A 165,000-square-foot entertainment complex featuring a glass pyramid and three geodesic projection domes is opening at Pier 70 next month, and San Francisco's waterfront is getting its coming-out party on September 19 with a dance music festival called Pier Play. Headlined by DJ BLOND:ISH, the 21-and-over event runs from 2 PM to 10 PM and also features Nico de Andrea, Darco, MALAS, and Admiral.
Pier Play serves as the inaugural public event for Elevation Sky Park SF, a $7 million interim venue built to hold up to 2,500 guests over a five-year lease, according to SFGATE. The domes themselves range from 2,000 to 6,340 square feet and hold between 150 and 750 people, with a design pulling from 1960s Bay Area dome architecture, according to AustinKlar. Beyond concerts, the domes are built to host film screenings and sound baths, with 360-degree wraparound projection mapping reminiscent of Las Vegas's Sphere.
The festival and venue leaders discussed what Bay Area audiences can expect during an appearance on KRON4's Live! In The Bay, hosts spoke with Elevation XR co-founder and CEO Sean Ahearn and RASA World co-founder and CEO Ahmad Muhaisen. According to KRON4, the pair joined host Jessica Wills to talk through how Pier Play will transform San Francisco's waterfront into an open-air cultural experience blending music and art.
A Long-Delayed Dome Dream Finally Lands
Ahearn's geodesic dome concept isn't new to San Francisco — he first tried to bring it to Pier 70 back in 2017, but pivoted to Los Angeles when costs proved too steep here, launching Wisdome LA in 2018 instead. The station's report notes Ahearn lived in San Francisco for two decades before making that move. Pier delays eventually created the opening he'd been waiting for, letting him bring the dome complex home.
RASA World, meanwhile, was founded in San Francisco in 2021 by tech entrepreneurs before launching the original Pier Play at the Santa Monica Pier in 2024. Per Business Wire, the company staged four consecutive sold-out editions there before expanding the festival back to its founders' hometown. Muhaisen brings a tech-industry background to the venture, having worked as a software engineer at Apple, Amazon, and Facebook before serving as an executive at fintech startup Tribal Credit, according to a Medium profile.
Growth Numbers Behind the Expansion
RASA World has projected a 248% increase in annual attendance and a 265% jump in ticket demand across its Pier Play platform in 2026, according to Morningstar. That growth is driving the platform's expansion into multi-day and multi-city formats, with Pier Play also set to run as a multi-day event in Santa Monica in October. San Francisco-based independent music company EMPIRE took a strategic investment stake in Elevation Sky Park SF last September to support the venue's live music and cultural programming, per PR Newswire.
A Waterfront in Limbo Finds a New Use
The dome complex fills a gap left by Brookfield Properties' paused master plan for the 28-acre Pier 70 site, which originally called for over 2,000 housing units and 2 million square feet of commercial space. According to SFist, that full buildout was planned back in 2019 before post-pandemic market conditions delayed major construction, prompting the port to turn to interim leases for temporary entertainment venues instead. It's not the neighborhood's first brush with this kind of stopgap programming, either — Hoodline reported on a similar temporary technology and culture festival, Worlds Fair Nano, staged at the historic pier back in January 2017.
Not every corner of Pier 70 is sitting idle, though. Venture capital firm General Catalyst signed a 70,000-square-foot lease in January to occupy the entire third floor of Building 12, a restored World War II shipbuilding shed that Hoodline reported functions as the master plan's commercial hub. Between that corporate anchor and the dome park's debut, San Francisco's eastern waterfront is finding ways to stay active while the neighborhood's bigger housing and commercial buildout remains on hold.
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