San Francisco Chronicle: Bay Area residents know how hard it is to get a full sense of the large and constantly shifting shoreline that frames the body of water at the center of this region.

Now imagine you’re an architect or landscape architect from outside the United States, embarking on an eight-month effort to conceive how different parts of the overall waterfront might function generations from now — not just ecologically, but also in terms of the people and cultures along it.

“I’m still overwhelmed by the scale,” confessed David Tickle, a principal at Hassell, an Australian design firm. “The different waterfronts, the communities, the infrastructures and potential disasters.”

Tickle’s firm leads one of the 10 teams that will be awarded $250,000 each to come up with design responses to the challenges posed by sea level rise in the Bay Area. The competition was organized by Resilient by Design, a local nonprofit that has support from several Bay Area government agencies and is funded in large part by a $4.6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Continue reading>>San Fra