When we look at architectural ornament in the categories of heraldry and emblems, we  find  abstract compositions that no longer imply a physical connection, as was the case with human, animal, and bird forms. Instead, we see a miscellany of items: plums, crowns, flowers, shields, weapons, and other things associated with aristocracy.  Such things make up the vocabulary of heraldry, which  was systematically established throughout Europe in the twelfth century to meet the demand for emblems of respectability and  proclaim the importance of feudal families. Tracing family genealogies  and devising coats of arms were its principle tasks.

Over time the aristocracy of business and commerce subsumed that of humans. Companies and corporations commissioned heraldic crests emblazoned on shields, which were displayed on the buildings they owned and occupied.

Although company logos have now replaced heraldic crests, we can still find examples of the old-fasioned heraldry on pre-modern buildings. The  terra cotta plaque shown below, which appears on a building at 101 The Embarcadero, is an example of such heraldry. The client is not identified, but the decorative elements imply prestige, even royalty, as in the fleur-de-lis, the royal lilly of France.

101 The Embarcadero, San Francisco.

Below, the “M” for Matson, an internationally known shipping line, is rendered in rope. The facade of the company building at 216 Market Street building is embellished with nautical symbols such as anchors, dolphins, and shells. Portraits of the Matson steamships appear in cartouches.

216 Market Street, San Francisco.

The bronze plaque on the building at 233 Sansome Street is an heraldic tribute to the firemen who may have occupied the building.

233 Sansome Street, San Francisco.

The former Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company building of 1925, designed by Timothy Pflueger, has a  bell framed in a rondel suspended above staff-like elements often used in heraldry as symbols of authority.

134-140 New Montgomery St, San Francisco.

The bell was modeled by the sculptor Pio Oscar Tognelli who was employed by the Gladding McBean terra cotta manufacturing company in Lincoln, California. This factory produced terra cotta ornament for buildings, particularly on the west coast,  from the late 19^th through the first decades of the 20^th century. The Gladding McBean company’s history traces the growing popularity of terra cotta.

The factory’s location in the small city of Lincoln followed the discovery nearby of an extensive deposit of pure white kaolin clay,  which partners Charles Gladding,  Peter McGill McBean,  and George Chambers leased from the owner, George Towle,  in 1875 for the production of vitrified  sewer pipe. The dramatic growth of west coast cities in the latter part of the 19^th century gave this product a bright future.

A two-story headquarters building was constructed in 1884, the year the company began production of architectural  ornament,  to advertise terra cotta’s advantages over other materials such as stone. It once stood at 1358 Market Street in San Francisco but is long gone.

Terra Cotta was less expensive to use for architectural purposes than stone for several reasons. It could be glazed  and textured to mimic different  kinds of the more costly material  from warm buff-colored sandstone to cool gray granite. And because terra cotta was lighter than stone the amount of structural steel needed for the building frame could be reduced, which also lower costs.

Architects  favored terra cotta because their designs could be modeled at full scale and reworked,  if necessary,  before they were cast. Despite the need for skilled labor to make the molds, once made, these could be reused more or less indefinitely. The standardization provided by the use of molds guaranteed accuracy in repeated ornament,  saved money through speedy execution,  and avoided the need for site work by expensive skilled labor.

To reduce costs further, it was common practice to construct tall buildings using stone on the ground floor and perhaps the second and third floors if they were visible from the street. But the upper floors were often clad in terra cotta or cast stone colored and textured to imitate the  stone used below.

“Shapes of Clay,” a company publication, described the process by which an architecct’s drawing was turned into reality.  In the factory drafting room, the drawing was keyed to show the location of the ornament. A shop drawing was then made following the architect’s  drawing and submitted to the architect for approval. Full size working drawings were made with allowance for shrinkage, and every piece was scheduled. At the factory, staff artists modeled the ornament in clay and plaster. After approval by the architect–often by means of photographs taken in the shop—the model was sent to the plaster shop where final molds were made. The publication recognized the creative efforts of the staff sculptors, adding that they were always under the supervision of the architect.

The lion and the unicorn appear on either side of the clock above the entrance to the former Royal Globe Insurance Company’s building of 1907 at 201 Sansome Street. They are part of a British coat of arms used here because the company was based in London. The lion’s solar stateliness is paired with the unicorn’s lunar purity to signify the union of opposites. The purity symbolized by the unicorn’s single horn explains its otherwise mysterious association with the Virgin Mary and monastic life.

201 Sansome Street, San Francisco.

A mythical beast, the unicorn has the head and body of a horse, the tail of a lion, the legs and hoofs of a stag, and a twisted horn in the center of its forehead. In this composite form the unicorn was revered in Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Hebrew, Sumero-Semitic, and Chinese cosmologies.

245 Market Street, San Francisco.

The ram, another sun symbol, also appeared in many cultures. As Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, the ram signified the beginning of a cycle or process of creation. A symbol of the masculine generative force, the ram was mainly a sacrificial animal. Its horns signified solar and lunar power, honor, and abundance. The ram shown here, looking out through the branches of a California live oak, is a High Sierra bighorn sheep. It appears on the wall of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company building 245 Market Street in San Francisco

The bull and the ox share many attributes. Both were sacrificed during harvest rituals to insure the renewal of the earth and its powers. The sculpted skulls of oxen, called bucranes, were decorated with garlands of fruit and flowers. Featured in the friezes of Doric temples, they represented the real heads of the sacrificed animals that were hung on the temples during the seasonal rites.  One wonders if their later use, as seen below on the Kohl building at 400 Montgomery Street, was intended as a reminder of the ancient rituals carried out to create wealth and prosperity.

400 Montgomery Street, San Francisco.

The grizzly bear, a California state symbol, is often represented but not always in a ferocious state. Indeed, the bear shown below above the entrance to the former Pacific Gas & Electric Company building at 245 Market Street, who peers down through sheaves of grain and produce grown in the state seems more worried than threatening.

245 Market Street, San Francisco.

The next bear, stepping easily over San Francisco’s skyline in a rondel on the building at 315 Market Street, is clearly a threat.

315 Market Street, San Francisco.

1000 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco.

This affable bear atop his column in front of a former Cadillac showroom at 1000 Van Ness Avenue seems to be welcoming the public with a smile.

University of California’s College of Agriculture, Berkeley.

Located on the UC Berkeley campus, Hilgard Hall was built in 1917-1918 to house the University of California’s College of Agriculture. Designed by John Galen Howard, the building was richly decorated with friezes of sgraffito–scratch in Italian–created by applying two coats of plaster in contrasting colors and scratching through the top layer to create a very shallow relief with a colored background. The friezes celebrate the rewards of tilling the earth and feature medallions framing depictions of barnyard animals that appear above swags laden with the products of agriculture.

Like humans, buildings talk about themselves, but architectural detail, or ornament, once so common, is no longer used around doors and windows, sections of walls inside and out, ceilings, etc., or even understood. Modernism replaced ornament with a different vocabulary of details involving straight lines, right angles, and clean edges. Still, since we admire buildings from the time when ornament was popular, it seems that revealing the meaning of decorative motifs would broaden our understanding of what they are trying to tell us and increase out pleasure in passing by them. They contribute to the urban texture of our cities.

Architectural Ornament Collage by Sally Woodbridge

The collage above is composed of details of well known buildings in San Francisco, which you may not recognize because. as fragments taken out of context, they don’t really belong together. Their locations are indicated by numbers; some may be neighbors.

But what is architectural detail? The word “detail” is rooted in the French word “tailler,” “to cut” plus the “de,” which means “apart.” So details are small, secondary, or accessory parts of larger things. Ornamental details such as wreaths, garlands of fruit and flowers, medallions with humans heads, continuous bands of waves or chevrons, lion heads, scrolled leaves, and varied moldings do not appear randomly on buildings; they are deliberately placed. They mark the location of floors, define edges, and call attention to windows and doors.

The design of buildings has much in common with that of clothes. The holes cut in fabric for the head, arms, and legs have always offered opportunities for decoration. The various approaches to cutting cloth, making seams and finishing edges have helped to create distinctive styles. In both clothing and architecture the pendulum of fashion swings back and forth between the lavish and the simple. Indeed, it seems that human beings are driven to ornamenting whatever they design and produce.

Before written characters morphed into signs that represent sounds, much early writing was pictorial. Today we have logos, short for logograms, that are modern, often decorative, hieroglyphs. The $ sign is perhaps our most familiar symbol. Many motifs used in architectural ornament are highly compressed visual abstractions like logos that would take up too much space if they were fully explained.

Despite the many learned histories of architectural ornament, new theories about its origin and use continue to appear. Many ornamental motifs we see, for example, on older buildings of our commercial centers were originally symbolic, but their meanings have been lost and the loss of meaning has rendered them mute.

However, the public’s interest in buildings that have the kind of small scale detail and texture that were familiar features of the discontinued historic styles has grown. Were these forms created simply to delight our senses or do they express aspects of the buildings’ structure and its purpose? Or did the use of humans, animals, flowers, fruit, and scenes have a didactic purpose?

This article is not intended to be another learned history of architectural ornament. Its purpose is to provide a context for increasing our appreciation of the buildings that furnish out urban environment.

The text is divided into the following chapters:

1. HUMAN FORMS,
2. ANIMAL and BIRD FORMS,
3. HERALDRY and EMBLEMS,
4. PLANT FORMS, and the most decorated features of buildings:
5. ROOFS, COLUMNS, WINDOWS and DOORS.

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.

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 HISTORIC SETTING

The outdoor theater is located at the end of a road leading from the entrance to the Grove at the intersection of 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard. From the street level the road descends down the steep slope into the ravine. The descent proceeds through a wooded terrain dramatically different from the orderly residential streets surrounding the park.

It was the contrast between the Grove’s wild landscape and the settled area on the streets around it that inspired Rosalie Stern to take the advice of John McClaren, Superintendent of Golden Gate Park, and purchase the property in 1931 for a public park in memory of her husband, Sigmund Stern.

The ravine had been a place for recreational entertainment since the mid-19th century. George Green arrived in San Francisco from Maine in 1847. Joined by family members, he subsequently purchased the land bounded by 19th avenue and Sloat Boulevard that stretched down to the beach. On the slopes of a sixty-four-acre ravine Green planted hundreds of eucalyptus trees. He and his son created a resort area with such popular features as a trout farm and boating pavilion.  In 1892, the Trocadero Inn was built on the north side of the ravine where it still stands and can be reserved for social occasions.

The Trocadero’s late 19th century cottage style with gingerbread and a generous veranda, shown below, recalls its hey-day as a party place. In front of it is a grassy picnic ground, and further along the ravine floor is the theater.

Following her purchase of the property, Rosalie Stern began a decades-long commitment to developing the park property to provide recreation and free concerts for San Franciscans.

A view of the meadow with the new theater structure and its metal canopy on the left.

EARLY CONCERT AND THEATER HISTORY

Finding the site’s natural acoustics to be excellent, Stern and her staff planned the first summer concert for June 19, 1932. One of the park designers, the architect Bernard Maybeck, designed a temporary fabric canopy suspended above a raised stage at the base of the southern slope. The meadow was lined with portable chairs.

Preparation for concerts was difficult and expensive. Portable seats needed to be placed, exit aisles had to be roped off, and temporary barrier-free access created. The rudimentary stage required time-consuming readjustment of each performer’s equipment and the cumbersome installation of a canopy to protect the musician’s instruments from the sun. The limited number of seats meant that many spectators sought precarious perches on the steep slopes, causing soil erosion and damage to the trees.

Yet, except for the creation of paths around the site and low stone walls built by employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) the meadow’s character remained unchanged until the 1950s when the city built a modest backstage.

Lawrence Halprin first visited the Grove in the 1950s when he came to watch his wife, Anna, dance.  “Even then,” he recalled, “it was kind of a mess, with a terrible set-up for the back-stage. And the people sitting on the slope would slide down to the bottom.”

A view showing the new terraced seating of stone opposite the stage.

World War II provided the impetus for the construction of factories and warehouses. During the War, the creek served as parking areas for large ocean-going tugs. Further up along the shore of the creek is located the largest copra coconut processing plant in the entire United States west coast region. In fact, the abandoned five-story high copra crane, shown in the picture above was used to transport large amount of copras from ships to the plant as late as 1974, is still standing on the creek bank today and is preserved as a historic landmark.

ILWU Local 10 longshoremen worked the pier, using picks and shovels to break up the large pieces of copra in the ships’ hulls. A large suction pump known as a blower then moved the copra pieces to the mill where ILWU Local 6 members processed it into oil. The remaining “copra meal” was pressed into pellets, put into 100 pound sacks and the warehousemen prepared it to be shipped across the bay to warehouses at Colgate-Palmolive-Peet and McKessin-Robbins. The crane was used to load the copra meal onto outbound ships.

By the 1970′s the businesses around the Creek had mostly closed and many buildings abandoned. Today the area contains several auto wrecking yards, underutilized warehouses and private and public bus storage yards. These facilities are situated right up to the edge of the Creek precluding public access to the water except in several small locations.

Presently, community organizations including the Friends of Islais Creek, established in 1984, have been working to improve the conditions of the creek and nearby areas.

The Copra Crane has been the subject of a campaign to save it as a monument to the old days of longshoring at the creek. Aerial dancers “re-purpose” the Copra Crane on Islais Creek for a unique dance performance in 1999.

Wikipedia > Islais Creek