San Francisco’s Frontier Tower transforms urban vacancy into living lab for longevity science, clinical translation and communal acceleration.
As the global geroscience community wrestles with the dual pressures of translational inertia and growing demographic urgency, an interesting initiative is taking shape in San Francisco. In a city with office vacancy rates approaching 30%, a 16-story building in the Mid-Market district – once just another casualty of post-pandemic urban drift – is being re-inhabited with intent. But not by corporations or conventional tenants; rather, the newly dubbed Frontier Tower will host a cohort of longevity researchers, biohackers, neurotech developers and founders for a concentrated six-week residential program: part scientific salon – and part city-scale simulation.
Reimagining real estate for rejuvenation science
Set to run from 20 June through to 4 August this year, the Viva Frontier Tower program represents a physical instantiation of the ‘pop-up city’ model pioneered by the team behind Zuzalu in Montenegro and Vitalia in Honduras. This time, however, the focus is more explicitly biomedical: the event will include a dedicated longevity track (20 June – 3 July), a summit and a suite of workshops and roundtable discussions focused on therapeutic innovation, regulatory strategy and health-optimized living.
Participants are not merely attendees; they are cohabitants, collaborators and, in a sense, experimental subjects – sharing Blueprint-inspired breakfasts, engaging in daily group fitness routines and immersing themselves in an environment deliberately designed to accelerate clinical and technical feedback loops.
Longevity.Technology: The Viva Frontier Tower project reflects a growing appetite for environments that accelerate not just ideation, but translation. As the longevity field moves from speculative to clinical, real-world experimentation of this kind becomes more than a curiosity – it becomes a necessity. Embedding scientists, founders and funders within a health-optimized, time-bound ecosystem is not just novel; it’s a systems-level strategy to address the inertia often found in institutional research. What remains to be seen is whether this model can bridge into scalable infrastructure – supporting regulatory-grade clinical research, reproducible outcomes and investable startups. With Montana’s new legislation enabling experimental therapies outside the FDA pathway, and a broader shift in US regulatory thinking toward age-related interventions, such environments may soon have a clearer route to impact. But the intent is clear: if we’re to shift the dial on aging, our tools must include not just molecules and models, but environments that support faster iteration and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Viva is not just a tower – it’s a testbed.
From tower to template
What distinguishes this initiative is not merely its creative use of disused real estate, but the structural ambition behind it. The tower is operated by Viva.city – a longevity-first charter city initiative – and Berlinhouse, a company focused on adaptive reuse of underused buildings. For these groups, the San Francisco experiment serves as both a pilot and a proof-of-concept; in their own words, “filling up one tower in SF is a great exercise for when we will be ready to fill up many towers in the new city.” With plans to explore partnerships with small nations to establish charter jurisdictions designed around healthspan optimization, the project’s urban ambitions are matched by a keen sense of clinical urgency.
“This isn’t a conference,” the organizers insist. “It’s a prototype for the future of living aligned around health, agency, and bold science.” Indeed, the convergence of individuals expected to participate includes not only longevity scientists, but also crypto founders, AI researchers, philosophers and artists – blurring traditional disciplinary boundaries in the service of accelerated experimentation. The program promises rooftop debates on epigenetic clocks, roundtable discussions on partial cellular reprogramming and whiteboard collaborations that extend beyond the seminar room and into shared kitchens, co-working floors and communal gyms.
Jakob Drzazga, CEO of BerlinHouse, described the initiative as “an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we use buildings.” That rethinking extends not only to urban infrastructure, but to how the longevity field can close the gap between frontier theory and therapeutic application.
Living labs and clinical speed
While the program’s internal content remains somewhat opaque – its promotion has been quiet, almost deliberately so – the emphasis on time-bound cohabitation and scientific proximity suggests a shift away from traditional conference formats.
The assumption seems to be that innovation benefits less from keynote presentations and more from the serendipitous friction of shared space: researchers and entrepreneurs encountering each other over breakfast, engaging in sleep-optimized evenings and co-developing trial protocols on the whiteboard walls of the 16th floor.
Can it scale?
To that end, Viva’s model may offer a useful blueprint for the kind of clinical trial acceleration the longevity field sorely needs. With regulatory pathways often ill-suited to age-modifying interventions – and randomized control trials both costly and slow – initiatives like this may provide a middle ground: enabling rigorous data collection in real-world, semi-controlled environments that remain nimble and adaptive. The question, of course, is whether such experiments can scale, or whether they are destined to remain artisanal – useful as provocation but limited in throughput.
For now, at least 350 individuals have signed on to the tower initiative; participation ranges from $800 for a two-week track to $1,600 for the full six-week program. The draw, for many, is less the price point than the promise of proximity – to ideas, to investors and to others similarly obsessed with the biology of time.
Vitalik Buterin, whose Zuzalu initiative helped lay the groundwork for Viva, captured the ethos during a recent visit. “The primary goal was to make an experiment,” he said. “And so if you do things [like pop-up cities], you’re able to get much more useful data than you can get out of, like, 10,000-word blog articles.”
Architecture as innovation and intervention
The longevity field has long contended with isolation – scientific, institutional, geographic. Viva’s experiment suggests that architecture itself might serve as an intervention; that the built environment, if designed deliberately, can compress timelines, catalyze ideas and perhaps even bring the future a few steps closer.
And as the field continues to mature, one wonders whether the future of clinical translation lies not only in wet labs and regulatory filings, but also in shared stairwells, sleepless conversations and the repurposing of concrete towers once thought obsolete.
Article photographs courtesy of Viva Frontier Tower
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