While walking through downtown San Francisco, it’s easy to get lost in a variety of building types, both old and new. On the same block, you may pass a recently built high-rise hotel, an aging two-storey auto workshop, a lavish Victorian apartment building and a gutted gallery space; it’s an interesting milieu spanning more than 160 years since the Gold Rush days of the 1840s and 50s.As artefacts, these structures exist within a patchwork of historical and cultural narratives, encompassing a vast array of formal and tectonic variations – wood and iron from the nineteenth century, glass and steel from the early twentieth century, concrete and metal from the post-1950s. New buildings bring with them new readings and interpretations of the urban situation, where the buildings themselves are defined by much more than their individual character and materiality. Expansive renovations and additions, along with a handful of new structures every year has been the norm in San Francisco for decades, but nowhere is this felt more clearly than in the SoMa [South of Market] district, where a mutable realm of architectural style is commonplace. In this area are building types that stand out, blend in or do both, but not by traditional or ubiquitous standards. Due to the inevitable growth, decay and reimagining of all cities, how we view the built forms around us is always a transitory and evolving phenomenon. For this reason it seems imperative that we continually elucidate these complex relationships, whatever they may be at a given time or place.
urbanism | san francisco aaron levine
shifting city urban plasticity: three urban conditions in San Francisco How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things. 1
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1 Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just . Princeton University Press, 1999. p15
Aaron Levine
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