BY JANE BERGER
There?s a lot to love about bamboo.
FROM THE NOVEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
Thousands of lucky San Franciscans will soon be walking through a bamboo forest on their way to and from towering glass buildings in the city?s Mission District. Groves of giant Japanese timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambusoides) are a stunning horticultural statement in a 5.4-acre park atop the new Transbay Transit Center, scheduled for completion later this year. It?s just one more sign of bamboo?s increasing popularity, despite its bad reputation.
The park, long and skinny, is 70 feet aboveground and extends four blocks, with public access by bridges that connect with adjacent skyscrapers, by gondola from street level, or by escalator, elevators, and stairways inside and outside the building. Adam Greenspan, ASLA, a partner at PWP Landscape Architecture, explains that no matter what level people are on, ?we wanted them to see that there was an inhabitable landscape up on the roof.? The dominant feature of the Transit Center is a light tower that extends from the grand concourse at street level up to the roof, where its glass dome is surrounded by bamboo. Greenspan says he selected Japanese timber bamboo because it allows for ?transparency and translucency,? and when you?re inside the building, ?you get a bit of filtered light through foliage and through stems and culms.? Up on the roof is a ?transparent scrim of green.? The bamboo is planted in a concrete ba...