San Francisco - Alison Bing [30]
Yerba Buena Gardens (opened 1993; Map; 3rd & Mission Sts) – stand in the garden and you can see stunning buildings on four sides: God, art and shopping – all in great buildings! This complex shows successful design on large and small scales.
AT&T Park (2000, HOK Sport; Map; 3rd & King Sts) – the architects had such great success in Baltimore they decided to do it again (and again and again). This brick park is a crowd-pleaser and a fun place to see a ballgame, but the Leave It to Beaver architecture is a lost opportunity.
Marriott Hotel (1989, DMJM; Map; 55 4th St) – locals call it the Jukebox, and we hate it. The ugliest building in SF screams for attention with its clumsy massing and flashy materials. Have a drink on the top floor of the hotel so you can see the city with this monster out of view.
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The city always had aspirations to rival the capitals of Europe, and commissioned architect Daniel Burnham to build a grand Civic Center in the classicizing beaux arts or ‘city beautiful’ style. But this Pacific Rim city also felt a pull in other geographical directions, incorporating the Spanish and Aztec influences of Mexico into Mission High School and financial institutions along Sansome St. The 1920s brought the mission revival style, a nostalgic look back at the state’s Spanish heritage. Julia Morgan became the first licensed female architect in California, and rose to fame with a precocious postmodern style that drew from a number of different cultural traditions, with her over-the-top Spanish-Gothic-Greek design for Hearst Castle, Italian-by-way-of-Meiji-Japan brick Zen Center and tastefully restrained pagoda-topped brick Chinatown YWCA (now the home of the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum; ). Distinctive Chinatown deco became a cornerstone of Chinatown’s redevelopment initiative after the 1906 quake, when a forward-thinking group of merchants led by Look Tin Eli undertook consultations with a cross-section of architects and held rudimentary focus groups to produce a consistent, crowd-pleasing, modern chinoiserie look that would attract tourists.
Meanwhile across the bay, Berkeley-based architect Bernard Maybeck was reinventing England’s Arts and Crafts movement with distinctly down-to-earth California sensibilities, cutting out frills in favor of harmonious geometry. Population growth and the movement to the suburbs inspired the California bungalow, a small, simple single-story design derived from summer homes favored by British officers serving in India. California Arts and Crafts proved equally applicable to cottages and to earthy ecclesiastical structures like San Francisco’s Swedenborgian Church.
SF’s ornate Victorian sensibility was quickly being superseded by toned-down, but no less beautiful architecture. By this time most of the city’s flatlands had been fully built up, so housing construction headed for the hills. As a result, the best places to see post-Victorian residential architecture are in hilly neighborhoods such as Diamond Heights and Twin Peaks. Art deco emerged from a 1920s fascination with machines and movement, yielding the futuristic, streamlined design aesthetic that gives the Golden Gate Bridge its wow factor.
The Depression years of the 1930s and the following WWII era brought a bonanza of WPA murals to town, but very little heavy construction. With the exclamation-point exception of Coit Tower, the city skyline scarcely changed until the early 1960s, when Downtown suddenly started to soar skyward. Before the ’60s, San Francisco had been known as the ‘white city’ because of its vast swaths of white stucco surfaces. But as engineers figured out how to build up without risk of complete tragedy in an earthquake, the Financial District rose skyward with acres of glass and steel to become thoroughly Manhattanized, with one notable San Francisco quirk: the Transamerica Pyramid.
Recent construction has focused on Mission Bay around AT&T Park, as San Francisco braces itself for an expected boom in biotech