Pedestrian bridges, often called foot bridges, have been both separate from and part of vehicular bridges. As separate structures they were often constructed in rural or wilderness areas tied to trails rather than roads and were designed with a rustic look.

However, pedestrian bridges associated with urban areas are in demand now and often include bicycle usage. As shown by the three bridges presented here, the reduced scale of urban bridges and their proximity to human beings and nature no longer call for a rustic design.

Despite the fact that these three bridges have gained praise and publicity, the present economic downturn has given them uncertain futures. Hence the title “Bridges to Nowhere—for now.”

THE ST. PATRICK’S ISLAND BRIDGE, CALGARY, CANADA

Rendering of the St. Patrick's Island Bridge, Calgary, Canada

The St. Patrick’s Island Bridge in Calgary was designed in 2009 by Endres Ware* and Ammann & Whitney**, as a gateway to the activities of the island’s Centenary Park. The two-part bridge will also frame views of Calgary and the Rocky Mountains.

The bridges connect to a central platform located where they meet on a mound of earth to be constructed on a site in Centenary Park. The rendering shows a curved path on a mound leading to a ramp lifted up and attached by some of the cables to another land form behind the main pier. The bridges’ low arches, also visible in the rendering, rise just high enough above the underlying flood plain to avoid possible flooding but will not block views of the surroundings.

The bridges’ structure allows the weight of the concrete decks to be carried by a series of main cables running up to the two masts from which backstay cables transfer the deck’s weight back to the ground.

Site plan for St. Patrick's Bridge, Calgary

The two separate cable-stayed bridges, one longer than the other, span the Bow River flowing by the city of Calgary.

Night rendering of St. Patrick's Bridge, Calgary

The masts are bent to reduce their height. The main cables are strung evenly along the length of the masts; the backstay cables, gathered near their tops, are “harped”, meaning that the cables have different lengths.  They cables splay from the top of the mast downward and extend to the adjacent bridge, which reduces the amount of force necessary for their anchorage and allows the bridges to brace each other horizontally.

The bridges appear to bow to their respective destinations, the city and the neighborhoods on the riverbanks. One hopes that users from both places will be able to respond with their feet to their salutes in the not too distant future.

THE LEWIS EATON PEDESTRIAN AND BICYCLE BRIDGE

The Lewis Eaton Bridge

The Lewis Eaton Bridge project began in 2007 and was designed to enable pedestrians and bicycles to cross the San Joaquin River at a location near Fresno west of Highway 41, which is known as “the Yosemite Freeway.” The bridge is part of the efforts of The San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust to conserve the river, rehabilitate the surrounding land in the 100-year flood plain, and connect the City of Fresno with Madera County. The commission for the project was awarded to landscape architects Patrick and Jane Miller of 2M Associates as the prime and architects and  Endres Ware for the bridge design.

Site plan for the Lewis Eaton Bridge

Visible from Highway 41 as well as from the Fresno and Madera County river bluffs, the bridge will be a landmark for the San Joaquin River Parkway. A multi-use trail located on or parallel to the existing vehicular access road parallel to the river will provide an entry to the bridge.

The soil characteristics of the site were a major challenge to the design process. Although the ground on the west bank is stable the landing is on an island that may wash out in heavy flooding. The dry riverbed is not suitable for a landing because of possible flooding and poor soil conditions.

Diagram of the cable-stayed structure of the Lewis Eaton Bridge

The cables surrounding the bridge deck will provide a sense of enclosure and increase the deck’s stability. They will also create a “gateway” to views of the river by splaying down from the mast to the approach deck which passes under the it.

A gathering place for pedestrians at the bridge access path.

As the ramps descend from the mast to the ground, they will create a small area for people to gather in the tower’s shade .

Although Endres Ware and 2M Associates were commissioned to design the bridge and its surrounding landscape in 2010, a lengthy permit process of five years or more must be concluded before its construction begins. Although the design may change during the time required to gain final approval, one hopes the vision depicted in these images endures.

THE WEST END BRIDGE ADDITION FOR PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA.

The international competition, sponsored by ALCOA, for the West End Bridge Addition over the Ohio River in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,  was held in 2006. Endres Ware’s winning design for a new pedestrian crossing to be connected to the historic Bridge over the Ohio River respected the existing bridge while

The West End Bridge and the proposed addition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

updating the structure with a dramatic suspended bridge that will improve access for pedestrians, cyclists, and boaters to new recreation and park facilities.

Site plan of the existing bridge framed by the new pedestrian addition.

There are two access points for the bridge. One is a ramp on the bridge addition that runs down to the park ground below. The other is from the historic bridge at its westernmost tower. Pedestrian and bike lanes run from there along the south side of the bridge until they reach the shore.

A Rendering of the new pedestrian addition to the West End Bridge.

For Riverlife, the organization that managed the competition, the West End Bridge project is a top priority, and although funding for the bridge during the slow economy has been tricky, 70% of the work on the surrounding park lands has been completed, and hope for the rest is growing.

Related Links

• Endres Ware, Architects and Engineers
• Ammann & Whitney, Bridge Engineers

Endres Ware provided architecture and engineering services for the site, including the design of a bridge with a 105-foot span for pedestrians and light vehicles that leads to newly restored wetland areas.

Bridge deck plan

The wood deck of the pedestrian bridge, which is cantilevered from a torsion pipe beam that  spans between concrete piers,  is set back from its support so that it gives the illusion that the bridge is floating above the natural landscape below. The sinuous railing provides areas for people to lean out over the creek without blocking the deck.

Along the trails through the park are a maintenance building, public restrooms, and picnic and shade shelters that Endres Ware also designed for Ryder Park. The structures contribute an open framework that allows visitors to pursue the activities of their choice from strolling, jogging and cycling to picnicking. The uniform palette of materials: Ipe wood, also called ironwood, decking, solid concrete bases, steel pipe, and the curvilinear forms shared by the structures promote a perception of the meandering park as a single entity.

References to nature are most obvious in the splayed forms of the two picnic shelters arcing away from each other that suggest wind-blown leaves. Wood slats recalling leaf veins are bound together by upper and lower steel cables that run through them to form the central vein like that of a real leaf.

Picnic shelters plan

The shade structure, shown here in structural drawings and a photograph continue the palette of materials used in the picnic shelters and their skeletal form.

As shown in the photograph above, the 70-acre park projects a festive feeling appropriate to a waterside recreation area.

Doyle Hollis Park

The back elevation of the restroom building

Thoughtful design is not something one expects to find in the restroom buildings of public parks. Usually, one settles for adequate light and ventilation along with functional plumbing. So it is a pleasure to publish a noteworthy example of thoughtful, even elegant, design in the restroom facilities of the City of Emeryville’s Doyle Hollis Park, which opened in September 2009 on 62^nd Street between Doyle and Hollis Streets.

The rectangular concrete building, designed by Endres Ware, an East Bay architecture and engineering firm, incorporates a variety of  sustainable elements including “green roof” made of grass and other vegetation that decreases the rainwater runoff and protects the roofing system. A plumbing chase in the center of the bathroom has a grey water filtration system to receive excess drainage from the roof and enable irrigation for nearby landscaping,

A vines grown on tensions wires strung vertically on the end walls will soften the effect of the concrete, which contains high fly-ash/slag  content and protects the walls from weathering.

Natural light for the interior is provided by skylights, shown above, made of heavy glass tiles like those used in the New York subway stations. They occupy sections of the roofs over the men’s and women’s rooms.

Metal screens above and below the recessed wood section on the back wall allow air to enter the building.  The warm Ipe wood boards compliment the cool concrete, and the handsome stainless steel plumbing fixtures are convincingly durable.

If attention  to materials and details produces the kind of successful design shown here we might wonder why we don’t find it in other equally deserving public parks.  John Ware’s explanation is that the design for such facilities is often such a low budget priority that standard off-the-shelf  designs are used to save time and money.  Fortunately for the Doyle Hollis Park users, Endres Ware’s design process was driven by a desire to improve both the quality of the light and the need for abundant natural ventilation. What a difference these concerns can make!

You may not think of landfills as harbingers of a “green” future, but if you check the web site of the Zanker Road Landfill or, even better, visit the landfill sites on Zanker Road in San Jose you will think differently.

An unsorted mound of debris at the Zanker Road Landfill

Historically, landfills have been the repositories of rubbish, defined as waste, refuse or litter of no value. But about ten years ago as municipal dumps filled up, the importance of finding ways to re-use the debris from construction and demolition grew rapidly and rubbish began to acquire commodity status and a bigger market.

Today, Zanker Road Resource Management, Ltd., which was formed in 1985 to operate the Zanker Road Landfill (ZRL), receives up to 2,600 tons  of materials per day from around the Bay Area.

In 1999, after completing a nine-year permitting process, the Zanker Materials Processing Facility began operations. The ZMPF is divided into several processing areas devoted to different kinds of waste: demolition debris, mixed debris, and wood waste. The Facility, which can process unsorted demolition debris at the rate of 135 tons per hour, separates the materials into manageable and marketable products. These products are then directed to other on-site recycling operations or shipped directly to end product users.

The 240-foot-long Conveyor Sorting System, which includes elevated work stations for employees, disc-screens, and magnets, is located above large concrete storage bunkers that hold recovered materials. The sorting system is capable of sorting 30 to 40 tons per hour; it removes a variety of materials and creates up to 16 products from a typical mixed waste stream.

The green tubular mechanism shown on the right is part of the conveyor screening system described below.

During the sorting process the mixed construction and demolition debris is removed from the soil, and the residue is loaded into a tank of water. Wood floats to the surface where it is collected and dried. Metals and rubble drop to the bottom of the tank where magnets remove the metal.

Using heavy equipment, the wood is loaded into a grinder. The shredded wood is then screened and separated into wood chips and fines similar to sawdust. The site of this operation is shown above.

The accumulated  wood chips are either sent to markets as fuel for electric generation facilities or colored and sold as landscape mulch, shown below. The fines are sold as soil amendments and blended with other products on site to produce top soil. All products are sold to landscapers, contractors or the general pubic.

CONCRETE

The ZRL concrete plant discussed below, was one of the first in the nation to convert concrete debris into aggregate products suitable for foundations and road construction. Zanker adopted the knowledge and skills developed in the 1960s by the crushed stone and mining industry and became the first plant in the Bay Area dedicated to recycling concrete debris.

The concrete recycling process begins when clean and reinforced concrete is unloaded at the site. The material is then screened to remove oversized pieces which are re-circulated through the crushing circuit.

Ferrous materials, compounds containing iron, that would compromise the value of the products are removed by the belt magnet equipment shown above, which is operated by nine staff members, four of whom operate the machinery. The other five employees sort the material, removing plastics, wood, trash and other contaminates.

Known as the Air  Knife, the machine shown above uses high volume air blowers to separate plastics and wood from the concrete debris.

The green machine called the “rocket”, shown above, was invented by the Zanker staff. It uses 2000 gallons of water per minute to separate wood and other floating materials from the heavier concrete and metals. The wood flows with the water out of the front of the Rocket on to a conveyor system to be sorted.  The heavy materials are conveyed out of the back of the Rocket and past a magnet which removes metals and a sorter that removes trash. The water is screened and reused.

Products made from the recycled concrete includes a 3/4″ class II base rock, recycled fill sand, pea gravel and drain rock. These materials are sold to contractors and the general public.

That mountains of construction and demolition debris like the one shown above are being transfomed into useful products is a cause for celebration! If you want to know more about this  phenomenal process visit the Zanker Road Landfill on the ground and on its web site, z-best.com.

350 Mission Exterior. All images are by SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL LLP unless otherwise credited.

Glassy office towers are not new to downtown San Francisco. One of the oldest, the Crown Zellerbach Building at 1 Bush St., was designed in the late 1950s in the newly established San Francisco office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Its design referenced the New York firm’s Lever House, built in Manhattan in 1952, which became a landmark of the Modern Movement in the U.S.

Typical post World War II high-rise building Photograph by Morley Baer

The post World War II boom in high-rise office buildings filled US downtowns with boxy skyscrapers encased in largely glazed walls. But over time these towers lost their currency and became stereotyped as “refrigerator cartons.”

Unlike the flat “curtain-walls” of the Modernist office towers, the current glazed exterior cladding for towers, which often have irregular shapes, may be prismatic, as is the case with 350 Mission St. Instead of serving as  mirrors of their surroundings, such buildings become vehicles for refracting and reflecting light. They shimmer and change color with the daily passage of sunlight and shadow. This is good news for us spectators who see the buildings from the street or freeway or the surrounding hills.

350 Mission Curtainwall Detail

The shimmering effect seen in these images is produced by arranging double rows of glass panes so that the panes in the upper rows are slanted inward while the lower panes slant outward, thus producing the appearance of a woven surface that reflects and refracts light.

Parapet atop 350 Mission Street building

The building is crowned with a parapet equipped with a layer of galvanized mesh, cyclone fencing, laced with translucent nylon strips that absorb and diffuse light in a soft way and also enhance the night illumination. The parapet also conceals window-washing equipment and a novel amenity, a rooftop dog-run for the building’s canine population.

The rooftop with the parapet and dog-run

The Brower Center at Oxford and Allston Streets.

The recently completed David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley is a memorial to a major figure in this country’s environmental movement. Brower served as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club from 1952 fo 1960 and later founded such environmental organizations as Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute. He inspired a generation of environmental activists, some of whom now work in the building at the intersection of Allston Way and Oxford Street that bears his name.

Thirty some national and international groups occupy 24,000 sq. ft. of office space on the building’s upper three floors. Their mission is to foster collaborations, engage new people in advocacy and facilitate cross-sector communication and partnerships.

Although the work of the building’s tenants is a story in itself, the subject of this article is the Center’s building design and its structural system, which were created to insure that the physical embodiment of Brower’s legacy would be a state-of-the-art expression of his life’s work. The building is on track to receive a LEED platinum rating—the highest possible—from the US Green Building Council.

Plans show the shape of the site and the Brower Center's rounded facade derived from the street corner it faces. Plans of the Oxford Plaza housing are shown on the right.

The building’s site is unusual in that the corner it faces has a rounded edge. This feature prompted the architects, WRT/Solomon E.T.C., to design a rounded façade that enables a more natural flow of space than the typical right-angled street corner. Pedestrian traffic flows from the building’s entrance on Allston Street past the Center’s ground-floor restaurant, Gather, to a gated open space between the Center and the apartment complex, Oxford Plaza.

The building’s façade suggests a temple form with engaged columns set on a raised base, a slightly projecting attic story above, and a cornice, which departs from the classical type by continuing the solid array of photovoltaic panels on the south side with a slatted trellis that follows the roof line and rises as it curves around the eave from south to north like an upturned hat brim.

View of the Brower Center from a building across Oxford Street.
Both photographs on this page are by Tim Griffith.

The panels’ downward slant on the south side moderates the greater amount of daylight entering the building from that direction and reduce heat gain in the summer; their upward tilt on the north side increase the admission of light to meet the seasonal greater need. Measures like these have made the interior nearly 100% daylit.

In respect to materials, the metal used for the façade is zinc, which requires less energy to mine and work into forms than aluminum or steel. Its matt surface avoids glare. The window glass redirects sunlight and thereby reduces heat gain. Operable window sections allow changes in ventilation.

The concrete used in the building is 70% blast furnace slag in the foundation and 50% slag in the super structure. The use of this by-product of manufacturing steel reduces the building’s energy content and its “carbon footprint” by 40%. The Brower Center is the first Bay Area Project to use high-slag concrete on such a scale.

The BRIDGE Housing Corporation, a non-profit company considered by many to be the state’s foremost developer of affordable housing, has built more than 13,000 housing units since its founding in 1983. Although Bridge’s original focus was housing for working families, it has diversified and now has several affiliates and a staff of about 250, enabling it to handle every aspect of financing, planning, development and maintenance of the projects it owns and manages.

Although outreach to the community surrounding its projects has always been an integral part of BRIDGE’s approach to building housing in California, its scope has expanded to include the components of communities and to transforming existing neighborhoods.

This article focuses on the early history of BRIDGE, beginning with an account of its founding and its early projects, Holloway Terrace in 1985, and Parkview Commons in 1990. The recently completed Mission Walk development comprises two buildings on Berry Street in Mission Bay. The missing period of enormous expansion between 1990 and 2009 will doubtless be covered in the detail it deserves, but a blog post is not adequate for that task.

The impetus for starting BRIDGE in San Francisco, which remains its headquarters, was an anonymous gift of approximately $650,000 entrusted to the San Francisco Foundation in late 1980.

The funds were dedicated to creating affordable housing and came at a time when the Bay Area’s high costs of living threatened the stability of the workforce because its members were being priced out of the housing market.

The nine-page document that accompanied the gift contained the following statement:

“The donor has had and still has a strong interest in housing for persons and families of low and moderate income. However well intentioned, various federal programs, e.g., Section 8, have not delivered enough housing to either the inner cities or elsewhere to meet the enormous demand. This in turn suggests that what the private sector needs is a program for the construction or rehabilitation of housing for low and moderate income groups which would attract private investors interested in meeting a real national need and still make economic sense to investors and the business community.

Accordingly, this gift must be used to form a relatively small task force to study the problem, using all the academic disciplines from Bay Area universities at the faculty and graduate school level. Membership of the task force should also include enough experienced businessmen and bankers to avoid too heavy an academic orientation.”

The foundation asked Alan Stein, an investment banker, to chair the task force and select its members. Stein had come to San Francisco from New York City in 1971 to head the office of Goldman Sachs. In 1978 Governor Jerry Brown appointed him Secretary of Business and Transportation, which had ten departments, one of which was Housing and Community Development. Since the HCD department lacked a director at that time, Stein’s first task was to fill that position.

For advice in finding a new director Stein consulted Richard Bender, then dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Bender recommended a faculty member, Don Terner, who was an ardent housing advocate and had worked successfully in affordable housing programs in New York.

In 1980 Terner was appointed director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. He moved to Sacramento where he worked closely with Alan Stein and, according to Stein, educated him about the housing field by taking him to see projects throughout the state. Terner left the state government in 1981.

In 1982, to fulfill the donor’s stipulation that a task force be formed to administer the grant, Stein convened a group of people who were successful in various fields and interested in affordable housing. Rather than create another report, the task force chose to start building. The next step was to hire executives to run the operation.

Don Terner’s actions as Director of Housing and Community Development made him a leading candidate to head the organization. He had sponsored legislation which gave non-profit housing developers the first option to purchase surplus public lands and had also initiated legislation that included density bonuses that allowed selected developers to add up to 30% additional units to their projects, thus giving them extra units at no additional land costs.

Terner was hired to be the president of the new organization, which was then called Bay Area Regional Housing Investment and Development Group, later turned into the acronym, BRIDGE. A close associate and former student of his, Rick Holliday, was made vice president.

To raise the capital needed to start building units, Stein and Terner, supported by their board of directors, held fund-raising events for members of the business community. This use of the methods of private developers was a radical departure from the 1960s approach of community non-profit housing organizations which were oriented toward government funding and focused on individual projects.

A highly successful fund raising event in 1983 allowed the first project, Holloway Terrace, in San Francisco’s Ingleside Terrace to start; it was completed in 1985. According to Alan Stein, the success of this and other projects that followed came from diligent outreach to the projects’ neighborhoods, ownership of the projects and careful management, and the serious involvement of board members in the projects’ development.

The original task force members are Dick Bender, Gordon Chin, Ken Phillips, Tony Ramos, Alan Stein, Clark Wallace, Susanne Wilson, Gerson Bakar, Preston Butcher, Tom Flynn, Tony Frank, Dean Macris, Sunne McPeak, Ken Rosen, Mary Lee Widener. The picture on the right is of Alan Stein and Rick Holliday, 2009.

I wondered why and set out to discover the answer. To do so I needed to learn about all the stations. In particular I needed to study Glen Park station. This is what I learned.

The BART system was planned in the 1950s and designed in the 1960s. The stations opened in the early 70s. It and Washington DC Metro were the first two systems in the nation and being pioneers of municipal transportation they had to make up their own rules. BART’s approach of employing different architects to design stations resulted in the variety of architecture that is absent in the DC system.

Different architects had different ideas for the design of stations. As with all things artistic some designs have worn better than others. Unlike other art forms, or even other architectural forms, BART stations have had to endure the test of time both aesthetically and physically. Glen Park station has passed both tests.

The station takes basic components of a station (platform, concourse, superstructure, surroundings and the means to get from one to the other) and translates them into a story about the BART system and its construction that relates to the building of monuments that have characterized human aspiration throughout time.

At the platform level, one of the deepest platforms in the system, jagged stone blocks cover the retaining walls. They are stacked like engaged columns that reinforce the feeling of being in a manmade underground tunnel. The roughness of the blocks suggests that the tunnel has been carved out of the solid rock within the earth’s core. Yet the place is not claustrophobic or oppressive. The stacked blocks lead the eyes upward where there is light and air. The roughness of the blocks is neutralized by the use of polished slabs of marble and granite for vertical cores and benches.

In the transition from platform to concourse the station’s walls shed their stone blocks to reveal rough-hewn concrete. The roughness of the concrete recalls the most basic and monumental of construction types. Vertical striations in the concrete reinforce the direction from the tunnel below to the street and sky above.

At the concourse level, one of the most compact in the system, the treatment of the surrounding walls and the use of a glass roof create the feeling of being in a monumental vestibule or, perhaps, the ruin of an ancient temple. The rough-hewn concrete walls continue to this level and characterize the exterior of the superstructure. But within the concourse are over 100 panels of polished marble that embellish the walls. They enrich the room with a finish that contrasts with the rough walls below. Yet they also complement each other; the stone blocks, the rough concrete and the polished marble are different expressions for the same element.

The use of different finishes enriches the experience of going from the platform to the concourse —from the earth’s core along rough walls to the refined room at the top. Capping the concourse with a glass roof highlights the experience of moving from the underground to the light and air above and back again.

From a distance the station appears to emerge from the BART system below. Its emphasis on vertical transformation acknowledges that the vast underground network is the core of the system and the station is merely one entry point. Design and finishes together support the theme of the station rising from the rails and platform up to the concourse and street, its perimeter walls like shards of concrete pushed upward through the earth.

The excellent design of Glen Park station secures its place in the history of architecture, however it is the use of durable and refined materials that insures that it will appeal to future generations. Based on my experiences I found the station to be an architectural achievement and agree that it is the crown jewel in the BART system.

The Salvation Army’s Turk Street Center is that rare building which both honors the context of an historic district and stands out as decidedly contemporary.

The new building at 240-242 Turk Street was completed in July, 2008 after five years of programming and an intensive Planning Department design review process followed by 28 months of construction, which included the demolition of an existing building.

In designing a rippling facade of metallic bay windows the architects, Herman Coliver Locus, have capitalized on San Francisco’s vernacular building style and affirmed its functionality for the architecture of urban streetscapes.

Photograph by Tim Griffith

By coloring some of the window frames blue or yellow, as shown above, the architects sought to allow residents the possibility of identifying the location of their apartment and thereby lessening the anonymity of  the wall of windows.

The eight-story building has 113 apartments, 110 of which are studios with 358.5 sq. ft. Three are 2-bedroom units with 912.5 sq. ft.

Frank Owen Gehry’s buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies, and cities seek Gehry’s services as a badge of distinction, regardless of the product he delivers. His best known works include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is covered in titanium, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, the latter of which jump-started his substantive career and lifted it from the stature of “paper architecture”, a phenomenon in which many famous architects are observed to have experienced their formative decades experimenting almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in their later years. Source-Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry

Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. From 1965 to 1970 he worked with Louis Kahn and with Makowsky. Later, he worked with Richard Rogers from 1971 to 1977, including work on the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He also had a long collaboration with the famed engineer Peter Rice. Today, Piano is well known for his museum designs: the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation museum in Basel, Switzerland, a museum dedicated to Swiss painter Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, as well as completed museum projects in Dallas (the Nasher Sculpture Center) and in Atlanta (the High Museum of Art).

One of Piano’s most recent designs is the approved Shard London Bridge skyscraper, also known as the London Bridge Tower or Shard of glass, in London. His latest project is the natural history museum the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. In 1998, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Source-Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renzo_Piano

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