the sky line

The Philip Burton Federal Building, San Francisco

San Francisco may not place in the highest rank of architecturally significant cities, but neither does it lack for built icons. This city's skyline profiles have graced more than their share of postcards. And yet one of our most communicative buildings, one of the most impactful in its bearing, is one not breezily identified with the city's image. Understandable, since it is, in itself, not much more than ordinary. What does make the Philip Burton Federal Building noteworthy is the illustrative example it offers of context in urban design, and of the pressures and influences that built structure can exude onto the surrounding environment.

The walk up to the front of the building will not grip the casual stroller. This building has obvious, undeniable design failings. It is not the most aesthetically engaging structure one is likely to find. It is simple and streamlined to a fault, a big, gleaming, steel and glass box built during an era of skyscraper chic when gleaming boxes, if not quite in the west coast ascendant, were in their prime. Even on these terms, though, its appeal has lost traction with the years. Set against the sleek and slender towers that now dot the city's skyline, it seems squat, big-boned, perhaps a touch frumpy.

Still, its composition on the whole is not entirely unsuccessful. The grays and blacks in the external framework blend with the reflected glare of the glass, capturing geometries of light and shading that articulate a sense of architectural order somehow more nuanced, more expressive than the typical office block. There is no pomp or even much personality to be found here, but there is a restrained stateliness of sorts. This is, after all, the seat of the US District Court for northern California, and the building's form and function are inescapably tied to signs of authority.

The plaza site spread across the front entrance and blending into Golden Gate Avenue is handled adequately. The perpetual challenge of designing public space for federal property is that of meeting the absolute necessities of safety and security while hopefully still maintaining some semblance of openness. How to design for safety without creating a fortress mentality; how to design for accessibility without opening security vulnerabilities? The slanting, concrete grass-capped knoll offers an acceptable solution that does not offend too much. This is not the most attractive or rich public square in the city, but neither is it the most attractive or rich site with which to work. But the plaza isn't what's interesting here.

Step back a bit and take a walk all the way around the block. Start on the south side, at UN Plaza where the BART station pokes its head up, and walk up the pedestrianized stretch of Fulton Street toward City Hall. The Federal Courthouse is visible to the north as you walk, full and weighty, sitting at the back of the cluster of public buildings set around San Francisco's city-beautiful civic center.


Here it sits comfortably, framing the central plaza, reinforcing and sealing off the axes directing flow toward City Hall, the focal point of the center. Its colors are darker, its materials contrast with those of its neighbors, yet its size, shape, and bearing reinforce the space it's set in. Its height completes a smooth, progressive step-up from the floor of the central plaza. Its design lines flow in parallel with surrounding architectural lines. It adds perhaps a more modern-era themed note to the neoclassical facades around it, stoically humming in the background like a Kubrick-ian monolith, while its mass anchors the entire set-piece. These buildings bow and nod to each other, as gentleman assembled in an austere settting.

Keep walking, past City Hall, around to the Courthouse's side, and head north, along Polk Street.


Now the stroller is presented with a singular object isolated within a clear blue field, wide and neutral. All the ceremony has drained off. Stripped of context, there isn't much of any impression left to take. Without its companion pieces, the building's sense of identity becomes loosed of its moorings, and drifts.

Keep going, past the Courthouse, north up to Eddy Street.


Again, the feeling changes. The first thing the stroller now feels is a sudden palpable sheerness. The rear wall is essentially identical to the front, but the context has been utterly upended. Gone is the sense of gradual gradation in height, of conference between structures; this building lords over its neighbors. From this vantage, the building is out of scale, a looming presence that takes on a quality of foreboding.

Now cross back along Eddy Street for a block, stroller, and turn up Larkin Street, heading north. Soon you'll find yourself moving deeper into those gray spaces between the Polk Gulch nightlife strip and the Tenderloin, home to the city's underbelly, a steamy mixture of drug abuse, homelessness, and the grittiest hipsters; a contemporary skid row at the vanguard of gentrification. In this setting, the symbolic freight of the courthouse is maximized, and inescapable. It becomes a territorial demarcation of civil society itself, a wall to keep the barbarians outside the kingdom.


Experienced on a human scale, from different points along the radius of a casual stroll, the courthouse reveals distinct and contradictory faces that change with the social landscape. Like people, buildings sometimes change their behavior with the company they're in.

the sporting life

Bosox Barry?

Call me crazy, but is this not the very scenario imagined as the one possible path for Barry Bonds back into baseball?

An American League contender, preferably a big-market team with big-market money, loses a big power hitter to injury and is forced to seriously consider taking on all the many headaches for Bonds' still formidable talents. And so, right on cue, down goes David Ortiz and his big bat (and left handed bat, at that!), for at least a month and maybe for the rest of the season, and the Red Sox have to come up with a Plan B.

All in all, it's the perfect scenario: It's Boston, with no limits on spending and a win-at-all-costs mentality. And it's their DH who's injured, so the disruption would be minimal. Bonds could just slip right into Ortiz's slot without disturbing any other player's place on the field or in the lineup. Barry couldn't have written it up any better.

But what about steroids? Sure, Boston hated Bonds as much as the next city, but that was then and this is now. A lot has changed since last we've seen Bonds: namely, the Mitchell Report. The heat's come way off Bonds as the rest of the country has been forced to face that the Steroids Era was exactly that, an era, and not one man. Boston, especially, has been pressed into a broader perspective, what with Roger Clemens, one of the Red Sox franchise players of the past twenty five years, taking over Bonds' mantle of steroids Whipping Boy. How could they reject Bonds without calling huge chunks of their own history into question?

I attended a Giants - Red Sox game at Fenway in June 2007. The media were all over him for days leading up to the series, the fans let him have it every time he came to the plate...until he homered, and then the park filled with oohs and aahs, because that's what everybody had come to see. The great Barry Bonds, crushing one deep, and you sensed that there would have been disappointment if the game's Home Run King had gone his whole career without homering at majestic Fenway, perhaps baseball's most mythologized showcase theater. Boston knows baseball, they're not blind to its history. They would accept Bonds.

But will the Red Sox bite? Maybe not now, not while there's still hope of Ortiz returning, not while they're still hanging onto a playoff slot. But that playoff spot is looking tenuous, indeed; Boston woke up today 4 full games back of Tampa, just a single game ahead of the surging Twins for the wildcard, and with growing worries that Manny Ramirez's month long slump may be more serious than previously thought. If a month from now the Rays are still growing stronger rather than weaker, if Boston bats are anything less than booming, and if the devastating combination punch of Ortiz/Ramirez still looks as compromised as it does now, you can bet the Boston Barry Buzz will start to take on a life of its own.