San Francisco: Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: A History & Guide
by Mitchell Schwarzer
San Francisco, CA: William Stout Publishers, 2007
187 pp.: illustrated with maps and color photographs
Mitchell Schwarzer’s insightful new book, Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: A History & Guide, should go a long way toward helping Bay Area residents understand the architectural traditions of the region and discover buildings that should be better known to both architects and the public. Schwarzer, a professor at California College of the Arts, has given us two books in one. Two-thirds of Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area is a guidebook to the Bay region, while the first third—and Schwarzer’s most important contribution—is a scholarly essay on the history of Bay Area architecture, beginning with Native American settlement and concluding with the contemporary scene.
The guidebook section, a straightforward discussion of the architectural monuments of the region, amplifies and improves Schwarzer’s indispensable earlier guidebook to the city, Architecture and Design: SF, published in 1998. Seven chapters examine architecturally important neighborhoods in San Francisco, while nine others explore surrounding regions, addressing important structures in cities as distant as Healdsburg, Walnut Creek, and San Jose. Each chapter begins with a clear introduction to the architectural history of the neighborhood or region, followed by helpful color maps and individual descriptions of important buildings and landscapes. In addition, Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area contains dozens of beautiful and heretofore unpublished color photographs of Bay Area architecture.
The essay section begins with the distinct geography and environmental history of the Bay Area, then continues through Spanish, Mexican, and early American settlement in the region. Schwarzer’s coverage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries differs from other architectural guides, as he gives over fewer pages to endless examples of Victorian and Edwardian architecture built by the city’s well-to-do and more pages to the creation of ordinary San Francisco and its modest houses, churches, schools, and shops. He brings to light the contributions of lesser-known builders, including Henry Doelger, Fernando Nelson, William Hollis, and the Gellert Brothers. Doelger alone constructed more than 25,000 small houses in the Sunset District, which many residents began calling “the White Cliffs of Doelger.”
Schwarzer’s best writing is reserved for the great works of Bay Area modernism. He reminds us that, in the mid-twentieth century, the Bay Area was one of the most important centers of modern architectural design. In an exhibition on modern architecture held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1944, six of the forty-six American buildings selected for the catalogue were from the Bay Area, including William Wurster’s now-demolished Valencia Gardens housing from 1943 and Gardner Daily’s Owens House, built in Sausalito in 1939.
Schwarzer reminds us of the fertile and diverse architectural climate in the Bay Area between 1940 and 1970, with some architects, like Daily and Mario Corbett, responding to the work of High Modern architects like Mies van der Rohe, while others took cues from more recent models, including the late work of Le Corbusier—a notable example being Mario Ciampi’s University Art Museum in Berkeley, completed in 1970. In the same post-war period, six leading Bay Area architects, landscape architects, and urban planners founded the Telesis group in hopes of bringing a greater sense of order and rationality to urban planning in the region. Influenced by the planning conferences of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (C.I.A.M.), the work of Telesis had an integral effect on master planning in California at the city and state level.
Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area also calls our attention to innovative school design from the decades around the Second World War. Bay Area architects like Ernest Kump helped move school design away from the massive, multi-story blocks of the early twentieth century and toward more dispersed, one-story buildings, often connected by covered outdoor walkways. Kump’s Acalanes High School in Lafayette, begun in 1940, is a particularly important example— the first large school in the United States to adopt this “finger plan” mode of design, which later became the model for school design in subsequent decades.
Schwarzer’s enthusiasm for Bay Area architecture cools when he reaches the late 1970s. This period, he writes, was a “time of reaction, and not vision” as city officials and the public began to oppose experimental architectural designs. He sees the roots of this resistance as part of a response to large-scale and often misguided modernist architectural and planning projects, as well as the public’s successful protest in 1960 against the plan to build a system of freeways through the city’s historic building fabric, including Golden Gate Park and the Marina.
“By the 1980s,” Schwarzer writes, “the citizen reaction to large-scale modernism spilled over to distaste for avant-garde art and architecture. Paradoxically, politically progressive cities like Berkeley and San Francisco became hotbeds of traditionalist aesthetics.” This reaction, Schwarzer claims, led to restrictive building guidelines for residential design as well as some of the more historicist designs in the city, including the San Francisco Main Library from 1995 and the Giants baseball stadium, finished in 2000.
Schwarzer’s book ends on a far more optimistic note, as he believes the city has warmed to more progressive architectural designs in recent years, including its support of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Federal Building by Morphosis in the South of Market neighborhood. This “new wave of modernism,” for Schwarzer, is a continuance of the best of the Bay Area’s architectural tradition—a time when it again accepts avant-garde design. As Schwarzer writes, “the moments when Bay Architecture has achieved the most are those when it has cast its gaze forward and outward.”
Reviewer William Littmann teaches architectural history at California College of the Arts. He is currently working on a book on El Camino Real and its meaning in California culture as well as completing a study of the architecture and landscape of farmworker settlements in the California Central Valley.
Originally published 3rd Quarter 2007, in arcCA 07.3, “Comparing Awards.”
