Before the Chase Center opened in September in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, developers knew the $1.6 billion basketball arena had to be more than the home of the Golden State Warriors. They wanted it to be a community gathering space, too.

“If you go to Chase Center, you’re not just going to one place,” said René Bihan, a principal at SWA Group, the arena’s landscape architect. “You’re going to start in one place and wind up in another one and go through several different experiences when you get there.”

Those experiences include a farmers’ market and neighborhood events, as well as an interactive installation by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson consisting of five polished spheres facing one another, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect.

“Who wants to see yourself from all angles?” the Warriors’ president, Rick Welts, asked facetiously.