AIA San Mateo’s annual design awards honor outstanding achievements in architecture and design across San Mateo County in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Citation Award: BioMed Life Sciences Campus – Foster City, California (above)
This new life sciences campus for BioMed supports the collaboration and innovation that fuel the efforts of its tenant, Illumina, to transform human health. Designed to accommodate a single or multiple tenants, the college-like campus rests on a pastoral site alongside a natural lagoon and the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. “The concept for the project was to create a campus that felt like these really tensile, crystalline machines sitting in a park,” said Paul Woolford, design principal for HOK’s San Francisco studio. “The concept is always modulating the response of the skin design to the solar relationship with the environment.” A cascading frit pattern atop the skin’s glazing mitigates glare and heat gain.
An expansive, open floor plan emerged from the creation of a flexible lab planning module that promotes collaboration and discovery among researchers.
Citation Award: Bay Meadows Urban Village – San Mateo, California
This mixed-use development transforms Bay Meadows Racetrack into a vibrant transit-oriented commercial district with offices, residential units, retail space, public transportation, and public parks and open space. HOK worked with developer Wilson Meany Sullivan to develop a plan for the site’s adaptive reuse, which is a model for sustainable growth in the Bay Area. Beginning with the concept of creating a transit-oriented development that reduces automobile dependency, the master plan creates a flexible framework of streets, public spaces and passages. The plan focuses each parcel on its connection to the nearby Hillsdale Caltrain station platform.
The project “is a real model for new urban living, sustainability and a place where people can live, work, enjoy themselves and recreate,” said Woolford. “The project responds to its community and context by not seeing itself as an island, but by seeing itself as an extension of the beautiful village character and scale.”
Merit Award: OpenText Office – San Mateo, California
This Bay Area office is a place where OpenText’s people can collaborate to shape the digital future of business information. The office is located within the HOK-designed Bay Meadows Village, a transit-oriented mixed-use development. HOK collaborated with the software company’s leaders to incorporate employee input and OpenText’s values of creativity, performance and hospitality into the space. The design promotes employee well-being and facilitates interaction.
“The ambition for the project was to create a sophisticated technology center. It needed to be focused on their users’ well-being and be inviting for families,” said Daniel Herriott, director of interiors for HOK in San Francisco.