The Brower Center at Oxford and Allston Streets.

The recently completed David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley is a memorial to a major figure in this country’s environmental movement. Brower served as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club from 1952 fo 1960 and later founded such environmental organizations as Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute. He inspired a generation of environmental activists, some of whom now work in the building at the intersection of Allston Way and Oxford Street that bears his name.

Thirty some national and international groups occupy 24,000 sq. ft. of office space on the building’s upper three floors. Their mission is to foster collaborations, engage new people in advocacy and facilitate cross-sector communication and partnerships.

Although the work of the building’s tenants is a story in itself, the subject of this article is the Center’s building design and its structural system, which were created to insure that the physical embodiment of Brower’s legacy would be a state-of-the-art expression of his life’s work. The building is on track to receive a LEED platinum rating—the highest possible—from the US Green Building Council.

Plans show the shape of the site and the Brower Center's rounded facade derived from the street corner it faces. Plans of the Oxford Plaza housing are shown on the right.

The building’s site is unusual in that the corner it faces has a rounded edge. This feature prompted the architects, WRT/Solomon E.T.C., to design a rounded façade that enables a more natural flow of space than the typical right-angled street corner. Pedestrian traffic flows from the building’s entrance on Allston Street past the Center’s ground-floor restaurant, Gather, to a gated open space between the Center and the apartment complex, Oxford Plaza.

The building’s façade suggests a temple form with engaged columns set on a raised base, a slightly projecting attic story above, and a cornice, which departs from the classical type by continuing the solid array of photovoltaic panels on the south side with a slatted trellis that follows the roof line and rises as it curves around the eave from south to north like an upturned hat brim.

View of the Brower Center from a building across Oxford Street.Both photographs on this page are by Tim Griffith.

The panels’ downward slant on the south side moderates the greater amount of daylight entering the building from that direction and reduce heat gain in the summer; their upward tilt on the north side increase the admission of light to meet the seasonal greater need. Measures like these have made the interior nearly 100% daylit.

In respect to materials, the metal used for the façade is zinc, which requires less energy to mine and work into forms than aluminum or steel. Its matt surface avoids glare. The window glass redirects sunlight and thereby reduces heat gain. Operable window sections allow changes in ventilation.

The concrete used in the building is 70% blast furnace slag in the foundation and 50% slag in the super structure. The use of this by-product of manufacturing steel reduces the building’s energy content and its “carbon footprint” by 40%. The Brower Center is the first Bay Area Project to use high-slag concrete on such a scale.

The BRIDGE Housing Corporation, a non-profit company considered by many to be the state’s foremost developer of affordable housing, has built more than 13,000 housing units since its founding in 1983. Although Bridge’s original focus was housing for working families, it has diversified and now has several affiliates and a staff of about 250, enabling it to handle every aspect of financing, planning, development and maintenance of the projects it owns and manages.

Although outreach to the community surrounding its projects has always been an integral part of BRIDGE’s approach to building housing in California, its scope has expanded to include the components of communities and to transforming existing neighborhoods.

This article focuses on the early history of BRIDGE, beginning with an account of its founding and its early projects, Holloway Terrace in 1985, and Parkview Commons in 1990. The recently completed Mission Walk development comprises two buildings on Berry Street in Mission Bay. The missing period of enormous expansion between 1990 and 2009 will doubtless be covered in the detail it deserves, but a blog post is not adequate for that task.

The impetus for starting BRIDGE in San Francisco, which remains its headquarters, was an anonymous gift of approximately $650,000 entrusted to the San Francisco Foundation in late 1980.

The funds were dedicated to creating affordable housing and came at a time when the Bay Area’s high costs of living threatened the stability of the workforce because its members were being priced out of the housing market.

The nine-page document that accompanied the gift contained the following statement:

“The donor has had and still has a strong interest in housing for persons and families of low and moderate income. However well intentioned, various federal programs, e.g., Section 8, have not delivered enough housing to either the inner cities or elsewhere to meet the enormous demand. This in turn suggests that what the private sector needs is a program for the construction or rehabilitation of housing for low and moderate income groups which would attract private investors interested in meeting a real national need and still make economic sense to investors and the business community.

Accordingly, this gift must be used to form a relatively small task force to study the problem, using all the academic disciplines from Bay Area universities at the faculty and graduate school level. Membership of the task force should also include enough experienced businessmen and bankers to avoid too heavy an academic orientation.”

The foundation asked Alan Stein, an investment banker, to chair the task force and select its members. Stein had come to San Francisco from New York City in 1971 to head the office of Goldman Sachs. In 1978 Governor Jerry Brown appointed him Secretary of Business and Transportation, which had ten departments, one of which was Housing and Community Development. Since the HCD department lacked a director at that time, Stein’s first task was to fill that position.

For advice in finding a new director Stein consulted Richard Bender, then dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Bender recommended a faculty member, Don Terner, who was an ardent housing advocate and had worked successfully in affordable housing programs in New York.

In 1980 Terner was appointed director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. He moved to Sacramento where he worked closely with Alan Stein and, according to Stein, educated him about the housing field by taking him to see projects throughout the state. Terner left the state government in 1981.

In 1982, to fulfill the donor’s stipulation that a task force be formed to administer the grant, Stein convened a group of people who were successful in various fields and interested in affordable housing. Rather than create another report, the task force chose to start building. The next step was to hire executives to run the operation.

Don Terner’s actions as Director of Housing and Community Development made him a leading candidate to head the organization. He had sponsored legislation which gave non-profit housing developers the first option to purchase surplus public lands and had also initiated legislation that included density bonuses that allowed selected developers to add up to 30% additional units to their projects, thus giving them extra units at no additional land costs.

Terner was hired to be the president of the new organization, which was then called Bay Area Regional Housing Investment and Development Group, later turned into the acronym, BRIDGE. A close associate and former student of his, Rick Holliday, was made vice president.

To raise the capital needed to start building units, Stein and Terner, supported by their board of directors, held fund-raising events for members of the business community. This use of the methods of private developers was a radical departure from the 1960s approach of community non-profit housing organizations which were oriented toward government funding and focused on individual projects.

A highly successful fund raising event in 1983 allowed the first project, Holloway Terrace, in San Francisco’s Ingleside Terrace to start; it was completed in 1985. According to Alan Stein, the success of this and other projects that followed came from diligent outreach to the projects’ neighborhoods, ownership of the projects and careful management, and the serious involvement of board members in the projects’ development.

The original task force members are Dick Bender, Gordon Chin, Ken Phillips, Tony Ramos, Alan Stein, Clark Wallace, Susanne Wilson, Gerson Bakar, Preston Butcher, Tom Flynn, Tony Frank, Dean Macris, Sunne McPeak, Ken Rosen, Mary Lee Widener. The picture on the right is of Alan Stein and Rick Holliday, 2009.

I wondered why and set out to discover the answer. To do so I needed to learn about all the stations. In particular I needed to study Glen Park station. This is what I learned.

The BART system was planned in the 1950s and designed in the 1960s. The stations opened in the early 70s. It and Washington DC Metro were the first two systems in the nation and being pioneers of municipal transportation they had to make up their own rules. BART’s approach of employing different architects to design stations resulted in the variety of architecture that is absent in the DC system.

Different architects had different ideas for the design of stations. As with all things artistic some designs have worn better than others. Unlike other art forms, or even other architectural forms, BART stations have had to endure the test of time both aesthetically and physically. Glen Park station has passed both tests.

The station takes basic components of a station (platform, concourse, superstructure, surroundings and the means to get from one to the other) and translates them into a story about the BART system and its construction that relates to the building of monuments that have characterized human aspiration throughout time.

At the platform level, one of the deepest platforms in the system, jagged stone blocks cover the retaining walls. They are stacked like engaged columns that reinforce the feeling of being in a manmade underground tunnel. The roughness of the blocks suggests that the tunnel has been carved out of the solid rock within the earth’s core. Yet the place is not claustrophobic or oppressive. The stacked blocks lead the eyes upward where there is light and air. The roughness of the blocks is neutralized by the use of polished slabs of marble and granite for vertical cores and benches.

In the transition from platform to concourse the station’s walls shed their stone blocks to reveal rough-hewn concrete. The roughness of the concrete recalls the most basic and monumental of construction types. Vertical striations in the concrete reinforce the direction from the tunnel below to the street and sky above.

At the concourse level, one of the most compact in the system, the treatment of the surrounding walls and the use of a glass roof create the feeling of being in a monumental vestibule or, perhaps, the ruin of an ancient temple. The rough-hewn concrete walls continue to this level and characterize the exterior of the superstructure. But within the concourse are over 100 panels of polished marble that embellish the walls. They enrich the room with a finish that contrasts with the rough walls below. Yet they also complement each other; the stone blocks, the rough concrete and the polished marble are different expressions for the same element.

The use of different finishes enriches the experience of going from the platform to the concourse —from the earth’s core along rough walls to the refined room at the top. Capping the concourse with a glass roof highlights the experience of moving from the underground to the light and air above and back again.

From a distance the station appears to emerge from the BART system below. Its emphasis on vertical transformation acknowledges that the vast underground network is the core of the system and the station is merely one entry point. Design and finishes together support the theme of the station rising from the rails and platform up to the concourse and street, its perimeter walls like shards of concrete pushed upward through the earth.

The excellent design of Glen Park station secures its place in the history of architecture, however it is the use of durable and refined materials that insures that it will appeal to future generations. Based on my experiences I found the station to be an architectural achievement and agree that it is the crown jewel in the BART system.

The Salvation Army’s Turk Street Center is that rare building which both honors the context of an historic district and stands out as decidedly contemporary.

The new building at 240-242 Turk Street was completed in July, 2008 after five years of programming and an intensive Planning Department design review process followed by 28 months of construction, which included the demolition of an existing building.

In designing a rippling facade of metallic bay windows the architects, Herman Coliver Locus, have capitalized on San Francisco’s vernacular building style and affirmed its functionality for the architecture of urban streetscapes.

Photograph by Tim Griffith

By coloring some of the window frames blue or yellow, as shown above, the architects sought to allow residents the possibility of identifying the location of their apartment and thereby lessening the anonymity of  the wall of windows.

The eight-story building has 113 apartments, 110 of which are studios with 358.5 sq. ft. Three are 2-bedroom units with 912.5 sq. ft.

]]> http://designbythebay.com/2009/06/salvation-armys-turk-st-center/feed/ 11 http://designbythebay.com/2009/05/frank-gehry-renzo-piano/ http://designbythebay.com/2009/05/frank-gehry-renzo-piano/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 00:30:02 +0000 RCCo http://designbythebay.com/?p=411 Prominent architects Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano talk with Charlie Rose about the architecture profession and their latest projects. (56 min video)]]> Prominent architects Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano talk with Rose about the architecture profession and their latest projects on the Charlie Rose Show from May 20th, 2009. (56 min video)

Frank Owen Gehry’s buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies, and cities seek Gehry’s services as a badge of distinction, regardless of the product he delivers. His best known works include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is covered in titanium, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, the latter of which jump-started his substantive career and lifted it from the stature of “paper architecture”, a phenomenon in which many famous architects are observed to have experienced their formative decades experimenting almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in their later years. Source-Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry

Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. From 1965 to 1970 he worked with Louis Kahn and with Makowsky. Later, he worked with Richard Rogers from 1971 to 1977, including work on the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He also had a long collaboration with the famed engineer Peter Rice. Today, Piano is well known for his museum designs: the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation museum in Basel, Switzerland, a museum dedicated to Swiss painter Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, as well as completed museum projects in Dallas (the Nasher Sculpture Center) and in Atlanta (the High Museum of Art).

One of Piano’s most recent designs is the approved Shard London Bridge skyscraper, also known as the London Bridge Tower or Shard of glass, in London. His latest project is the natural history museum the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. In 1998, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Source-Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renzo_Piano

You can catch all episodes of the Charlie Rose Show at http://www.charlierose.com/

Since southeastern San Francisco is changing dramatically, how will its transformation affect the city as a whole? Will people travel the same routes to the same destinations that made the city famous in the past? Or, will a new city center in Mission Bay turn the old familiar city into what we may call the “museum city.” This transformation will not rob the historic city of its charm and importance, but it may no longer have the dynamism that will characterize the new center.

When San Francisco is depicted in the public’s imagination, its important geographic centers are typically those that were established in the 19th century and remained dominant through the 20th century. They are: the financial district in the blocks around lower Market Street; the commercial areas focused on Union Square and in recent years extended to Mission Street; the hills named Nob, Russian, and Telegraph; and other well known residential neighborhoods: Pacific, and Presidio Heights, the streetcar suburbs such as the Mission and the Western Addition, and the Richmond and Sunset districts, automobile suburbs that began to spread across the city in the early 20th century.

In recent boom times real estate development for office space crossed Market Street, and a new cultural center coalesced south of Market in the 1990s in what is now called SOMA.

Both SOMA and the Central Waterfront district to the south have experienced more or less steady development of market-rate and affordable housing with related commercial activity. The completion of the baseball park in 2000 spurred growth and attracted attention further south to the Mission Bay area.

Yet, the idea of living and working in the barren southeastern flatlands so unlike the familiar and glamorous traditional city to the north did not appeal to most San Franciscans.

by Lucio Flavio Pinto
translated from Portuguese by James Denison and Cassia Leal

It was a challenging spectacle that took place in Belem, the ninth version of the World Social Forum, bringing global solidarity to the Amazon. What really resulted from this initiative? That is the question that remains. One of the few things that remain after its departure.

Among capitals in Brasil, Belem has one of the lowest percentages of green space per capita, although it is located at the entrance to the Amazon, which contains one-third the world’s tropical rainforests. The most extensive green areas remaining in the city are the campuses of two federal universities, the UFRA and the UFPA, which hosted, for a week, the ninth edition of the World Social Forum, which ended on February 1st. These woods are surrounded by two of the most populous and dangerous districts in the city, Guama and Terra Firme, which contain 10% of the 1.4 million people living in Belem, and some 15% of its crime.

Guama grew by receiving migrants from the interior, who were thrown off of their native lands by the arrival of the new colonizers. These colonizers brought with them cow farms, timber mills, agricultural plantations and mining operations that are responsible for the largest destruction of forests in the history of humanity (the equivalent of expanding Sao Paulo to three times its size in only four decades). Terra Firme became overrun with miserable motels that were installed to receive desperate laborers who were forced off of their land and then urbanized by being herded up by the same coyotes who manage the manpower used to destroy the land where the natives used to live.

In meetings held in Terra Firme to prepare for the Forum a group was formed to ensure the participation of local people. But the idea of local participation evaporated because of the non-participation of NGOs and organizers who were in charge of the event. Furthermore, participation became an impossibility because of the 30 reais (15 dollars) entrance fee to the Forum that nobody could afford.

The Forum discussed none of the problems afflicting the enormous and chaotic outskirts of Belem, where one will find what is considered to be the largest flatland favela in the country, Paar, teeming with 140,000 inhabitants. In addition, Belem is the second most violent city in Brazil, after Recife, in proportion to its population. Ironically, during the week of the Forum, it was the very problems of these neighboring districts that inspired disdainful diatribes, on the internet, from the Sunday social columnist who writes for O Liberal, the paper that is owned by and represents the interests of the moneyed elite in the State of Para.

The international themed conference held in Belem, to emphasize the “Amazon question” and to provoke ideas and arguments about what to do about the current environmental situation, did not dare to cross the police barrier that isolated the dangerous districts, within whose limits are embarrassing black spots on the city’s image. Uselessly these neighborhoods looked on as the mob of foreigners held their unusual events. Locals from these neighborhoods did not participate in the hundreds of scheduled events, nor enjoy meaningful interactions with the foreign festival goers, but merely sold knick-knacks to them to make an extra buck. They had good reason to do this: out of all of the state capitals in Brazil, Belem has the largest informal economy and one of the largest unemployment rates in the country. A huge part of its citizenry make a living by doing odd jobs or work without relation to any kind of stable employment. From this there is an ever-expanding segment of the population that crosses over from the informal economy into the criminal world, with only the slightest possibility of returning.

During the days leading up to the opening of the World Social Forum, local people crossed over the security barriers, that isolated the campus, any way they could, carrying tables, chairs, pots, spoons and food to offer the public because of the inadequate supply of food services for an event of this size in Belem. Later, after an increase in security at the barriers and the entrances (to participate in the debates once inside the campus was free, but access to the entrances was super-controlled) local people began to rob, for the most part, the two thousand volunteers passing between the campuses of the Federal University of Para and the Federal University of Rural Amazonia.

First they stole the volunteers’ credentials, and then altered them so that they could pass through security and bring in with them their food, pastries and desserts. People also stole official t-shirts in order to pass through security (some of the volunteers actually had to sell their own official t-shirts in order to get money for the bus so they could get to and from the Forum). In this way, the marginalized people of this Amazonian metropolis tried to take advantage of the huge event of the year, which, according to organizers, welcomed 130,000 people. But because of thousands of extra t-shirts, many in unopened boxes, people began to wonder who really knew how many people were actually inside the event.

Thanks to a marriage of necessity between the need for food and the more than three thousand people camping out on the campus and thousands of others passing between the campuses during the day, there was a link between the bubble of solidarity and the hope for a better world, but there had to be physical manifestation of these utopias, those excluded from globalization in flesh and bone. Guama and Terra Firme were two of the most serious worries afflicting the government and the organizers, the hidden subject in the demand for independence by the World Social Forum (like a contra-faction against the summit of the ultra-rich in Davos).

The Federal government, the PT (Workers Party), dispatched 300 National Guard troops, and sent 50 million reais (out of a 160 million reais budget) for security alone. The State government, also ruled by the PT, put in a concentration of 7,000 military and civil police in the city of Belem. They set up barriers around the neighboring districts to protect the attendees of the Forum from the more than 200 daily incidents of crime in the area (60% of these are robberies, more than 2/3 of which are violent). Thousands of residents were stopped and searched by police patrols, neighborhood bars were forced to close at 10pm because of the marshal law that was imposed on the area. Daily routines were changed, but not for long.

Thanks to these measures, no violence disrupted the atmosphere of the Forum during its week-long stay in Belem. Isolated in this manner, the participants could develop, without interruption, their ideas and proposals for the construction of a better world and a sustainable Amazon. The uncomfortable reality, that was here before, will now return now that the gurus, prophets, disciples and people of goodwill have returned to their homes around the world. Carrying back home with them the same ideas and images that they brought to Belem.

Without a doubt, the World Social Forum brought to Belem people of great intellectual capacity, with strong credentials, willing to apply their talents to build a better future for the planet at large, and in particular, for the Amazon. Few, however, came to hear what the region itself had to say. Many had dedicated their time to studying the Amazon, remaining on constant alert to what is happening through their electronic devices, connected to satellites, accessing data banks, analyzing information, developing complex arguments and coming to conclusions about what is happening in the overexploited Amazonian soil. It seems, nevertheless, that this digital world is so fascinating that its users have no need to go out into the real world and see it for themselves. But the real life characters in this history are aware of their struggles and difficulties without the subtle sophistication of this new electronic idealism.

The Forum came and went like a traveling band passing by the young girl’s window that Chico Buarque de Holanda had in his hit song four decades ago. In one his movingly expressive verses he observed: “My suffering people/ said good-bye to the pain/ just to see the band passing / singing songs about love.” The love is gone, the suffering remains. That’s what life is, it invades and contaminates the virtual world, throwing out its virtue, that’s the way it should be.

Throughout his busy career in architecture, which stretched from the early 1930s to the 1980s, Cliff May profited from and contributed to the ebullient spirit of the post-World War II era In California, his native state. He designed over 1,000 buildings, most of them houses, which came to symbolize “western living” for a national and even international audience.

May’s accomplishments were not confined to architecture, which he learned as an amateur by crafting furniture before turning to building houses. He was a dedicated horseman, a musician who in
college had his own dance band, an automobile collector, an airplane pilot, and a talented self-promoter. He seemed to live the idyllic life projected in his designs.

You might say that Cliff May inherited the archetypical Spanish colonial ranch house, which he adopted as emblematic of the California being publicized as an earthly paradise. His great, great, great grandfather was a member of the Estudillo family, builders of the San Diego adobe house that Helen Hunt Jackson made famous in her romantic novel, Ramona, an enduring best-seller published in 1884.

May’s early houses hewed to the character of the colonial adobes. Although they acknowleged the automobile by makng the garage an important element of the house front, they were low one-story structures with heavy tile roofs, uneven stuccoed walls, and other elements of the pre-industrial Hispanic culture that, while useful, also functioned as decorative features.

Although May had no architectural training, his wife Jean, had taken a college course in the subject. They collected the arts and crafts products produced by the Spanish colonial revival style and copied the furniture marketed in California in the late 1920s. But this nostalgic use of history never interfered with equipping their houses with the latest appliances. May even posed for a photograph scooping ice cream from the freezer of his 1937 rancheria.

The country’s acceptance of the modern ranch house began in the mid-1940s when this new vernacular style was presented as an alternative to the cool and hard-edged International Modernism showcased by Philip Johnson in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition, “Modern Architecture: International exhibition.” In 1944 Elizabeth Gordon, editor of the widely read magazine, House Beautiful, published a long article showing Cliff May’s house #3 on the cover.

Thus began an advocacy of California living that declared its anti-modernism in such statements as Gordon’s 1946 article description, “A House Can Be Modern and Not Look It.”

Above is the cover of the February 1947 issue of House Beautiful, which featured the Pace-Setter House.

Entering the national quest for the postwar house in the 1940s, Sunset magazine published designs by several young western architects, but ultimately adopted May’s approach as best representing the magazine’s vision for the future with its abundance of “new convenience ideas” that would make housekeeping joyful in tastefully designed homes. In addition to his continuous production of Sunset’s published tract houses, May created the magazine’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It was a roughly 30,000 square-foot ranch house–the crowning achievement of his long association with this so-called “Laboratory for Western Living.”

Below is May’s drawing of the proposed Sunset Magazine headquarters building in Menlo Park.

Although May’s ranch houses remained talismanic, their design was never frozen in time. In the mid-century decades the houses merged gracefully with Modernism, exchanging the overtly colonial features of the early work for the light-filled, open-plan house with glazed walls that minimized the separation of inside and outside and integrated the garden into the whole.

Photograph by Joe Fletcher

Gregory’s book follows this trajectory with gorgeous photography and detailed descriptions of the buildings. Excerpts from original publications recapture the changing colors and graphic styles of the times.

Author Daniel Gregory is highly qualified to guide readers through Cliff May’s work and the period’s history. Gregory was employed at Sunset for twenty-seven years. He served as a senior editor for fifteen of those years and is well versed in the history of the magazine. His grandparents built a seminal ranch house in 1928, designed by William W. Wurster. While Wurster never made a career of designing ranch houses, his influence on Northern Calilfornia architecture has a somewhat parallel course to Mays’s. Gregory’s account of the family “farm”, as they called the Santa Cruz property, enriches our understanding of the times.

Although Sunset magazine still publishes designs for living, Cliff May’s ranch houses no longer spread new wings over the California landscape. Instead, they are being restored and landmarked, as befits the legend they embodied.

The five-acre site is bounded by Union, Sansome, and Greenwich Streets and The Embarcadero. Buildings occupy only 40 percent of the site, which is divided by Battery Street into two sections. The office buildings on the western block are composed to create a view path to Telegraph Hill just beyond Sansome Street and up the well known Filbert Street steps to the hill’s summit crowned by Coit Tower.

The corporation’s low-rise brick buildings are configured with set-backs on each floor that create open balconies on their corners. The rounded corners have a rippling effect that relates the buildings to their landscaped setting.

Grouping buildings around the edges of the block allowed space for a central plaza to facilitate circulation between the buildings.The plaza’s centerpiece is a raised landscaped section that features a variety of water elements set in sculptural masonry forms.

A hard-edged concrete coping separates this section from the paved area around it. The composition is capped by a two-ton block of carnelian granite over which water spills into a pool below.

The plaza’s paving, inlaid with red, gray, and white granite blocks and divided into 35-foot-square diamonds, defines a path through the property from The Embarcadero to Sansome Street.

The path stretches like a carpet across Battery Street where a flight of stairs descends to the eastern park. The paved path then leads to a complex of office buildings in the southeast section of the block. Near the stairway a curved path introduces the informal park that serves as a foil for the plaza.

The hard edges and planar geometry of the plaza have yielded to artificially created grassy hillocks that shelter a stream, the counterpart of the plaza’s monumental fountain. Here Halprin recalled the Sierra foothills’ mining area where Levi Strauss sold his original work pants.

The stream enters the park near its southeastern corner from water mains under The Embarcadero. The rhythm of the water’s flow changes from rapid at the waterfall near the stream’s entrance to slow as the stream pursues its serpentine course through the park.

The water disappears under the street near the park’s northeastern corner.

Granite boulders set in the stream banks punctuate the stream’s narrative. Many of them stand-in for individual sculptures.

Near the northern side of the park the stream loops around, forming a small island bridged by round cast concrete stepping stones that recall those of stone in Japanese gardens. A willow tree trails its low leafy branches over the island where a pathc of lawn invites people to sit either singly or in small groups and enjoy the intimacy of this metaphysical still point in the world moving around it.

Soon after the completion of the Levi Strauss & Company campus in 1982 it became a tourist attraction. Indeed, outsiders were not aware that the plaza was Levi’s property. Company signs were discreet, and the open spaces were scaled for public use.  That the general public was not excluded from this privately owned property is a reminder of the civic generosity of this family enterprise, which conquered the world with blue jeans

Credits:

Buildings were designed by HOK with Howard Friedman and Gensler & Assocs.

Landscaping for the 3.2-acre site was designed by Lawrence Halprin

I had decided to drive from San Francisco to Chicago with the intention of visiting several monuments of 1970’s “Land Art”, a movement characterized by very large scale works  executed primarily in the American west by a handful of sculptors. I also intended to see a series of American civic art museums built between the 1920’s and 1940’s in middle American cities, which have recently had additions by famous national and international architects. I gave myself one week to accomplish this task.

My plan on DAY 1, August 24, was to drive from Palo Alto, California, to eastern Nevada where I intended to visit two renowned works of the land art movement: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and his wife Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. My journey took me through 615 miles of scenic, mountainous, spare terrain, particularly in eastern Nevada where I arrived around sunset.

On DAY 2 my first stop was Nancy Holt’s 1976 work, Sun Tunnels. Even with detailed narrative directions from the so called town of Lucin (note: Lucin is not actually a town, but barely a crossroads) the Sun Tunnels are hard to find – the abbreviated version is: south from Lucin crossroads 2.5 miles, then bear east (to the left). The tunnels are visible on the distant horizon to the left, head towards them for two miles, then bear right for 1.5 miles and arrive at the tunnels. If you get to the used tire scrapyard, you’ve gone too far. They consist of four 3M diameter drainage pipes, arranged in an asymmetrical “X” configuration on the desert floor. Each of the four pipes is related to, and shares the name of, a single constellation in the night sky. Corresponding apertures in the “ceiling” of the pipe wall are aligned with the stars in said constellation. The pipes frame views of individual stars in the night sky and of one another, along with views of distant landscape features during daytime. The work conjures up images of a post-industrial Stonehenge .

Robert Smithson’s 1970 work, Spiral Jetty, was several hours away on nearly continuous unpaved roads. This very large project is composed of a continuous ridge of black basalt boulders (lava stone) which projects south from the north shore of the Great Salt Lake some fifteen miles south of the Golden Spike National Historic Site where the east and west segments of the transcontinental railroad were joined to one another in 1869. The Jetty has recently risen above the water level of the Great Salt Lake following a period of submersion. (The rise and fall of the lake water is cyclical.) It is now possible to walk across the salty surface of the lake bottom which is rather like walking across a crusty ice surface. The contrast between the white salt and the black rock made the sculpture particularly graphic in the bright, summer sunlight.

After driving south for two hours, my next stop was the University Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah, designed by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti. Overlooking downtown Salt Lake City, the museum is detailed a series of crisp brick boxes with lead coated copper bay windows projecting from the main building mass.

The distance traveled on day 2 was 547 miles of often unpaved roads, especially along the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake.