Mission Bay and San Francisco’s Future

Posted on April 30th, 2009 by Sally B. Woodbridge
Architecture, Urban Planning |

BERRY STREET

The blocks of Berry Street, which runs between King Street and Mission Creek, from 7th to 3rd Street are lined with residential buildings that exemplify the “new town” ambiance of Mission Bay North. Unlike King Street, Berry is narrow enough to allow comparison with streets in San Francisco’s 19th century and early 20th century neighborhoods, but the buildings’ contemporary materials and new vocabulary of forms has created a different streetscape. A look at some facades from different periods in San Francisco’s growth makes that case.

Below is a turn-of-the-20th-century apartment house with a facade articulated by polygonal bay windows and classical ornament that express components of the building’s wooden frame. The invisible vertical posts and horizontal beams were masked with a decorative icing of fake classical window heads, cornice moldings, and other classical details. The spaces between them were set by construction codes established for stabilizing wood buildings.

San Francisco was as famous for its bay windows as Boston, which gave the “bay” window its name.

The enrichment typical of building facades in the 19th and first decades of the 20th centuries vanished with the spread the Modern Movement. Le Corbusier proclaimed five principles for Moderism: the use of pilotis, open floor plans, a “free facade”, horizontal windows, and roof gardens. Echoes of Corbusier’s doctrine are evident in the building on Berry Street shown below.

However, Corbu’s recipe for modernity did not appeal to the American home-buying public, which favored the historic styles of the pre-World War II decades. The so-called International Style Modernism introduced to the United States in the post-war period failed to attract a following outside the avant-garde architectural world.

Various kinds of mixed stylistic metaphors stamped the flood of residential design that swept the country in the post-war years. Yet, gradually versions of Modernism overcame aversions to it, and a Modernist cast settled over residential design in new multi-unit buildings in the 1960s. Then, with the 1976 Bi-Centennial celebration, the Post-Modern movement, which found new meaning in the past, began.

In the 21st century Modernisn has been re-cast as Contemporary, which was its original meaning. But while rejecting Post-Modernism’s symbolic historicism, architects are still searching for ways to enrich the visual experience of viewing buildings on city streets.

Below is a dramatic example of re-thinking the familiar 19th century facade punctuated with bay-windows.

Haight Street Lofts by Leddy Maytum Stacy, 1996

No longer constrained by the structural system of previous wood-frame buildings, architects are free to tinker with facade elements and create new adaptations of the fenestrated bay. The one shown above is on the Berry Street facade of the Mission Creek Senior Community Center building at 4th and Berry Streets designed by Hardison Komatsu Ivelich & Tucker with Santos Prescott & Associates.

Finally, under the guidance of the Redevelopment Agency, current residential building facades on Berry Street have been designed with townhouse units on the first two floors. The projected two-story fenestrated bays, colored differently from the main walls, recall the rhythm of older San Francisco neighborhood streets.

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