2001 MARKET in San Francisco (45/58)

2001 MARKET STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114

The Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES), a partnership of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden, has selected 175 pilot projects to test a national rating system for sustainable landscape design, construction and maintenance. Making the list is a new Whole Foods store in San Francisco, proposed for the corner of Market and Dolores streets, along with a half-dozen other projects in the Bay Area and a total of twenty-one across California.

The proposed Whole Foods store would replace the currently vacant S&C Ford auto dealership at 2001 Market Street with a 30,000 square foot Whole Foods Market on the ground floor and 82 residential condominiums above the store. The project team includes April Philips Design Works, The Prado Group, BAR Architecture, William McDonough + Partners. The Prado Group is working to get the project’s planning approvals and expects to go before the Planning Commission in September 2010. If successful, construction would start mid-2011, with the grocery store slated to open in 2012 and the residential units in mid-2012.

The SITES rating system is similar in intent to the LEED certification program administered by the U.S. Green Building Council in that it sets out to provide a measure of the sustainability of the built environment and create a minimal and optimum standard. LEED applies almost exclusively to buildings, however, SITES is designed to address site planning and landscape design – the space outside the building envelope. The SITES rating system includes 15 prerequisites and 51 different credits covering areas such as the initial site selection, water, soil, vegetation, materials, human health and well-being, construction and maintenance – adding up to a 250 point scale.

Besides the use of a previously developed, or brownfield, site, the proposed development at 2001 Market Street includes an edible garden element as well as other details that help to mitigate the effects of the multi-story, mixed-use project. (More details of the project, as well as those of the other 175 sites, are available at www.sustainablesites.org/pilot.