Treatment Center, San Francisco, CA

The Tom Smith Center was a residential treatment center that served 26 men and women with multiple diagnoses (alcohol/substance abuse and HIV or mental illness) in a cramped and antiquated hospital ward. A vacant 55 room historic seaman's hotel was selected by Haight Ashbury Alcohol Treatment Services for complete renovation to a 30 bed treatment center. All major functions were to have views into the focal point of the project, an interior courtyard carved out of the existing building.

A new kitchen and dining room were to be constructed on the roof of the existing building. Rather than setting the vertical addition back from the face of the building, or extruding the existing shapes up into another floor, the roof elements were designed to have their own identity, in scale and character with the existing building and in active interplay with it. The project was not constructed because federal funding was not secured in a very competitive HUD funding cycle.