Cum laude:
Even if City College folds, its new Chinatown tower deserves an A.
Ambitious buildings often debut at the most awkward possible time. The Chinatown/North Beach campus of City College of San Francisco is the latest case in point.
The 14-story tower that now anchors Portsmouth Square had its ceremonial opening Friday as the 86,000-student system is threatened with the loss of accreditation because of managerial and financial problems. The first meeting held by trustees in a companion four-story building included a vote to bring in a state trustee to oversee operations.
In this context, it is difficult not to view the $138 million campus as an albatross. But from the urban design perspective, or as a manifestation of San Francisco’s cultural dynamics, look on it as something else: a smart addition to the landscape no matter what comes next.
The complexity of the task that faced the architectural team of EHDD and Barcelon & Jang can be seen from the upper floors of the boxy tower at
Kearny and Washington streets.
Views to the south are blocked by the Hilton hotel, a 27-story concrete slab from 1971. The northern views take in the bay and Telegraph Hill and, much closer, laundry hanging from clotheslines on the rooftops of Chinatown buildings.
Relating to both worlds
This tension plays out within the tower and its companion to the east, which wraps around the historic Colombo Building at Washington Street and Columbus Avenue. Though courses are offered in such fields as business, most of the classrooms serve the needs of immigrants who still move into the neighborhood from Asia: English as a second language, and vocational courses for adults whose first job here might be in the kitchen of a hotel or downtown restaurant.
The design challenge was to relate to both worlds, the high-rise march of the Financial District and the pedestrian-scaled terrain of Chinatown’s older buildings.
The three-story base meets Portsmouth Square with a tall glassed-in ground floor that serves as the equivalent of the campus quad and includes a curved staircase leading up to the library. The glass is bracketed by sand-toned masonry at either end and, on the floors above the lobby, adorned with tight lines of metal that deflect the sun.
Visual gesture
Those metal blades also frame public art that connects with its surroundings much more effectively than any architectural gimmick could have done. Above both Kearny and Washington streets float immense images reproduced on the glass. The Kearny facade showcases a Chinese landscape by Michael Kenna; looking down on Washington Street are an Asian girl photographed by Arnold Genthe and a calligraphic scroll by Mak Ming Chan.
The images humanize the scale of the base. They’re also a visual gesture to Chinatown that says, in essence, “This building is yours.”
The height of the tower exceeds the former zoning for the site, and it prompted two years of opposition from the Hilton and an adjacent condominium tower. That campaign failed, in large part because Chinatown residents turned out in force to support the project as designed.
“It’s an educational facility. It gives the community a sense of hope,” says Minh-Hoa Ta, dean of the Chinatown/North Beach campus. She arrived in San Francisco in 1979 with her mother and five siblings after escaping on a boat from Vietnam. As for the juxtaposition in scale, “it reminds me so much of Shanghai, the old and the new. You always see that in China.”
My one design quibble is the faux masonry skin: It is glass-fiber-reinforced concrete, a lightweight material that’s no match for the brick and terra cotta found on the older structures.
Overall, though, the two-building campus is an architectural success. The sophisticated tower serves as an effective transition from the Financial District toward North Beach, even as it translates the aspiration of immigrants into elegant form.
Is it also a building too far? We’ll find out soon enough: CCSF will learn next spring whether the loss of accreditation can be staved off by still-to-be-determined reforms. Those reforms could include the closing of several outposts in the far-flung system.
My hope is that CCSF weathers the storm, and that the northeast corner of Portsmouth Square survives as a showcase of public education — as well as stylish but sensitive city building.