YAMAMAR Design recently began construction on a new 44,000 sf four-story Ambulance Deployment Facility in the Bayview District of San Francisco. The program includes an ambulance resupply warehouse, training classrooms, administrative offices, staff locker rooms, kitchen and exercise room, and parking structure. The essential services facility functions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The project will provide a more efficient and seismically safe facility for the city’s fleet of ambulances and EMS staff. The design will support improved emergency medical response times for the dynamically deployed ambulances throughout the city.
Conceptually, the building is massed as a simple metal box floating above a horizontal concrete plinth. Stacked within the box are the ‘clean’ program elements with training room and admin offices at the highest floor. The plinth holds the double height warehouse, parking structure, and ground level connectivity to the larger site. A ribbon of glass floats the box above the plinth, and lets daylight into the warehouse space. Although the facility is not accessible to the public, it does serve the public, is visible from afar, and we felt strongly that the architectural expression should be one of a civic building hovering proudly above its industrial surroundings.
