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San Francisco's Spirited Modernism
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20665 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,299 Words |
| Author
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Diana Ketcham
Diana Ketcham is an architecture writer based in San
Francisco. |
San Francisco has never been a city that welcomed Modern architecture. Neither the pioneers of Modernism in the early twentieth century nor the Mies-influenced American architects of the fifties, nor the recent Neo-Modernist school left a substantial mark on the city by the bay. In the downtown, building by the great names of Modern architecture are precious and few-Frank Lloyd Wright's Morris jewelry store on Maiden Lane, Gordon Bunschaft's Crown Zellerbach tower on Market Street, and a handful of houses by Richard Neutra and Eric Mendelsohn.
The city has been too pleased with it--inherited charms to be champion of an architecture of the future, or even the present. San Francisco has been content to let its architectural identity be defined by the past. Its proudest fine arts tradition has been the Bay Region Style, derived by Bernard Maybeck and Willis Polk from the English arts and Crafts movement. Its Public building have grown up in the shadow of its Beaux-Arts Civic Center, a legacy of the 1893 Chicago Universal Exposition. Its residential character was set at the turn of the century by its vast stock of Victorians, built tall and narrow to fit the fifteen-foot lots of the nineteenth-century boomtown grid.
During the 1980s, San Francisco's backward-looking architectural sensibility was enshrined as official city policy. The Post-Modernists' byword, contextualism, was a perfect complement to the city's long-standing reverence for tradition. When Post-Modern nostalgia discovered San Francisco in the eighties, it was an ideological marriage made in heaven. In 1985, the city adopted a downtown plan that encouraged the use of features from past architectural styles, recommending decoration, protruding cornices, setbacks, tapered tops, light colors, and textured masonry as a material instead of dark-tinted glass. Moreover, it required new buildings to be aesthetically compatible with their neighbors, inspiring a revival of the bay window and traditionally painted wood siding. So far-reaching were the design provisions of this ordinance that many believed the city government had taken a stand in the architecture style wars, against Modern architecture and on the side of Post-Modern historicism.
International Trend
But by the 1990s, the cityscape was beginning to reflect a movement in the other direction, toward a reappreciation of the International Style. The examples are scattered and few-a crisp Cubit townhouse here, a sleek glass brick showroom there, a composition in metal breaking a row of painted Victorian
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