Hooper Street is as obscure a street as you can (barely) find in San Francisco. It’s a single block shadowed by Interstate 280. Until 2015, dozens of self-storage sheds were the main draw.

Now the sheds are gone, replaced in part by perhaps the city’s most intriguing and innovative new development — an industrial building with an artisanal twist and 21st century political smarts.

“This is the beacon that manufacturing is here to stay in San Francisco,” Kate Sofis, founder of the industry group SFMade, told an enthusiastic crowd Thursday night outside 150 Hooper St. “It is built to stand the test of time.”

Sofis was exultant as she spoke, and no wonder: She was hosting a celebration to mark the debut of the Manufacturing Foundry — a four-story, 56,000-square-foot structure that offers below-market-rent space to firms that are engaged in production, distribution and repair.

Sponsors for the event included Rickshaw Bagworks and Bi-Rite market. The eight tenants so far run the gamut, from a robotics firm to an old-school sewing business that works with interior designers. A fair number of the celebrants sported haircuts and shoes far hipper than yours or mine.

There also were plenty of local politicians on hand, including Mayor London Breed.

“Even though this is one of the first opportunities for affordable manufacturing space in San Francisco,” she said, “I pledge it will not be the last.”

The object of their affection is modest by Financial District standards. The building is a stocky cube with a lean concrete frame that sits behind a deep plaza where the celebration took place. The ground floor has a generous height of 18 feet, tall enough for deliveries to be wheeled in and out with relative ease.

Such buildings were once common in American cities. By contrast, the saga of 150 Hooper is one-of-a-kind.

The place to start is the setting.

The Manufacturing Foundry doesn’t stand alone. It’s a caboose of sorts, the western end of the much larger 100 Hooper project by Kilroy Properties that also is four stories and has light-industrial space on the first floor. But the rest of Kilroy’s two buildings are leased to Adobe, and the developer touts the overall complex as “a micro community of progressive thinkers and skilled makers connected by sky-bridges and common goals.”

Directly to the east is I-280. On the south and west is California College of the Arts, which occupies a former bus repair facility and has expansion plans on one-time parking lots. To the north is a Recology truck storage yard, where the waste recovery firm hopes to build 1,059 housing units plus commercial space.

You get the picture. It’s an area in a transition.

The reason SFMade is part of the mix is that activists and neighborhood politicians in recent years have put controls in place to protect industrial spaces in areas like this once-remote set of blocks between Showplace Square and Mission. This includes zoning that requires one-third of new space in some projects to be reserved for light-industrial space. When Kilroy bought the 3.3-acre Hooper Street site in 2015, it agreed to donate the northwest piece to PlaceMade, a subsidiary of SFMade, as part of the effort to satisfy its overall requirement.

A 1-foot-wide seismic buffer is all that separates 150 Hooper from Kilroy’s 100 Hooper. They share the same architects, Pfau Long Architecture and Forge, as well as the publicly accessible plaza by SurfaceDesign that includes a bioswale so large it looks like a remnant of the marsh that might have covered the site 200 years ago.

All in all, the pairing of 100 and 150 Hooper St. is a real plus. The market-rate buildings have slightly more elaborate facades, but the overall package has straightforward sophistication. There also are such small delights as the tall, narrow breezeway through 150 Hooper’s base, or the benches made from stacks of now-polished concrete that once covered the site.

Here’s another overlap between the two. Seven Stills, a brewery and distillery now based in Bayview, leases space in 150 Hooper for barrel storage. Next year it also will expand into 100 Hooper with a tasting room and distillery. I’m guessing there will be lots of happy-hour traffic from the well-paid Adobe employees upstairs.

“Projects like this can change the nature of development in San Francisco,” said Kilroy’s Mike Grisso, a senior vice president. “They’re more varied, more vibrant.”

It’d be nice to hold up 150 Hooper as the first in a series of great things to come, a new artisanal landscape. That’s probably not the case.

The donation of land from Kilroy was a huge economic boost. So was the assistance of City Hall in helping PlaceMade to secure federal tax credits.

But with luck, San Francisco’s small but tenacious manufacturing community will continue to carve out enclaves where it can. Smart developers will understand that, like Kilroy, it can make business sense to be flexible when you have a large piece of land.

“You can mix manufacturing and office space,” Sofis said. “Done correctly, you can also make an active city out of it.”

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron