San Francisco's skyline is changing dramatically. The new Transbay Transit Center will be nothing short of stunning and the new Intercontinental Hotel rising at Fifth and Howard has an impressively streamlined cool-blue glass-and-steel look.
Unfortunately we also have two new monstrosities that are just plain butt ugly. One is the new federal building on Seventh Street where the old Greyhound Bus Depot used to be.
In the photo: the new Transit Center and other planned buildings for SOMA
The new federal building looks like it is wrapped in a mindless nightmare of scaffolding that will never be taken away. It has the appearance of a huge disabled building that requires outside braces to hold it together. What makes it even more hideous is the fact that it is located across the street from the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The U.S. Court of Appeals Building at Seventh & Mission Streets is one of the most opulent public buildings in California. The imposing granite edifice was designed in the 1890s by James Knox Taylor, chief architect for the U.S. Treasury Department, to house the federal courts and the main San Francisco Post Office. When it opened in 1905, Sunset magazine called it the Versailles of the West. It was one of the few buildings to survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Now that grand old building sits across the street from one of the most disappointing public buildings in American history. The new federal building will be an enduring blight on an otherwise beautiful landscape.
The other new building that is, shall we say, doomed to be an old spinster is the Palms, a condominium project recently completed on Fourth Street near Brannan. It's not a very good design. In a dozen years its going to look like a dreary and matronly sort of place where boring people live and do boring things until late hours into the night. In a City of magnificent and breathtaking architecture, pedestrian designs become all the more ugly.
To read more about the City's changing skyline
and the new projects under construction,
follow this link
to an earlier story in this blog.
Also,
read about the new
Jewish Museum's Blue Cube
and the
Cool, Blue Glass Intercontinental Hotel.
and the new projects under construction,
follow this link
to an earlier story in this blog.
Also,
read about the new
Jewish Museum's Blue Cube
and the
Cool, Blue Glass Intercontinental Hotel.
1 comments:
Are all those monstrosities going to be built on fill? Doesn't anybody remember that photograph of the Valencia Hotel from 1906?
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