Architect Explores San Francisco's Distinctive Styles | Walking Tour | Architectural Digest

I'm James Dixon I'm a practicing San Francisco architect and today we're going to take an architectural walking tour of San Francisco [Music] the iconic building over my left shoulder is the very famous Transamerica Pyramid completed in 1972 designed by William Pereira and Associates you know you've arrived in San Francisco when you see the Transamerica Pyramid one of the reasons it's raison Detra for its shape which is you can see all the way through to downtown that was an important distinction that the person who commissioned the building who was a CEO of Transamerica Corporation said I want more light onto the street and the city said we want more Vantage points to downtown so that shape reconciles those two desires to a remarkable degree and you'll see at either side of the pyramid shape there are two concrete shafts one is the elevator core the other is a Stairway shaft with the smoke shaft that's the reason for those but they work very well with the pyramid shape the building terminates the long axis of Columbus Columbus goes all the way from Fisherman's Wharf through North Beach the Italian area through Chinatown into the financial district as an architectural equivalent the way the building meets the sky was given much more attention than the way the building meets the street you'll see how they had to resolve the inclined face of the building with windows that don't want to be inclined no one wants to feel like the buildings falling on them so the way they resolved that was with a series of concrete forms and the window frames are offset from one another with the one above it so that when the building horizontally meets the inclined Edge that isn't ever a sliver it's always a full window both the Transamerica Pyramid and the B of A former BFA world headquarters building are in The Valleys so this is what led to the fear of we're going to have these tall things at the bottom of valleys that just creates this homogeneity viewpoint now we're standing in front of the holiday Building completed in 1917 by the architect Willis Polk the building is named for Andrew Halliday who is the inventor of the cable car system here in San Francisco so he was a mining engineer who was brought over from Scotland to say how do we get the ore out of the mines so he developed this very Harry potter-esque carts on Rails that same idea was in use for the cable car system that is now a national registered Historic Landmark what you'll notice is that the facade is entirely glass there is a metal Armature that supports the glass and the metal Armature goes back to be attached to the structural skeleton this is seen as a radical departure from what was going on in architecture at the time the idea of the glass kirschino wall is what's on display here what Polk is doing is allowing as much natural light into the space as possible this idea of the glass curtain wall turns on its head the famous architectural dictum window versus wall and says window is wall in the same way that Frank Lloyd Wright said no it's not formed false function form is function so the idea of that curtain of glass suspended over a public sidewalk on an Armature you're just kind of inventing was so gutsy this had been done in Germany before by Walter gropius but this is the again the first or the second time in America this had been done but the idea of the Mad Men era when everything was a glass clad skyscraper is exactly the progeny of this idea foreign welcome to the incredibly beautiful Pacific Telephone and Telegraph building this is the first modern skyscraper in San Francisco this was done in 1925. so the way the building meets the street is with an elbow a high level of Sierra Nevada granite and above that is terracotta this is a steel frame building I have to have it fire approved so the way you do that or the way they did it was with terracotta around the steel skeleton and the Terracotta does a very good job of matching the original Sierra Nevada Granite if you look at just above the entryway there is the beautiful Bell System Bell and then even at each of the spandrel panels at the lower floor there is a series of bells that hang down post-world War One the idea of this new world view this new architecture was a rejection of any type of a European past Europe had nearly destroyed the entire world fluger loved the idea of the Mayan world and the Chinese world as the major influences of San Francisco architecture this building behind me is 555 California formerly the world headquarters of the Bank of America building by using crystalline forms in each of the Bays it achieves this geometric Purity going from the street to the sky and the geometric Purity is maintained uninterrupted until each of those individual Bays end at varying Heights on the facade then there is a unified crown that is very clearly faceted at each side as it wraps and forms the top or the hat to the building and this building is one of the two that we're seeing as the start of the manhattanization of San Francisco as much as this building is loved it also was feared as making these Canyons downtown like Manhattan so this talks a lot about the history of the era and how we are housing modern Corporate America in these monuments to capitalism foreign Telegraph Hill at the base of the very famous Coit Tower this Tower was completed in 1933 and was the result of a design competition it actually exceeded the height ordinance of the time but because it was so beautiful the Board of Supervisors they also said you know what we're going to pass a new zoning law so no one can build anything tall near this building from this vantage point from the base of Coit Tower you can see the entire Panorama of San Francisco the way this building meets the sky with this filigree of architectural bravado the building itself can be seen as an abstracted fire nozzle the designer said that's not the case at all it is simply its own idea the building meets the ground with a beautiful Colonnade and a Promenade around its entire base housed within that base are controversial murals controversial when they were done and controversial today it was done as part of the Depression era works progress Association there was a hammer and sickle in one of the murals and it was seen as so controversial at odds with American values that they padlocked the building and had them paint over the hammer and sickle then once it was painted over then they took the padlock off but still in those murals still seen are people in the murals reaching for dos capital in the library browsing the workers daily magazines and the magazine racks it is a very Stark social difference between what was happening in the Depression era with what was happening when the murals were done behind me is the very famous postcard row these were all built in 1894 and 1895 by the multi-hyphenate Kavanaugh who was described as a carpenter designer Builder developer you you pick the noun so all these are Queen Anne in style the defining characteristic of Queen Anne is the reform goes all the way through from front to back you don't have the false fronts that you would have an italianate or an stick style the roof form is telling the truth about how the building was framed previously in the previous Styles one was constrained by the balloon framing system that went all the way from the foundation all the way up to the top of the roof now with a new framing system called platform for I mean our Western framing each floor was framed individually so that each floor could do its own thing so every cubic inch of Queen Anne's was usable I I feel my Van Helsing Duty and quest to drive a stake through the myth of painted lady that was only a thing starting in the late 60s right down here on Steiner Street no one wanted bright pink on the exterior of their building nor do they want that mixed with a lime green guess who did hippies were fine with that that was the cheapest possible paint those are the cheapest buildings to rent and that be said no we're fine with low rents and we're going to paint them the way our psychedelic dreams are foreign [Applause] [Music] behind me is the gorgeous block of 3200 Pacific Avenue known as the wall the reason the wall is so important it was the most prestigious address one could have the wall is simply a masonry wall that separates the historic Presidio where the Spanish originally established their fort in 1776. from public land these houses on this block had the premier architects of this era working at the height of their powers with barely any limited budget but here is what was limiting these lots are ridiculously small the Wall comes at a trapezoid to the rectilinear street grid to the point that at the very bottom of this block the lot is only 14 feet wide then it comes to a point so that's a tough architectural challenge to meet they were up for the challenge the building immediately right here is 3232 Pacific done by the God Almighty Ernest Cox head in 1902. this building is an example of first Bay Area style if not the best example of first Bay Area style which combines the informality of East Coast shingle style shingle Style was brought into being by H.H Richardson and architects of his Elke and Architects at the top of their game designing residences for the elite New York City socialites who got tired of a fussiness and the formality of living downtown New York city so they would design these homes based on American Colonial shingle architecture a rustic architecture these buildings carry through that informality with a uniform wrapping of shingles on every surface including the roofs and this gets into the idea of skin buildings is once you have a skin anything that happens in it can be very irregular you can do irregular window sizes I can have a casement next to a double hung I can have a bay window next to an oriole window who cares at the stairway above is a palladian window below that is a broken cornice over the front door those elements are usually only found in classical architecture the broken cornice down the block great examples of second Bay Area style what second Bay Area style second Bay Area style uses the vernacular architecture of California so what secondary style does is say everything is going to be horizontally based using simple materials natural and exposed to view as large panes of glasses we can possibly manage and very simply constructed buildings so they're very Carpenter friendly everything was a very Carpenter friendly right angle but very Californian in the sense that I can walk right out onto the patio I can have an interior Courtyard I but everything is horizontally based as if it were in some theoretical Farm yard the difference to third barrier style is third bear style is vertical it's saying I am in San Francisco I am in a city I have hard limits where my property lions are so third barrier Style very vertical second barrier style very horizontal first Bay Area style drop dead gorgeous this block going up going down going across every building is chock full of excellent Architects doing excellent work we're here to see two iconic things one is a San Francisco fog in summer the second is the very famous Golden Gate Bridge the Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937. it was designed by two main Engineers the chief engineer was Strauss and the principal engineer was Ellis Ellis has been given most of the credit for the Bridge's design their architects who pulled everything together including the color was Irving Morrow Irving Morrow kept a very Art Deco feel for this bridge going from the largest elements to the smallest the largest elements being these immensely tall steel towers that have an inset and repeated parallel faceting that works all the way up and goes to the sky and then is divided three times as it marches down the main thing about the bridge is this incredibly graceful and beautiful four thousand two hundred foot span the bridge meets the land with concrete abutments to weight the lines down as they go into the Earth the reason that's important is it is a suspension bridge and it wants to pull those suspension cables right out of the land but they're anchored into the hillsides on both sides what Morrow does with the concrete abutments is to give them the same facetine that he used at the towers and elsewhere in the design because Art Deco is an unabashedly vertical style it uses geometric ornament as its Cornerstone and as a linking device so the guard rails are a series of verticals the reason that's important is just like stroboscopic movies just like zoetro movies your eye quickly removes the vertical and you see what's behind it the Navy wanted the bridge painted in a striped pattern because of danger to shipping and Maura said uh we're not doing that he said we're using this color I'm going to call International Orange so the Golden Gate Bridge is not named for the color International Orange it is named for the Golden Gate straight that it Bridges [Music]

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Id: EuNguMnSKnA

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022