Garage, an uninspiring ubiquitous space originally integrated with the American single-family home to shelter automobiles, found a new meaning in Silicon Valley as a space for invention. San Francisco and the extended Bay Area championed the myth of the garage ‘tech start-up.’ A banal space thus became a novel symbol. The first success story goes back to 1938 when Hewlett Packard started out of a Palo Alto garage. Apple started in 1976 in a Los Altos garage and Google in 1998 in a Menlo Park garage.

The current project transforms a dark garage into a well-lit working environment with natural daylight. The project is defined by an austere refined roughness manifested in earthy and industrial materiality. The site is a corner plot house in Dolores Heights, San Francisco, on an elevated ground and a quintessential steep-sloped street with expansive views of the city. The office space is for a socially conscious design practice and its parallel philanthropic foundation.

The garage doors were designed with glass panels at the eye level aligned to the bottom of shelving, providing daylight, acting as a voyeuristic window to the city, and strategically reflecting the San Francisco skyline. Metal chain curtains, fabricated in the suburbs of Beijing, China, hide the storage shelves and mechanical units behind, creating a translucent atmosphere of hide-and-seek. Acacia wood planks with pronounced wood grains are used for desks and wall shelving with simple linear geometries. The original 1941 floor joists are exposed to create a bare ceiling with black spotlights. The lights are inserted within wooden planks retrieved during demolition. The polished concrete floor is exposed, and concrete table organizers extend its materiality.

Architect: AUR - Architecture Urbanism Research
Client: PLUS (Public Landscape and Urbanism Studio)
Design Team: Aurgho Jyoti
Contractor: Scott Jian Zhao
Photographs: Cynthia Wang
Status: Project Built 2020