 The basic topic is kind of what 10 buildings say about the San Francisco of 2015. And it's very interesting writing about architecture right now in San Francisco because it can almost feel as if architecture is irrelevant. That the way a building looks, the quality with which it's built, doesn't matter. What matters is the amount of affordable housing in it. What matters is the amount of transportation fees it generates. What matters is whether it is a contributor to gentrification or not. What matters is whether it is going into an area that should be protected historically if it is replacing what could be considered a historic resource. In other words, it's almost as if the buildings that get, the quality of the building is less important than the symbology and the politics and the tensions of the city. And in fact, as important as all those issues are, and we'll hit against a number of those issues as I talk, buildings are hugely important. They show us what a city values, what makes a city distinct and where it came from and where it sees itself headed. So that's one reason that the second cityscapes book of mine is called Cityscapes II with the subtitle, Reading the Architecture of San Francisco. The fact is that not only do buildings reveal the talents of the designer or the quality of the construction or the passions of the past, they really do offer a lens into how we live now and our aspirations for the future. So that's what I want to do is look at how certain buildings around us, new and old both, embody the San Francisco of 2015. As I said, some are from the book, but not all of them. Some of the buildings I'll go into in depth, but not all of them. And the first stop, we'll start with a very familiar scene, certainly imagistically. But the first building that I want to start with is a landmark you all know. And that is the Ferry Building, which looks pretty small here, but once upon a time looked much bigger. It was built in 1898. The design is by A. Page Brown. The history is palpable. I'm not going to go back to the present. You all know that. But some of the ambitions of the building, I mean, this was intended from day one to be a portal into the city. It's not just where the developed city meets the water. It is essentially the junction of the most important street in the city and the great beyond. This is where people came into San Francisco from the mainland. This is where people departed from San Francisco to points beyond. But it's not just a historic landmark. What's so fascinating about the Ferry Building is that it isn't simply a relic. After decades of neglect, and I could give a whole lecture on the Ferry Building, including all the weird things that were done to it between 1939 and 1989, after decades of neglect it reopened in 2002 as a microcosm of the 21st century city. It is, again, I'm going to assume you've all been there. It's all about small retailers, makers tied to the land, locally sourced, organic, free range, ethically farmed. It is very much a personification of how San Francisco wants to see itself as part of a nurturing culture. And it is a sustainable culture. And it's very much a building that has been on the roll since the day it reopened. And we're kind of taking it for granted now. But those of you who have been in San Francisco long enough to know Gear Deli Square and its heyday or the cannery and its heyday, that period of time was actually pretty short. I mean, within a decade, Gear Deli Square was kind of seen as part of the tourist realm. Not that a zillion people didn't go there for the first 20 or 25 years, but it was kind of seen as off the map. Because the ferry building, it reopened in 2002. It's still a place that tourists love, but Bay Area residents feel at home. And instead of bringing in big chains, it's almost like a little showcase of cool little neighborhood places getting bigger, like Blue Bottle Coffee and now Humphrey Sloka Mice Cream. But it's not simply preservation. It's not simply a retail shop and it's not simply restoration. This is the current view from the water. And the fact is none of this really, none of this that you see existed when the ferry building was the major entry into San Francisco. Back then, the ferries pulled straight up to the boat, straight up to the ferry building. I should add an aerial shot that, you know, the slips came out. It was like an airplane hangar. You walked out of the airplane, you walked and boom, you were right inside. Now though, public access to the bay is required by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. So when the building was rehabbed, they had to add on all this public walkway. As part of the restoration cost, they were allowed to add the upper to the eastern extension on the upper two stories, which increases the amount of office space inside that is leased to very profitable tenants and very big firms and things like that, big in terms of prestige and the amount of money they charge their clients, not so much in square footage. And so it, you know, and it's also still a place that the ferries don't pull right up, but they pull up on either side, and a lot of the people choose to walk through the building. They can pick up pastry on the way through, they can stop at Pete's Coffee or I mentioned Blue Bottle. I mean, it is part of the ongoing life of the city and the region, you know, a building that it exerts a gravitational pull, but it's also strong enough in and of itself to kind of fit into the changing urban scene. And I want to show you a current installation unless it's moved on in the last week or two. But this is, there are about a dozen or so sculptures that are in the teardrop-shaped plaza in the middle of the Embarcadero outside the ferry building. And so let's look at this photograph. We've got the restored ferry building, we've got a plaza that was done around 2000. The Campanile on the ferry building is adorned with 1915 as a gesture toward the Panama Pacific International Expedition. We've got a historic streetcar that probably didn't really come from San Francisco, but blessed the volunteers who have restored it and painted everything, running on streetcar lines that were restored in the 1990s or 2000, all these different pieces. But again, so here is an artwork that is all about silences and the tension of free speech and the importance of not succumbing to self-censorship and things. And it'll probably, it'll come, it'll go, there's artwork that comes and goes just south of the agricultural building. I mean, the ferry building in a very real way, it's like the larger city. It's seen it all before and it shrugs off distractions that the rest of us might dwell on and that might stick in our craw. Now for the next building, I want to move down Market Street a lot closer to where we are now. And this, if you are an architecture buff, this is 1355 Market Street, built in 1937 as the Western Furniture Exchange. The architects were the capital company. How's that? Not exactly Frank Lloyd Wright. But the rest of us know it now as the Twitter building. And what's interesting about the Twitter building, we'll just kind of call it that from there on, is that the program is pretty much the same as the ferry building. And for those of you who haven't been in, I'm just going to give you a real quick tour. But from the outside, the building looks pretty much as it did a decade or so ago before the renovation was done by the Shorenstein company that has brought in Twitter and other tech firms there. This photograph shows a top floor that was partially removed. There's now a roof deck for the Twitter employees, thank goodness. So basically the building looks like it did from the outside as it did back in the 30s. If you go inside though, what you see is the imposing bones, the concrete structure, the original building have been cut back to make the ground floor a much more dramatic space than it was when this was a wholesale building for furniture vendors or other types of manufacturers. And inside, so instead of the light on the inside of the ferry building, we've got this kind of shadowy drama. But what you do have, you have a large market that has lots of different food in it. It was intended as a bunch of small stalls, instead it's one tenant but trying to keep up the kind of small stall atmosphere. And then there are three restaurants that offer eating and drinking options with enticements. This is from one of the restaurants, Dirty Water, and I'm not having this to show the misspelling of Napa because for all I know there's a super cool Napa cabbage that is spoiled with two peas. But in other words, it's very much saying, this is of the moment. And then like the ferry building, you can walk through, but when you come out at the back, you're not at the bay. You're at a former alley, this is a block of Stevenson Street, that has been turned into kind of a pedestrian way, complete with artificial turf and a nice, you know, raised seating area for people at the restaurant, well, the restaurant and the market, and then a communal fire pit. Again, this is 2015, so you want to have a communal fire pit. But again, it's interesting, it's pretty much the same formula that we saw at the ferry building. This time though, the idea isn't simply to inhabit the past but to give it kind of an artisanal twist. And I want to go back into the lobby. This shot does not show quite what you think it might show. It's not simply a stripped down wall with an artsy installation. This is a collage by an artist named Chris Edmonds. It consists of 18 rows of bronze boxes that were the mail boxes for the original building. These were all taken from the merchandise mart's mail room. And then kind of arranged randomly, I kept looking, there's no pattern I could figure out, with dichroic glass where the numbers would have been on a lot of them, just to add a little bit of color and reflectivity and unexpected twists. As for the wooden walls around it, again, these are not just exposed wood walls. But here's a plaque that explains where the wood came from within the building and how it was put to use and why it was put to use and things like that. So it's kind of every generation of San Francisco restores things and then shows it off in their own way. But this one has a little bit of the DIY ethos. It's not just exposed wood, but we found it on the rooftop and things like that. Beyond the building itself, the reason that 1355 that I see this as a defining building is that no building in the city shows so powerfully the role of tech as a catalyst to today's economy and how it's just reshaping our physical landscape. I mean, whatever you think about that, whatever you think about the merits or drawbacks of the so-called Twitter tax break, this is an area of Market Street that was dormant or worse for decades. This is a little beyond the best known part of mid-market. I'll put it that journalistically detached. And it's essentially this building is surrounded by several other large buildings that were built in the early 70s as back office space for the financial district. They were pretty much empty or just rented by government agencies and things by the time this century rolled around. Now you've got Twitter in the Twitter building, but you've also got Uber in one of the buildings. You've got Dolby Laboratories bought a building. I mean, it's not just that the old buildings are filling up, but there's been a construction of more than 1,500 housing units nearby. I mean, right behind the Twitter building on 10th Street is NEMA. This is one of the three towers within it or two towers within it, 750 apartments are in it. And then at the back of the block, there is 150 units of kind of higher affordable housing being purchased. And then on 9th Street, here's another building. This is Avalon Bay as an apartment firm. For those of you who really know the area, that block was empty with three different approved towers in like the last 15 years. Twitter signed up and a new developer swung in, bought it, turned it into how, you know, built an apartment building just as quickly as they could. And of course, the other thing that all these have in common is there's a lot of glass. And the abundance of glass in the new buildings going up around the Twitter building kind of brings me to my third defining building in San Francisco. This one heading back that way, but not all the way to the water. And that building is 560 Mission Street designed by Pelley Clark Pelley. Now 560 Mission is the one in the middle. It's not the one on the right. It's not the one on the left. And it's not one of the glass buildings I could show you further down the block or in the next block with more coming up. And when I say more coming up, I'm not just using hyperbole. This is four of the towers. These are the Lumina and Infinity complexes on Folsom Street. And then just south of them, a little southwest, you get the glass towers that are rising up toward the Bay Bridge approach on Rencon Hill. And what's taking shape is a new district that in a certain light makes the San Francisco the fairy buildings seem very, very far away. I mean, these are buildings by global architects working for global developers, designed and marketed with the idea that people with resources want things that look as new and contemporary as can be. So I'm going to go back here. 560 is the one in the middle. So why do I pull out 560 Mission? In part, it's because it's the first of the wave of glass towers that continues. It opened in 2002. To me, it's also the best. I mentioned the firm. I mean, the architect was Cesar Pelle, who has a long lineage of high-rise buildings in modern style and post-modern style and post-modern style. That firm is doing what's now being called the Salesforce Tower back to tech. But the thing about Pelle and a very quick digression, every large architecture firm has kind of their A buildings and their B buildings. The buildings that are kind of like aimed at the monograph and the feature project on the website and the hope for reviews and awards, and then the buildings that kind of pay the bills. Whenever Pelle has an A building, there's always this meticulous attention to detail and style, a genuine love of craft. And this building, to me, and I'm going to get to that in a sec, really does have this kind of precision that works on the skyline and then also on the ground. I mean, it's very modern, but there's a real clean Christmas to it. And when the building opened, I had just started in like the prior year as the architecture critic at the Chronicle and talked to Pelle for it. And he told me his inspiration, one of his inspirations for this tower, which is 31 stories, is the Hallity Building on Sutter Street, which is by Willis Polk and it dates back to 1918. It is considered by most scholars to be the first glass curtain wall building in the United States. Now, it might be that Pelle was using a little bit of hyperbole to market the building in terms of his reputation, but it's a real intriguing connection to make. And again, this building, it's definitely an emblem of kind of today's global culture and global urban trends and fashion. But to me, part of the defining thing is it shows that international trends can look at home in this city, that they can work on the local scene, that San Francisco can kind of absorb them. And the reason I was using the to me is that the first time I gave this talk, I had two people afterwards tell me they thought it was a great talk, they loved my work, they didn't buy the thing about 560 Mission Street. That said, I'm the one giving the lecture. So you can join in on the question section. The next stop I want to make, and we've got two more at length and then a few quicker, is not just a single building, but an entire part of town. One that reminds us that the physical changes of 2015 San Francisco aren't simply the rebirth of old buildings or the erection of new ones, but we're seeing entire new neighborhoods in places that once seemed off the map over the horizon. And that brings us to 1184th Street. It's a 149 unit affordable complex that was developed by Mercy Housing in Mission Bay. And I'm guessing that when a lot of you think of Mission Bay, you think of scenes like this or scenes like this, just very kind of dreary mundane boxes kind of stamped out, you know, planted so it's not to this, so it's not to that, and then it gets done and everyone says, boy, it's not too good. It's really, really boring. What's interesting to me before getting back to this building, or not this, we're not going to stay on this building long, 1184th Street is that no matter how boxy and bland a lot of Mission Bay might be, it has begun to breed life. If you go to Mission Bay now, there are dog walkers. You do, you have a Phil's Coffee and you have a morning scene at the Phil's Coffee, which incidentally is in the first affordable housing building that was built in the neighborhood. It's on the south side of the creek, north side of the creek on 4th Street, and it's also where the city's branch library is. You even have multimodal transit. You've got the guy on the scooter. What could be more San Francisco than that right now? In other words, if you erect a neighborhood in today's San Francisco, it starts to feel a lot like today's San Francisco. And, you know, that said, the goal of this city and the goal of planners and developers and architects in this city should not simply be to develop something that people can fill up, but it should be to add some sort of architectural drama and just kind of distinctiveness to the emerging landscapes. And so in terms of 1184th Street, I'll get back to that. It's the building at the end of this walkway. This is 4th Street on Mission Creek. The way that it looks is not an accident. Back when the neighborhood was planned in the late 1980s and middle 1990s, care was taken. 30% of all housing units were to be affordable. This is about 6,000 housing units being developed. One third were to be affordable. Not only that, they were to be on site. Most of them were to be on sites provided by the developer to the city at no cost. Sprinkled throughout the neighborhood physically, so there wasn't like the low-rent area and the market rate area, but blocks mixed within. And also they had to be built in tandem with the market rate construction, be it housing or offices. Parks had to be done the same way. So what you have is that you have 4th Street as kind of the main road in and out of Mission Bay. And on each side of it, you've got affordable housing sites. And by the time that 1180 was being planned, it opened up earlier this year or late last year, the city realized that it wanted more than just good stuff, that it wanted good architecture. You know, I kind of saw the first wave of things that came through and wanted to try and up the game. So mercy housing was kind of encouraged to hire two good local architects, Methune Solomon, which is led by Daniel Solomon, and then Owen Kennerly. And the team responded with a really interesting assertive building. I mean, this is the view from abroad and you can read the height limit and how it's kind of straining to be prominent, you know, using glass to emphasize the tower and all. But then here's the view along the creek, along the road that parallels the creek. You know, this isn't just the kind of, we'll do the bays in slightly different colors, like you saw earlier in Mission Bay, or you saw you in too many infill projects in San Francisco. This is a real assertive shift in rhythm and scale. And it really does begin to read as different buildings or it just reads as a really interesting building responding to a lot of different situations. This is the view on the south end of the building where you've got a kind of diagonal corner leading down. So that it shifts almost to kind of like a streamlined Miami modern, you know, and whether you see that as kind of beguiling or brash, it is not bland. I mean, I personally, I like it. But so again, so how does a building like this help us give us insight in today's San Francisco? And I would say that it's as a reminder that this city is still adding to the map and that as it does it, there also are social and architectural desires beyond simply filling in the blanks. The last building that I wanna look at at length is it also bears testimony to civic ambitions, albeit ambitions of a much different sort. And of course, I'm talking about the Trans Bay Terminal to be. You know, you all are at the library. You all know the tales of the city. I'm sure enough to know the parameters of the story, how the idea was not simply to rebuild the Trans Bay Terminal but make it into the grand central of the West and bring high speed rail to it, bring Caltrain straight downtown, every conceivable bus line into it. And while we're at it, create a quarter mile long rooftop park that the neighborhood could share. I was skeptical of this when it came out since then the high line is open in New York. So I hope I'm wrong. We'll just put it that way. But you know, so the winning, this was a competition back I believe in 2006. And the idea was very much, we're not simply putting in this huge train station or bus station, we're going to make it into a integral part of the pedestrian fabric, not just with the rooftop, but also along Natoma Street, along the alleyways, you know, kind of perish the thought it would be the concrete hulk of the old Trans Bay Terminal. Again, we'll see how well it works out, but it's interesting that the new SF MoMA edition designed by Snow Heta, a lot of the talk from Snow Heta is we want to tie into the alleys. There's this whole new network emerging. We want to plug into that. So if you know the ambitions, I'm going to assume that you also know the financial travails of the project, how the cost is more than doubled now. It's at about $2.1 billion. And that's just for the first phase. That doesn't include the rail extension, which will probably cost a lot more money, but that'll all work itself out. So we'll see. But one of the things that I just enjoy about watching this project is that it's one thing to see a tower get built or see an empty lot get filled in with a five-story building or something like that. It's fascinating after spending three years in the ground and below grade to see how fast this thing is growing and changing. How many of you kind of are down by the trans-bay terminal area every now and then? Okay, not a whole lot of you. I would say this is how the scene looks now, but this shot is like months out of date. That shot, it hasn't even jumped first street yet, whereas now this shot shows it coming to Fremont Street that the big cone on top is kind of, the architects have some fancy name for it. It's a dramatic skylight to try and pull light down into the concourse, but since I took this, the buildings now jumped Fremont Street. It'll go up to Beale Street. I took some pictures last week, but they were awful, so they're not on the slideshow. Meanwhile, the entire skin you saw will be this undulating thing. It started out as light glass, then it was fritted glass, now it's metal. The white mica-flect paint that will go on the panels has been selected. This is from a few months ago, the approved test panel, and now that that's been all agreed on by the architects and the contractors and the Trans-bay Joint Power Authority, it's gonna start something like 5,000 units are going to be made in beautiful Gary, Indiana. And so in other words, it's just, it is really rolling along and the target opening date for the buses, and so far it stayed on schedule the whole time is 2017. Not only does the building get built, not only does it plug into the existing neighborhood, one of the financing mechanisms was to raise the height on all the publicly owned land around Trans-bay Terminal so as to capture tax money and land sale revenue that would help pay for the terminal's construction. So this building here, which has received almost no attention, is a very thin office condo building going up on Fremont between Mission and Howard Street. It will plug into the rooftop deck, several other buildings will be doing the same thing, and it will be taller than the Bank of America building at 5,5,5 California. It will be almost as tall as the Trans-America Pyramid. Meanwhile, just in the last month, construction began on this building, which is at Beale and Howard, and it will not connect in, you'll notice it's all glass, that one got by me, but it's being called Park Tower. So even when they don't connect to the rooftop park, they're emphasizing the idea of the rooftop park. And so not only does the Trans-bay Transit Center define the San Francisco at 2015, but it also in a very real way is kind of defining the city of tomorrow, certainly the downtown. Now, just to wrap up so we can get to questions, real quick I wanna show you a few other buildings that to me kind of capture the changing city, and today's city. One is the Embarcadero substation on Folsom Street at Fremont. One of my favorite buildings in the book, I can tell I just lost a sale with whoever hissed, but what fascinates me about the building, you know, it was built in like the late 60s, early 70s, and think about it, what was it Fremont and Folsom in we'll say 1972? Nothing. It was a dying warehouse area across the street where I'm standing to take this photograph where the off ramps from the Bay Bridge leading to the Embarcadero freeway. You know, everyone talks about the Embarcadero freeway, but there was the spaghetti plate of ramps leading to and from it and onto it and onto the Bay Bridge. So this, so where, you know, you gotta build a big concrete substation, put it down there. The catch is then the freeway comes down, Rencon Hill is zoned for high-rise housing. This photograph I think I took in 2011 when I did the item for my Sunday column where the cityscapes come from. When it came time to rewrite the chapter, or the chapter, the squib and put it into the book is an example of a clue where you can look at a building and see something about the city and how it came to be. I had to reshoot it because by then there were more condo towers going up. And this photograph is in the book, but it's outdated as well because now that building that's a concrete frame, people are moving into it even as we speak. To shift gears in a variety of ways, a much different manifestation of the way we live now is the Parklet at Columbus and Kearney Street outside Reveley Coffee. In a building that was painted pitch black, which is another San Francisco of today thing, but I don't include that in here. But I could give a whole talk on Parklets. I could give an equally long talk, or I could devote an equally long amount of time answering questions from people who don't like them. But the point of including this one is partly just I like as an act of construction, I like how this example of very small scale contemporary place making matches the underlying topography of the city. But what's important about things like Parklets and some of the other innovations that were kind of spawned during the recession and continue is that they're homegrown proof of today's, of the love that many residents have for small nooks of street life. It's kind of an ad hoc urbanism. I mean, Parklets are something born here. There are now more than 50 of them with more in construction. I've given up trying to see them all. And one you can look at, this is Dreamforce from last month. Now you've got Oracle World on Howard Street, the same block. And you could almost argue, well, what is this if not kind of pop up urbanism at a full block scale? It's there one week, go on the next. Also at a small scale and almost reflecting back to the Twitter building is the sight glass coffee shop on 7th Street near Folsom, not for the exterior, but the interior, which just took an old mechanical shop and kind of turned it into a bespoke artisanal wonder of exposed wood and railings and things. And this wood is where it started out. When I wrote about, I very rarely do interiors, but I wrote about sight glass in 2012 because I was so struck at kind of what the design by Boar Bridges said about the Maker City. This is kind of before everything got out of control. Then it was like, oh, there are these cool things south of market, as opposed to, oh my God, Uber's everywhere. I just wrote about how it was kind of yesterday's city repurposed to enrich tomorrow's potential. Obviously this whole thing has only grown more diverse, more intense. We looked at the Twitter building, but it still kind of comes down to the idea that it's like this experiential space. I want to wrap up with two old buildings and two new buildings and one old one. The first old building is 8 Octavia Street at Octavian Market by Stanley Sedowitz. And I mentioned this not just for the design, but it's an example of how some neighborhoods in the city do wish to make San Francisco hospitable to very contemporary architecture, very cutting edge architecture, if you want to almost use a pun you could use in connection with this building. It only opened last winter, but it was born back in like 2006 in a design competition that was held by the city with the blessing of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Group. The city selected architects for four or five of the sites and encouraged developers to work with them when the sites were put up for bids. So guess what? A lot of the architects are getting work from that. But it's interesting too. So it's not just that the Hayes Valley folks wanted fresh looking buildings. They also wanted to preserve the best they could to the housing mix within the neighborhood. So a full 50% of the 1,000 or so housing units that are being constructed on the path of the former central freeway, which goes beyond Hayes, it goes several more blocks to the north, must more than 50% of the units must be reserved for low income residents. So whereas this building has an inclusionary component like 17%, there's also a building like the Richardson apartments at Fulton and Goff by David Baker. And this one is 120 units. And they are all, it is supportive housing for formerly homeless people. But at the same time, the ground floor is high ceiling. It's very approachable and it's got retail along the street. I mean, there are places where big dramatic buildings are great and there are places where integrating to the street is great. And this is kind of a gesture to extend Hayes Valley beyond Hay Street. And the last building I wanna wrap up with and then we'll have questions. It has received an abundance of attention this year, deservedly so. And this is the Palace of Fine Arts, which I'm sure you've all been to, the lagoon in the marina. It is the one large physical remnant onsite of the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition. And so partly it shows how the San Francisco of 19, of 2015, venerates the city of yesterday, whether it's architecture of a century ago or the cool bar or the old storefront or something like that. It's treasured by tourists. They come to see Bernard Maybeck's Melancholy Wonder. It's also treasured by locals. And it also shows how much of our veneration of the past is kind of a make-believe thing. For those of you who know the history of the Palace of Fine Arts, it was built of paper mache. It was essentially taken down in the mid 1960s and rebuilt, paid for by philanthropists. Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times said it was absurd to do such a thing. Not to save it, it's just you saying this wasn't built to be saved. You're just mimicking the past. Mimicry that works so well that the building or the place a few years ago was not torn down, but it was hollowed out and seismically upgraded along with new paint, new fixtures, new everything under the sun to make it feel like it had always been there. And so you kind of say, okay, well this is a lot of San Francisco. San Francisco venerates and pays homage to a past that doesn't necessarily exist the way we want to think it exists. To which I as a history major would say every dominant culture always does that. And if it's something like the Palace of Fine Arts or 1355 Market or the Ferry Building, who really cares. So I wanna just end with a photograph I took from Diamond Heights just cause I like it and it's a view of the city. You don't see it on postcards, but it captures how much of the city exists beyond what we talked about tonight. And I now wanna throw the floor open to questions for anyone who has them. And it looks like there is a microphone being walked around. So if you raise your hands all there, that woman there has one. I totally agree with you about 560 Mission. I think it's one of the most elegant buildings I have ever seen. And I have the pleasure of seeing it every day. It doesn't photograph that well. You have to see it in person. Oh, it's beautiful. But what do you think of something like Linnea? Which is the building on Market Street diagonally across from Whole Foods. I Safeway that is Black Glass and a Hulk. Yeah, Linnea is kind of due east of the New Mint built in the 1930s or whatever. We use the word new pretty freely around here since I'm talking in the New Main. I don't think it's very good. And it's interesting. It's an architecture firm, Architectonica who does a lot of stuff around the world, a global firm. They did the Infinity Towers and the Lumina Towers that I showed earlier, working with a local firm. They're pretty erratic and that one feels like kind of a B-list. It's like an interesting idea that really went astray and the thing about it, it's not big in absolute terms but it's so visually prominent that it's very jarring. That's my critique. I can't review every building that goes up. That's the thing. Other questions? As a library user advocate, the library as you must know has put up renovated or built new most of its 27 branches over about 15 year period ending fairly recently. And I know that you did some reviews of some individually as they came out, but I'm wondering whether you would and why you haven't considered the overall project, which was about a $200 million cost over the time and with interest in everything else. And whether you're just silent because you don't like to say anything not so enthusiastic or what. Well, I'm happy to say bad things about things. So that's not a problem. I'd give two answers to the question like, why haven't I done a big wrap up at the library program? Part of it is there is so much going on the last few years. One reason I wrote about Parklitz so much when they were starting was, because what else do you write about? It's pretty quiet. Oh, look, someone just turned two parking spaces into a Parklitz, stopped the presses. These days, there are just so many breaking, just kind of like new trends, things like that, that I try to step back and do larger pieces, but it's difficult to do. I'm just constantly not getting to things I want to do. And then the other thing, honestly, a trick about being a critic. The best criticism is when you love something or you hate something. And I kind of feel like the library rebuild was pretty good and it could have been better. And some are better than others, but it's kind of these things. If I had a 3,000 word piece, I could explore all those things, but there's not a real, this is a cautionary tale like the Bay Bridge of things going wrong. It's also not a, my God, this is a model for other cities to emulate. So it's kind of hard to fall in. Who knows? There'll be a recession, there'll be a new bond, and then I'll write about it again. Other questions? Yes, I work at Southern Montgomery and I could see 560 Mission. And I'm not the biggest fan of contemporary architecture, but there's something graceful about it. It catches my eye and it's kind of like your definition as an amateur critic. It just appeals. I like it, actually, now that you've brought up the history of it. Shifting to something completely different. And I know this is a very predictable question, but in Golden Gate Park, the creators of it, like William Hammond Hall and John McLaren, would have turned over in their graves that this natural respite from the urbanity of the city was turned into a monument for the rich who built the De Young Museum for the exposition in 1894, I believe. What do you think of the New De Young? I think the New De Young is great. I mean, I really do. I know plenty of people who 10 years later still hate the way it looks or hate the idea of the part of that being there. The flip side is the thing it replaced was built by a rich guy, the chronicle publisher, in 1894. It was kind of like a vanity fair, where he trotted everything out of his attic and stuck it in Golden Gate Park. I mean, that rich thread has always been there. I really like it because I think it's a terrific space inside and outside if you just stare at the building, it's kind of awkward in things, but it almost, to me, works as an element within the landscape. I was really struck how when the Academy of Science was opened, when I was at the Academy of Sciences, I wasn't reading the De Young across the way. I was almost just reading like kind of a geomorphic form or something. In other words, from any one angle, maybe the tower is overly bulky, except from every angle it looks completely different and it's just fascinating how it becomes this gravitational, not gravitational, but like this kind of marker within the park. So I understand why people don't like it because it is very unapologetic, but I do. But that's just me. One or two other questions before books? Yes, in the back. Can you give this guy a workout? In fact, I wanted to know what would be your top three unsung heroes, if you will, that are buildings in the city that really capture the most, if you will. Questions like top three unsung heroes? That's actually one reason I started the cityscape column back in 2008 or so and have had it pretty much on an every week basis since then. It is a way to write about the unsung heroes, to just look at the landscape. The first collection I did was in 2011. There's a whole section on icons because why is the pyramid an icon? Why is the sentinel building an icon one block away? Why are they photographed together? But a lot is the whole notion of just the buildings that are part of the fabric. So if I had to do three off the top of my head, one is not in the book and it is the Sharon building on New Montgomery Street across from the Palace Hotel. House of Shields is in the bottom. It's just this great building from about 1909. Just pow, pop it in. I would say another one that is not in the book. I better come up with one in the book so you guys buy it. One that is not in the book is there's a terrific little kind of art deco, not really deco, kind of later than that in the inner sunset on Judah Street. Henry Doldger built it as his marketing center and it's just this, you know, I mean, I lived in the inner sunset. I love the neighborhood, but you don't expect to see this little bit of streamlined white plaster shimmy in along the middle of the block, but there it is. Where are Judah? Judah between 8th and 9th on the north side of the street. And just to conclude, with a building that is in the book, I'm quickly riffling through everything. I would say the unsung hero is actually not a building but a bridge that I did not know existed till I stumbled across it and was flattered to have an architect in his 70s say, I never even knew that thing was there. That's Dragonfly Bridge. It's a WPA bridge in the Presidio. So that would be another vote of mine. So there are three. We'll toss in the Merced Reservoir building down on Slote in the Parkside and call it a talk. Okay. Sure.