-winning design, transformed what was once an English strolling garden into a richly integrated and multi-faceted community space. Close collaboration with neighbors, community groups, and City agencies yielded a design that it totally unique to the park. The park is now universally accessible, due to careful consideration of circulation and topography. South Park succeeds as an ecologically and socially sustainable park, setting the stage for use, connection, and delight while creating a space that is both magnetic and evolving.
