Educate, Preserve, Reuse: The Good (Not Great) Garage Buildings of San Francisco

This paper examines parking and repair garages built on the streets of San Francisco between the Great Earthquake and the Great Depression. It also documents a related study undertaken by students in an undergraduate studio class at UC Davis, who were assigned particular buildings to research, document and analyze. The study includes demolished and existing garages, as well as buildings adapted to new uses. Towards the end of the quarter, students developed original adaptive reuse designs for buildings they had researched. A sampling of the study, along with three reuse designs, is compiled as an Appendix at the end of this paper.