From Transamerica to Salesforce Tower: San Francisco's Urban Form and Future

Benjamin Grant is a city planner, urban designer, curator, and teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2009 he has led SPUR's Ocean Beach Master Plan, an award-winning climate adaptation strategy for San Francisco's open coast. He leads SPUR's policy research on physical planning and urban design, including the 2013 report Getting to Great Places, supporting the transformation of San Jose and other suburban communities into walkable, sustainable places.

He has developed exhibitions on a range of urban issues, including Agents of Change, a historical survey of San Francisco urbanism for the opening of the SPUR Urban Center. He has been a lecturer and studio instructor in the graduate program in Urban and Regional Planning at San Jose State University and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute.

William Littmann is a Senior Adjunct Professor, teaching architectural history in the Architecture and Visual Studies departments. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and his MA in print journalism from Columbia University. His current research examines the buildings used to register Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens before they were sent to internment camps. An article on the history and landscape of Parlier, a transnational farm worker community in the Central Valley of California, appears in the Fall 2010 issue of journal Buildings and Landscapes. In the same year he published an article titled, “The Final Days of the Beaux-Arts: Warren Perry and the Student Campaigns for Modernism at Berkeley,” in the 2010 book, Design on the Edge: A Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903-2003. A recent interview with William Littmann about San Francisco's hidden landmarks was aired late last year on the KALW radio program, “99% Invisible" and is available as a podcast through the “99% Invisible" website.