2018 DCC Award Winner
Unity Plaza, T.B. Penick & Sons, Inc.

First Place: Concrete Artistry / Over 5000 SF

Unity Plaza serves as a hub connecting businesses, residents, City College and muni routes in the Bay area. The plaza features benches, pedestrian lighting, a domed climbing structure and photography displays.

T.B. Penick collaborated with City of SF landscape architect and artist Kelling Ording to install her paving design Ebb and Flow, an homage to the plaza’s microclimate of constant fog, sun and wind. Unique colors and textures were achieved using Lithocrete paving materials that allowed the artist’s two dimensional vision to become a reality on a large scale.

The entire plaza was poured at 8” thick using white cement. For the Chevron design, Penick used top seeded, blue aggregates before applying a broom finish. They added decorative saw cuts and sandblasted to expose the seeded aggregate. In the ”sun” design, black aggregate was seeded before applying a broom finish and then saw cut before being sandblasted. The “wave” design features decorative saw cuts in a wave pattern superimposed over quarried stone finish stained with an opaque black water stain. The project consisted of 1,300 lineal feet of decorative saw cuts and an additional 2,900 lineal feet of structural saw cuts and required approximately a week and a half of sandblasting.

Challenges included the difficulty of working with white cement, and accurately laying out the numerous sandblast stencils, which required three days and the tremendous effort of containment and cleanup of sandblast debris.