For the site design of the Golden State Warriors' new basketball arena, Rene Bihan, FASLA, says success was measured by what happened on nongame days. This meant offering people something to do beyond the 41 National Basketball Association home games each season, and it fell to Bihan and his team at SWA's San Francisco office, with help from Merrill Morris Partners, to design a way out of the boom-and-bust cycles that typically plague sports stadiums, with hordes of fans tramping the grounds over the course of a few hours, followed by deserted plazas no one thinks to pass through. The solution at the Chase Center, a new arena in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood, opened before the 2019-2020 NBA season, was to increase flexibility. SWA developed a set of custom-designed mobile seating and planter elements that can rapidly reconfigure the arena's 3.2 acres of plaza space for different activities, partnering with Landscape Forms's Studio 431 to fabricate the planters.
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