Joseph P. Donaher

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SF GLOBAL  AI  HQ
YEAR:2026

LOCATION:San Francisco, California

The project reimagines San Francisco's Westfield Mall through the collision of two urban orders. Positioned between the historic Bartlett Grid and the later orthogonal expansion of SoMa, the proposal performs a gradual pivot toward the historic city but remains suspended in the act of turning. This maneuver opens a new civic axis extending from Market Street toward Yerba Buena Gardens and SFMOMA, transforming an oversized superblock into a sequence of plazas, passages, and public spaces. The primary public space at the corner of Market street forms a new circulation axis toward The SFMOMA, lined with market stalls and mixed use retail.The termination of this axis at the base of the 1100’ tall tower and beneath the histroic rotunda brings public circulation into dialogue with the massive HQ lobby, and is adorned with a massive sculpture designed in situ. The basic program calls for a 1.1 Million sqft Office HQ, combined with another 1.5sqft million sqft of various housing typolgies enmeshed in a dense, mixed-use urban framework.

At the center of this transformation stands the preserved 1896 Beaux Arts façade and rotunda, one of San Francisco's most significant surviving architectural artifacts. Rather than treating the historic structure as an isolated object of preservation, the proposal positions it as the fulcrum around which an entirely new district rotates. The project neither conforms to the historic grid nor the newer one, instead occupying the space between them and transforming a geometric conflict into a civic opportunity.

The project operates within the classical architectural tradition, employing the Doric order though it destabilizes it with a deconstructivist, iteratively compositional sensibility. Towers, domes, and columns remain present, but are interrupted by a second language of flowering and erupting forms that appear to pull the composition out of grounded stability. The architecture stages a negotiation between historic instititional classicism, the artistic prowess of the work of Frank Gehry, and contemporary cultural uncertainty in the age of AI’s emergence. Conceived for as a global AI headquarters, the project imagines architecture’s role in this new and emerging paradigm.






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