China Basin—
The Machine in the Garden

San Francisco, CA
Phase 1, 1989
Phase 2, 1999

Agrest
Phase 1 site plan Phase 1 original plan in pencil with shadows Phase 1 general plan on green level Phase 1 programs plan Phase 1 courtyard level activities plan Phase 1 mechanism Phase 1 mechanism study 1 Phase 1 mechanism study 3 Phase 1 sections Phase 1 workshops Phase 1 seat in cinema, plan Phase 1 seat in cinema, section Phase 1 Olympic training center, section study Phase 1 preliminary sketch model Phase 1 circulation mechanism model Phase 2 continuity of programs under the green Phase 2 plan at night Phase 2 public places Phase 2 mechanism Phase 2 section 1 Phase 2 section 2 Phase 2 section 3 Phase 2 section through movement systems Phase 2 section at night
The city as object of desire is transformed into the city as the place where the forces of desire are set free. The China Basin project, much like Donna Haraway's cyborg, is ‘about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities.’

This project is a provocation. It is, to paraphrase Haraway, a fiction mapping our urban, social, and ideological reality, resolutely committed to partiality, irony, and perversity. It is antagonistic, utopian, and completely without innocence.

Excerpt from ‘The Return of the Repressed: Nature’ by Diana Agrest in The Sex of Architecture, eds. Agrest, Conway, Weismann, MIT Press, p. 60.

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