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San Francisco, California
And the walls spin, and you're paper thin from the haze of the smoke and the mescaline
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is the second building by architect Daniel Libeskind in this still yet to end slideshow. Just like the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, you have similar angled, aggressive, crystallized forms, although San Francisco's building is a little more polished (and a hell of a lot smaller). Clad in smooth midnight blue panels and dotted with little tiny windows, the museum's main form erupts from a reused historic power station and hovers suspended over a pedestrian path between Market Street and Yerba Buena Gardens, set back from both and always a bit of a surprise no matter how many times you walk on by.
Inside that angled, aggressive, crystallized midnight blue form, things start to look a little bit different. The space (the Yud Gallery) is one large room, complete with little tiny framed views of the city and sky. Inside (when I visited) was a temporary exhibit featuring reasonably contemporary (think 1960s) Jewish music. The angled walls (complete with oddly positioned tacked on track lighting) makes the gallery perfect for that kind of exhibit and pretty much unusable for anything else. Just try and hang a painting or photo on those walls. I dare you.
The rest of the museum is certainly interesting (especially architecturally) though painfully small. When I was there, the exhibits on view included the recorded music in the Yud Gallery, a wall of photos and personal objects and one large certainly well researched exhibit all about Russian Jewish theatre with a few Chagall paintings thrown in for good measure. Luckily the experience was saved by Chagall (as always), most notably by two fantastic saturated paintings at the very end of the exhibit. After grumbling throughout the museum (not at the architecture but at what little was on display) those two Chagall paintings were enough to make me forget all that grumbling all about a museum collection that otherwise felt like nothing more than a minor distraction.
Mario Botta's (now) classic San Francisco Museum of Art is notoriously difficult to photograph, although I think at least this photo captures one small aspect of its scaleless (and visually busy) lobby.
On an AIA tour of something completely different, I was taken aback by the guide (a local architect) who spoke of the building in passing as beloved, something which must come more from familiarity than from objectivity. In the 2007 slideshow I wrote "(s)ure the stairs are interesting and the lobby has a look to it, but the design has, I don't know, a static pretentiousness to it, should such a description exist." Two years later I stand by that view and am prepared to go even further. I now realize it is a primarily just a big, striped, bulky fortress of a building with a lobby (and giant paintings) that almost has a fascist scale to it. Yes, I said fascist. Ok, maybe I'm being a bit too harsh. Maybe I need to go back again and again, to walk by it day after day, to let it become part of the fabric of the city rather than seeing it for what it is. Maybe then I'll start to think of it less like an abomination and more like a familiar old friend- a big, striped, bulky fortress of a familiar old friend with a lobby with an almost fascist scale to it.
One of my very favorite pictures of this slideshow, although one that admittedly doesn't explain a damn thing about the building pictured. Sorry about that.
Maybe these pictures are a little better, at least in terms of understanding the building.
This is the San Francisco Federal Building designed by Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, the same guy who designed Caltrans in Los Angeles, Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, the building at the University of Toronto and that new building at Cooper Union (for anyone local). An impressive building (far better than the easily comparable CalTrans Building), it has a lot of expected Morphosis flourishes (skip stop elevators that everyone hates, lots of metal screens, tiny strip windows that confuse any sense of exterior scale, a crumpled up form) as well as all of the environmental design and security features you would expect from any new federal building.
After landing at night, I stayed at the airport hotel before transferring early the next morning to a downtown one
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (the last stop before the Supreme Court for both difficult cases and often judges) is a historic building that survived the 1906 earthquake (when it was a post office) but didn't do all that well in the 1989 earthquake. The real reason for the damage was an addition built that managed to knock into the original building during the seismic event, something which caused near catastrophic damage to both buildings. The solution to save the building(s) is rather dramatic, base isolators were added underneath the building (and one of them is pictured below). The way they work is rather amazing. Unlike a regular building with a foundation that connects to solid ground, the courthouse sits as a single, independent object that rests (unattached) to the ground at multiple points. There the building is free to move as a single, independent object, and during the next real seismic event (which always seems unavoidable but will still come as a surprise), the building should be absolutely fine after it settles back on its base isolators after going for a bit of a ride.
In a similar seismic vein, I visited the International Terminal at San Francisco International Airport on a tour given by the SOM project architect who knew everything about the building. The main building (at about 850 feet long) is the world's largest on base isolators, a requirement since the building needs to be operational almost immediately after a major earthquake. What was most interesting was to hear about was how the building connects to its two wings, the roadways and the airport train (all designed with seismic features but not with base isolators). There is a clear seam that was pointed out inside the building, a 4 or 5 foot wide zone that was designed to pop out, slide or lift between the center building its wings. The skylights will slide around, the terrazzo floor will pop up a few inches and slide around, the walls will break apart and slide just enough to cause no injury or real damage. Electrical and plumbing and gas connections will be maintained without issue and the entire sidewalk and concrete plaza upstairs will slide back and forth over the road- there is a seam where the curb hits the pavement where you can start to see that the entire plaza is on top of (potentially) sliding stainless steel panels. Absolutely fascinating, at least for me.
