…. be sure to wear flowers in your hair
I recently had a four night San Francisco layover. Usually that layover would be three days – two nights, but this time I lucked out and got five days – four nights, due to decreased pandemic flight frequencies.
San Francisco’s mystical Golden Gate Bridge is rarely seen in clear weather, as there usually is some kind of dense fog or morning mist blurring its columns. Inaugurated in 1937 as a suspension bridge that links San Francisco with Marin County, it has become the icon of San Francisco.
The bridge with its International Orange color in the Art Deco style of the time was designed by architect Irving Morrow and structural engineer Joseph Strauss.
I am a big movie lover. My San Francisco sentimental aura was influenced by movies I watched as a child and stories I read by Jack London. I first got notion of San Francisco as a child around eight years old, when I watched Disney’s The Love Bug. What a loverly movie about a soulful little Volkswagen Beetle with a personality. Much like Wall-E decades later. In The Love Bug, during one profoundly dramatic scene, Herbie tries to throw himself/itself from the Golden Gate Bridge because his owner abandoned him. Of course it was saved by dashing race car driver Dean Jones and there was a happily ever after. I was mesmerized, even though that scene of the Golden Gate Bridge was a matte painting. As a young adult, I watched Vertigo. Since then, I have rewatched it many times. Pure Hitchcock perfection. I have sought out the places Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart went to. In What’s Up, Doc? Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal race down Lombard Street in a car chase, the crookedest street in the world.
As an adult, I watched Bullitt. Those San Francisco streets Steve McQueen was racing were pretty empty back then! And let’s not ignore the airport chase scene. Steve McQueen, San Francisco, the airport… suave!
Every city has a distinctive movie or many of them, that I like to rewatch to get into the mood again, before I travel there. As for Chicago, I watch The Blues Brothers or The Fugitive. Never tire of them. They’re also great architectural history documents.
Another architectural icon of San Francisco is 1972’s Transamerica Pyramid. It was designed by William Pereira, the architect of LAX’s Theme Building, using crushed quartzite for its light façade. Pereira had a very expressive, futuristic style of design, rooted in science fiction and his vivid imagination. This idiosyncratic style was his brand.
San Francisco Airport’s International Terminal was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) in 2000. Its new control tower was completed in 2016 by Fentress Architects, both architecture companies are prominently presented in this storytelling blog.
Terminal 1, named the Harvey Milk Terminal after the assassinated local politician who fought for LGBT rights, is currently being remodeled by HKS.
HKS’ focus is on the passenger experience : the design creates a calm and curated journey with a generous central concourse featuring “intuitive wayfinding”, advanced acoustics and lighting, and art galleries. I am curious to learn about the intended art shows in there.
Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco before I did. And Jack London certainly did, he was born there. San Francisco has such an incredible aura. It’s like Greek Mythology. People who haven’t been there (yet), long to go there. Others who have been there, are either in love or disenchanted with it. It is true, the tech industry has pushed away the mere mortals, and rent has exploded over the last two decades. I’ve been going to San Francisco for a quarter of a century and the homeless situation right now is at its saddest. I have no words. It is even worse than the tent cities during the Occupy movement ten years ago.
San Francisco is a war zone. Is Newsom to blame? That sleek fair weather Governor? Or maybe it’s the fallout of liberalism, capitalism and Silicon Valley altogether, that has created a vortex of desolation in the Greater San Francisco area. It started off so well, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury in the late Sixties, with the pacifist hippie movement. Whenever I pass through there, on my way to Golden Gate Park, I feel deeply in awe of its history.
The Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is equal to Central Park in Manhattan. A vast urban oasis with different botanical gardens, pathways, recreation areas and world renowned museums. The smell of Monterey pines and other greenery is enchanting. Northern Californ a has that distinctive invigorating pine smell, of Monterey and Ponderosa pines among two dozen of pine variants. A bit like the earthy, herbaceous smell of Provence in France.
The De Young Museum (2005, Herzog & de Meuron) works with the surrounding nature, allowing for the copper facade to slowly become green due to oxidation and therefore fade into its natural surroundings. The facade is also textured to represent light filtering through a tree. The Swiss architects Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron thought of an organism with several limbs or extensions, and arranged the building in three parallel bands in order for the park to fill the places in between. Nature, trees, plants, and water, in various forms, are an integral part of the building.
Herzog & de Meuron were the second Swiss architectural firm to re-build an older museum (The original De Young was from the 19th Century). Mario Botta designed the new building for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995.
Another grand museum of San Francisco is the Legion of Honor. Perched atop Lincoln Park at the Land’s End section bordering the Pacific Ocean, on the westernmost part of San Francisco, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor was built in 1924 in the Beaux-Arts style as a replica of the Parisian Palais de la Légion d’Honneur (Pierre Rousseau, 1782). It is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The affluent Spreckels family assigned the construction to architects George Applegarth and Henri Guillaume after they saw a replica of the original at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 in San Francisco. In that case, it’s the replica of the replica. It still is a grand museum in a Pacific-embraced landscape.
This is where Kim Novak was staring at that fictional Carlotta painting in Vertigo, while being watched by James Stewart.
I keep visiting these precious places, which offer ever changing new exhibitions or new personal experiences. And I hope that San Francisco recovers and a prosperous and thriving future turns the homeless situation into human-worthy existences.
Sources:
https://www.hksinc.com/what-we-do/case-studies/san-francisco-airports-terminal-1-redevelopment/
https://www.herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/151-175/173-de-young-museum.html
David B. Walker, Modernist Maverick: The Architecture of William L. Pereira, 2013