San Francisco civitas - San Francisco Civic Center and Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, California

Architectural Review, The, July, 1995 by John Ellis

Now reaching fruition after a long gestation period, the Yerba Buena Gardens development in San Francisco shows how a collection of individual parts does not necessarily engage to create a responsive urban whole.

There could not be a greater contrast between the urban design and architecture of the San Francisco Civic Centre and the recently-opened Yerba Buena Gardens. They aptly represent two distinct eras. Both contain civic and cultural buildings; both are organised about a central public space; and both have buildings by many different architects. But, whereas the Civic Centre represents the classical tradition of urban design and public place making, Yerba Buena Gardens is an example of suburban planning and composition and the effective privatisation of public space.

At the Civic Centre, the collective result of all the buildings is to make an urban ensemble, whereas at Yerba Buena Gardens, each building is a self-contained and self-referential entity. The Civic Centre, designed and built after the 1906 earthquake and fire, was the fulfilment of the ideas of the City Beautiful Movement. Axially planned in a Beaux Arts manner, it is a unified urban quarter, integrated into the surrounding city fabric and street grid. Its architecture is consistent through the use of sierra white stone and a variation of classical styles, from Beaux Arts, Mannerist, and Baroque. It has a sequence of civic spaces focused on City Hall that are figurative in form and layout.

Yerba Buena Gardens, in contrast, is like a World's Fair. It has a series of stand-alone pavilions by internationally famous architects, each in a different style and all competing for attention. The recently-opened Museum of Modern Art by Mario Botta is the equivalent of the Swiss Italian pavilion. It followed the opening last year of the Japanese pavilion, Maki's Centre for the Arts Gallery and the New York pavilion, James Polshek's Centre for the Arts Theatre (AR August 1994). We can look forward to the construction of a Mexican pavilion, a new Mexican Museum, reportedly to be by Legorreta. The remaining question is who will be the architect for the proposed Jewish Museum to be built in the shell of Willis Polk's 1920s Jessie Street Substation Building nearby.

Yerba Buena is the result of a 35-year saga of urban renewal and a series of failed or abandoned masterplans. The result is a study in how not to create a coherent urban cultural centre. The whole complex, which occupies approximately 25 acres, sits above the Moscone Convention Centre. Designed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the local offices of HOK and Gensler Associates, the Moscone Centre was intended to bring much needed revenue to the city with all the conventions and conferences that are part of corporate life these days. Unlike many other US cities where complexes of this size can obliterate whole city blocks, Moscone was designed to be below ground with a park on top so as to minimise its bulk and create the opportunity to build above. The convention halls are partially excavated, but also have a substantial portion above ground. This created a particularly difficult relationship with the surrounding streets and started the move toward an inwardly-focused layout for the future buildings to be built above.

Yerba Buena Gardens is essentially anti-urban in its planning and design. The central feature is an oval-shaped garden facing Mission Street with new cultural buildings located around its perimeter. None of the buildings addresses the street, nor do they really address each other. All the new YBG buildings could be relocated anywhere on the site without any loss of integrity. In contrast, the new Library at the Civic Centre is so precisely located within the urban grid and Civic Centre axes that it would not fit in any other site.

The lack of a clear urban design vision or plan for YBG is a result not only of its chequered history, but of the fact that the whole site comes under the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRDA). The SFRDA is autonomous from the City Planning Department, has its own planning codes and staff and is analogous to the Vatican City in Rome. While the rest of the adjacent San Francisco Financial District was under the urban design controls of the Downtown Plan (AR February 1984) with its limitations on height, bulk, setbacks and building shape, the two hotel towers on Market Street that fall within the boundaries of the YBG redevelopment area were not required to conform to the City's new planning constraints. The result is two of the most banal buildings in Northern California - the grotesquely misshapen Marriott, a building that resembles a juke box and might look out of place even in Reno, and the ANA Hotel (originally known as the Meridien), a graceless, skewed slab that succeeds in blocking the previously open vista down Kearny Street to its north. Neither building would have been permitted if they had to comply with the controls written into the Downtown Plan.