San Francisco Federal Building, Morphosis, 2007 — All Photos: Richard Lacayo
Ever since I came back from San Francisco in September I’ve been meaning to post about the new federal building there by Thom Mayne’s firm Morphosis. While I was out there I got a tour of the place from Brandon Welling, the project architect, and Maria Ciprazo, an executive of the General Services Administration — the agency that commissions and manages government buildings, and that had the taste (and hey, the daring) to go with Mayne’s firm for this building, with gratifying results.
As you may have heard, San Francisco is a beautiful city. But as far as contemporary architecture goes, until recently it’s been mostly a backwater. The new federal building is a pretty smashing addition to the skyline. To give almost everyone working in the 18 story tower portion access to direct sunlight, Morphosis came up with a slim wafer of a tower just 65 feet wide. To minimize the need for air conditioning, the building relies mostly on natural ventilation. Many of the windows can be partly opened. Vertical translucent glass fins shield offices on the northeast side from afternoon sun. On the southeast facade that steel mesh scrim acts as a sunscreen that cascades in accordion folds across the street level plaza, a sculptural touch that it repeats at the roof by curving up and over it. And at night the three story sky garden — that’s the square void you see about midway up the tower, which brings to mind Arquitectonica’s Atlantis Condominium in Miami — is lit by a James Turrell neon installation.
Federal building lobby
Morphosis also arrived at something impressive in the lobby, with its combination of diagonal concrete piers, steel walls and projecting lanterns. It manages to feel both august and lively.
So I was thinking about that building when I came across this piece by Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of The Chicago Tribune (and my onetime post-grad fellowship co-fellow at the University of Chicago.) Last year the GSA almost chose Thomas Gordon Smith, the former dean of the school of architecture at Notre Dame, as its chief architect. (He ended up instead in an advisory position.) Smith is an all too dedicated classicist. If he had gotten the top job at the GSA, the Thom Maynes of the world wouldn’t be getting much work out of that place.
In 1994, thanks to the New York senator and architecture buff Daniel Moynihan, the GSA started a Design Excellence Program that led to the selection of some first rate architects in the same decade in which the feds were also embarking on a courthouse building boom. Like the Richard Meier federal courthouse out on Long Island, or Henry Cobb’s courthouse in Boston, what the San Francisco building proves is that sometimes even the federal government gets it right. Meanwhile Kamin’s article is a reminder of just how easily it can all go the other way.