Buckland Recreational Swimming Pool

New 2,400 SF seasonal recreational swimming pool and Bathhouse in Buckland, MA. An angled pool within a generous concrete deck orients the site toward views of an abutting stream and highlights the bucolic setting.

Floating and Energy-Independent Public Safety Architecture A Strategy of Resilience

Public safety facilities along our shores grow more vulnerable due to rising seas, which continue to threaten coastal communities and infrastructure with more frequent flooding and inundation. Designing public safety buildings—or retrofitting existing ones—as floating and energy-independent structures is a viable way to maximize resiliency and preserve continued operations.

Newsletter #11

Last month, we were excited to host our annual office retreat at the Randall Museum, a project we did a few years back with our good friends at Pfau Long Architecture (now Perkins&Will). The retreat was a great success: we began to craft a mission statement, reviewed personal and team goals, and—above all—enjoyed reconnecting with one another. We are now back at the office with a hybrid work model and are relishing collaborating informally and working with each other in person again.

How to Carve Out a Townhouse in a Four-Story Midcentury Modernist Apartment Building

Recently, we reconfigured several units in a four-story midcentury gem of an apartment building atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, an exercise that was not unlike solving a 3D puzzle. We kept the panoramic views of the Bay and city skyline while rightsizing some of the units and carving out a two-story townhouse for the owners. The project shows the adaptability of the original building’s strong modernist bones and the opportunities for adding curves to counterpoint the orthogonal nature of the modernist box.

Telegraph Hill Apartments

San Francisco, CA
Set atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, this seven-unit apartment building was originally designed in 1951 by the Bay Area firm of Hertzka and Knowles. With spectacular panoramic views of the Bay Estuary, Bay Bridge and Downtown, the project scope included a full renovation and seismic retrofit of this mid-century gem with the goal to reallocate the units’ square footages in order to create a new three-bedroom “owners” townhouse.

Re-Envisioning a Suburban Mall in Marin

Suburbs and cities everywhere face the challenge of what to do with malls and shopping centers that have been hit hard by COVID-19, the departure of department store anchors, and the rise of online shopping. One example close to home is Northgate Mall in San Rafael, which opened in the 1960s and currently has a Macy’s and a Kohl’s as its anchors. A third anchor, Sears, closed its doors here in 2018. About a year later, Costco proposed taking over the site with a massive three-story big box store and 30 Costco fuel pumps.

Eastham Harbormaster Building and Site Improvements

The Town of Eastham on Cape Cod selected Kuth Ranieri to design and administer construction of a new office facility for the Harbormaster and staff, located at the town harbor at the mouth of Rock Creek. The relocation of this public safety component to the harbor permits staff to manage the boat launch and slips directly, as well as to stage any rescue operations in the bay and interior freshwater bodies.

A Conversation with Our New Associates

Kuth Ranieri Architects has promoted architects Rob Marcalow and Juno Song to associates. Rob is the firm’s East Coast studio director for the Boston regional office. Since joining in 2018, he’s worked on everything from a daycare center to San Francisco International Airport. Juno came to Kuth Ranieri in 2015 and has had a hand in a number of the firm’s projects at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), ranging from the new Harvey Milk Terminal 1 to the “Big Room” co-location office for the entire Terminal 1 team. 

Stepping into a Book to Visit the Dentist

Going to the dentist can be a scary experience for children. For the Division of Pediatric Dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco, providing affordable services to the children of the city’s low-income families is about investing in the community. So when it came time to renovate the clinic’s home base at the Parnassus Campus, our clients asked us to transform the space so it could offer a private practice–quality experience, both for the comfort of patients and pride of staff and students—despite some difficult constraints the existing building posed.

Micro-hood

San Francisco, CA
Considering the possible future abundance of office spaces San Francisco will inherit and the cultural shift towards “work from home,” the City’s downtown’s commercial district will need to be re-envisioned for the post-pandemic society. It doesn’t make sense to tear down and rebuild with the investment we’ve already made, i.e. embedded energy embodied within building materials and labor of construction. We can take this opportunity to rethink retrofitting the building stock we have, repurpose it, optimize its use and decarbonize the future.

Black Lava Fields Visitor Center

Dimmuborgir, Iceland
From the smoking eart, rise black castles; their twisted towers clawing to rip free from the earth. This is the home of myth, the home of Gryla and her sons, the place where Satan fell to earth. These are the Black Lava Fields of Dimmuborgir, a place of myth and legends, a place where man meets nature. Our concept accentuates the mystery of the site, capturing and contrasting the intersection of the built and unbuilt landscape.
In Collaboration with RHAA Landscape Architects

SF Fire Boat Station 35 (Finalist)

San Francisco, CA
Our design proposal for the new Fire Boat Station 35 (FBS35) bridges the waterfront and the urban edge of the city’s shoreline. In response to the fire station’s prominent location at the foot of the San Francisco — Oakland Bay Bridge, we have marked the facility with an illuminated tower that commands a place in the front row of the city’s skyline and at the end of the Harrison Street view corridor.

Clover-Shelter for Regrowth

In the fall of 2017, one of our clients lost their house to the Santa Rosa wildfires. Not long after, they asked us to drive up from San Francisco and talk about designing a new house on the same site. The landscape was eerie, all ashes and chimneys and bent, burnt, broken things.

UCSF Pediatric Operatories

San Francisco, CA
This pediatric dental clinic for the UCSF School of Dentistry transforms an outdated 1970s clinic into a vibrant space that is both state-of-the-art and child-friendly. The School of Dentistry is located in the School of Dentistry Building on UCSF’s Parnassus Campus. Pediatrics occupies a cluster of rooms on the first floor which have been undergoing incremental modernizations.

Hillside Courtyard House

Marin County, California
The Hillside Courtyard House is a remodel of a midcentury home on a steeply sloping site in Marin County. As one descends the property they pass through multiple thresholds of privacy. Each step leading further toward calmness and seclusion.

Remaking a Roller Coaster into a Home for Birds at Lion Mountain

We’ve completed a number of unusual adaptive use projects—repurposing a storefront for the GLBT History Museum, converting a historic 1880s stone vinegar factory into offices for a nonprofit foundation, and remaking an industrial shed into a bunkhouse for artists. But we never expected we’d be asked to turn a roller coaster into an aviary.

Shishan Park Rollercoaster Aviary

Suzhou, China
Inspired by traditional Chinese ink paintings, the new form of this aviary, with Lion Mountain behind it, evokes the feeling of layered misty mountains. This project repurposes an abandoned rollercoaster structure into a 160,000 SF enclosed aviary. New programs include: wildlife exhibits, water features, walkways, and viewing platforms.
Architect to TLS Landscape Architecture