From a plain box to a fractured sky
Civic Center-bound commuters on Ninth Street probably don’t pay attention to what brackets their slog, but along the way is one of our least-shy rooftop additions — what its architects call a “pixelated cloud.” The original three-story concrete box now wears a coat of powder-blue below a thick two-story wedge adorned with painted cubes of varied size in aqua shades The contrast at a larger scale would be disruptive. Here, on a long grim block with a gold-domed neighbor next door, it’s just another visual testament to a neighborhood in digitized flux.
Cityscape is a weekly look at a distinct slice of San Francisco in words and photographs by John King, whose collection “Cityscapes 2: Reading the Architecture of San Francisco” was published this month by Heyday. E-mail: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron