One of San Francisco’s most anticipated towers finally has an architectural green light from the city — nearly two years after the unusual design was unveiled and with few changes that will be obvious from afar.

Part of the reason for the delay was politics, no surprise. But the evolution of acclaimed Chicago architect Jeanne Gang’s residential cluster on Folsom Street near the Embarcadero also offers fresh proof that for planners in this city, the skyline show often isn’t as important as what happens on the ground.

“What we got from this whole process was a desire for more color and texture, but a similarity of material, but not look like one big box,” said Gang, whose honors include a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant awarded in 2011.

The schematic design approved Tuesday by the city’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure remains pretty much the same as when the project by Gang’s firm, Studio Gang, for developer Tishman Speyer was first shown to the public in July 2014.

At the northwest corner of Folsom and Spear streets, there would be a 39-story tower sliced by sinuous strands of bay windows. Behind it along Main Street there’d be an eight-story building. Four stories of townhomes would line a new pedestrian alley along the north edge of the block.

All told, the complex, now called 160 Folsom, will hold 391 condominiums, with 40 percent of them reserved for moderate-income buyers. There will be shops along the sidewalks and an outdoor staircase off Folsom Street that doubles as a public seating area.

The tower remains silvery gray, a blunt corkscrew softened by those tightly spiraling lines of what Gang calls “migrating bays,” each one with a slightly different angle than those around it. The base, though, now looks like an ensemble of buildings rather than leftover pieces of the tower. The eight-story wing would have broad bays and metal cladding the tone of a copper penny, while the town houses would present textured off-white panels above brick-clad entryways.

Some of these changes are the standard design evolution that comes as an initial vision’s details are filled in. But the emphasis on fitting into the surroundings is a direct response to San Francisco’s emphasis on pedestrian life, adding variety and texture where it counts.

Nor were the refinements the main reason for the slow pace of a project that from the start has stood out from the aesthetic crop. The tower is 100 feet taller than what zoning allowed on the block, which led to predictable opposition from the upper-floor residents of the equally tall complex across the street (ah, first-world problems). The height was raised by a unanimous Board of Supervisors vote in April after Tishman Speyer agreed to boost the amount of lower-income condos, not only filling the lower buildings but also threading the units through the tower’s first 26 floors.

The only procedural step that remains is a supervisors’ vote this summer to approve the sale of the city’s slice of the block to Tishman Speyer. Assuming that occurs, construction could begin next spring.

Tuesday’s vote was before the relatively obscure commission that oversees the redevelopment of land in the Transbay district that once was covered by freeway ramps. Support was strong, though one commissioner suggested that making the lower buildings have different colors than the tower meant the lower-income tenants were being “discriminated against.”

Not at all: If the lower portions of the block are visually distinctive, that will make them look stronger as independent pieces of the neighborhood that’s starting to take shape around them.

Too often, second-guessing by planners waters down a design’s potential. This process has brought the overall vision for 160 Folsom into sharper focus. Built with care, the result should be something to see.

Award winner: The awards ceremony is a few months off, but congratulations to San Francisco’s Hargreaves Associates for being named a recipient of this year’s National Design Award in landscape architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

The firm, which was founded in San Francisco in 1983 by George Hargreaves and also has offices in New York and Cambridge, Mass., received plaudits for “the transformation of neglected urban sites, waterfronts and campuses into memorable places that have become icons for their cities.” The i-word is overused these days, but it certainly applies to Hargreaves’ best-known local work: the reclamation of the Presidio’s Crissy Field, which turned a ramshackle military backwater into a regional destination.

Other Bay Area projects include the sculpture-studded plaza at 555 Mission St. — check out the voluptuous living wall — and Stanford University’s recent science and engineering quad. There’s more on the way, including a 13-acre bay-side park that’s part of the redevelopment efforts at the former Hunters Point shipyard in San Francisco.

The National Design Awards will be presented Oct. 20 in New York. Don’t be surprised if design fans Barack or Michelle Obama — or both — show up for the festivities.

Place is a weekly column by John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron