San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
It’s a federal offense to culture warriors
Futuristic design of S.F. building is blight to purists lobbying Trump
The San Francisco Federal Building, as befits an 18story structure clad in sheets of steel, is a lightning rod.
Design buffs celebrate its futuristic swagger. Local detractors recoil from its blunt slablike form.
But neither camp, I’ll warrant, expected the 13yearold complex at Seventh and Mission streets to emerge as a poster child for a handful of people who hate modern architecture — hate it so much they want President Trump to pretty much ban any new federal buildings that don’t look like they were designed in 1903.
Scary thing is, the taste police might get their wish. When cultural zealots court a cynical politician, all bets are off.
Our silvery gray slab at Seventh and Mission streets is in the national design spotlight because of a draft executive order that surfaced this week with the working title — I kid you not — of “Making Federal Buildings Great Again.”
The draft order decrees that for all federal courthouses, as well as all federal buildings in and around the District of Columbia, “the classical architectural style stall be the preferred and default style.” Elsewhere, the emphasis would be on styles
“that value beauty ... and command admiration by the public.”
By contrast, the draft proclaims that the track record for federal buildings since the 1950s is one of “aesthetic failures, including ugliness.” And to illustrate that bureaucratic blight still ravages our land, three contemporary structures are cited as having “little aesthetic
appeal”: courthouses in Miami and Austin, Texas, and yes, the San Francisco Federal Building.
“Federal architecture should once again inspire respect instead of bewilderment or repugnance,” reads what sources say is the current version of the draft. “Classical and traditional architectural styles have proven their ability to inspire such respect for our system of selfgovernment.”
On the sliding scale of outrages from an administration that makes a fetish of undoing everything from environmental protections to the right of a woman to control her body, the notion of imposed aesthetics is small potatoes. Nonetheless, the fact that it is under discussion shows the extent to which selfinterested crusaders can try to dictate public policy behind closed doors.
The driving force behind the quest for an executive order — whose existence was made public last week by Architectural Record — appears to be the National Civic Art Society, a small advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., that defines its mission as “advancing the classical tradition in architecture, urbanism and their allied arts.”
Trump has appointed two of its members to the sevenmember U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which reviews designs of memorials and large government buildings.
At best, the Civic Art Society’s selfappointed design czars are guilty of the same fault they ascribe to modernists — an elitism that views any differing opinions with disdain. People are aligned with your world view, or they are beneath contempt.
At worst, the society and its backers are comfortable arguing that “visual embodiment of America’s ideals” is architectural classicism — the same design ethos that Adolf Hitler embraced as Nazi Germany’s official look.
Realistically, I can’t imagine Donald Trump caring one way or another.
As a developer, Trump’s bestknown residential towers came wrapped in glitzy metal and glass. But his obsession then, as now, was with the brand. Certainly this was the case in Chicago, where after erecting a crisp skyscraper along the Chicago River, he attached his name in two storyhigh letters at the top of the base — a billboard looming over the river’s architectural boat tours.
What’s profoundly more disturbing is that with each year of his presidency, Trump’s only core conviction is the need to stoke up his “base” by whatever means he can. If he can undermine policies that are valued by his perceived opponents, watch out.
That’s why I won’t be surprised if “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” finds its way to the Oval Office.
What better way to placate a few purists still upset about design wars that now date back generations? And, in the process, troll the bigcity libs already railing at the potential edict as a backwardlooking assault on contemporary values.
Evidence? The draft now circulating states that if a design competition is held for a building project, there need to be panels where the public can have a say — but “participants shall not include artists, architects, engineers, art of architecture critics” and so on.
Back to the San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis and open since 2007.
I love the tower’s metallic vigor. The threestoryhigh public alcove that begins on the 11th floor is a truly generous civic treasure.
Other aspects of the complex, though, are troubling. The gravel plaza that Mayne conceived as a village square in fact is a stark, sketchy void. The Social Security Administration office on the plaza’s west edge, the space that regular citizens are most likely to visit, claustrophobic and glum.
But here’s the bottom line: This flawed but ambitious complex offered a fresh take on the traditional American urge to strike out in fresh directions. This makes it a provocative companion to its federal neighbor across the street, the ornately classical U.S. Court of
Appeals Building, a 1905 treasure filled with the city’s most lavish interiors — “like walking inside a wedding cake” one employee once told me, referring to the lavish slather of marble and tile work that cloaks every corridor.
The United States isn’t perfect. Architecture doesn’t have the power to right larger wrongs. But federal buildings should convey our varied society’s potential in all its conflicted aspirational splendor — not try to pretend somehow that the 21st century does not exist.