Fall 2018, Arch 201 – Strange Finger: Oakland’s Webster Street Corridor

The urban fabric of Oakland, California has suffered the past half century violently ripped by the insertion of freeways and auto infrastructure. While Oakland is in a number of ways extreme, this is a condition familiar to many North American cities, and, increasingly, to many other cities around the world. As architects, we have enormous opportunity to continue creatively grappling with this situation, even as we must additionally add global warming, sea water rise, gentrification, income inequality, and many other contemporary social, economic, scientific and political concerns into the deep complexity of interwoven architectural imagination and responsibility.

The primary objective of our project shall be to create an effective, mixed-use corridor of auto, public transit, pedestrian and bicycle connectivity passing under the I-880 freeway. We will concentrate on one particular finger of urban space in Oakland, the section of Webster Street leading southward from Chinatown, under the I-880 freeway, over the tunnels between Oakland and Alameda Island, over the BART...