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.