At the time of the missions
The Spaniards marked the region with their amazing adobe architecture, of which the missions and presidios are the great representatives. The missions are characterized by a rectangular plan dominated by a large central courtyard around which are organized the church, the workshops, and the convento, an arcaded building housing the priests. Recognizable by its bell tower(campanario), the church is of great simplicity, its facade being often only punctuated by niches in the gable to accommodate the bells. The adobe walls (usually whitewashed) can reach up to 1 meter thick and the roofs of pink or red glazed tiles ensure shade and coolness. Inside, the frameworks reveal the mastery of wood, especially the redwood, which is abundant in the region, and whose imposing beams are fixed by leather straps. Mission Dolores is the oldest building in San Francisco, and one of the most beautiful missions in California. Don't miss the San Francisco Solano Mission in Sonoma and the San Carlos Borromeo Mission in Carmelo-by-the-Sea. The presidio are military forts. The one in San Francisco illustrates the evolution of defensive architecture, from a simple fortified camp with adobe buildings, to a real military base with wooden, then brick and finally concrete buildings. In Monterey, the Larkin House, still made of adobe and redwood, marks a turning point in terms of domestic habitat with its structure with floors and balconies, its veranda on the façade, its double-glazed windows and its shingled roof... all elements linked to the Anglo-Saxon influence which can also be seen in the increasingly frequent use of brick. This mixed style, called Monterey Colonial, is very present in Monterey State Historic Park.
The Gold Rush
The Gold Rush saw the birth of countless " boomtowns
"... that is, towns built in less time than it takes to say it! The rules of construction were always the same: first, a square wooden building with one or two floors and a nearly flat roof was built to reduce the loss of space, then a sort of facade was added, extending beyond the roofline, with medallions, crenellations and tiers adorning the gables. Today, many of these towns have become ghost-towns, the most famous being Bodie, a stunning mix of brick and wood. The historic district of Old Sacramento also preserves superb examples of this architecture with its 3 perfectly restored blocks including raised and covered wooden sidewalks, buildings with pediments and of course... saloons! This gold fever also turned San Francisco upside down and it inherited from this period its nickname of "Instant City" which went from a hundred inhabitants to thousands in a few months. But this transformation was not without difficulty, as the city had developed on marshy ground. Initially, wooden planks were thrown across the streets to make them passable, while various materials were used to fill in the roads and create a pier leading to the hundreds of ships waiting in the port. The city thus progressively advanced on the sea, eventually encircling the ships left abandoned in the cove (some of these ships were even transformed into housing!), while the hills were populated with houses. In an attempt to counter this somewhat anarchic development, the authorities decided to apply a checkerboard plan to the city... but applying such a geometrically rigorous plan to such a diverse and steep terrain creates situations that are, to say the least, ubiquitous. This is how the city came to have its famous streets with vertiginous inclinations and flights of stairs that are safer than smooth slopes!Architectural boom
The 19th century is one of the most fascinating periods in San Francisco's architectural history. It is from this period that the "Old Painted Ladies" date, these wooden houses of various styles, following the great Victorian tradition. These houses are inseparable from a standardized construction technique that was widespread at the time: the balloon-frame, a light structure made of planks serving as a framework on which are fixed large wooden panels in turn covered with plaster or shingles, the entire structure resting on a brick foundation. Towers, tall chimneys and irregularly shaped roofs characterize the Queen Anne houses, of which the Haas Lilenthal House is the most famous representative; rotunda corner windows are very present in the Italianate style; the Gothic revival gives pride of place to geminated bays and crenellations; while the Eastlake style emphasizes the verticality by the use of astonishing prefabricated wooden ornaments. In a city that imposed the use of brick in its business district as well as the installation of iron shutters and curtains to protect against fire, it is easy to understand that these wooden houses were relegated to the hills. But that doesn't matter, because with the advent of the legendary Cable Cars, the city's hills were almost flattened! Nob Hill and Liberty Hill are full of these Victorian masterpieces.
The 19th century also saw the creation of the city's two major campuses: Berkeley and Stanford. The former was long called the "New Athens of the West" with its monumental neoclassical buildings along the main streets, while the latter, with its red-tiled buildings in local stone, was inspired by the missions. A masterpiece of landscape architecture, Golden Gate Park is one of the largest urban green spaces in the world. In 1894, it hosted the Midwinter Fair, which was accompanied by the creation of 37 international pavilions and gardens, and the construction of a greenhouse whose multi-colored glass dome is a masterpiece of Victorian architecture. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the city and its population and wealth increased, as evidenced by the beautiful mansions such as the Gibbs House and the Brown House designed by Willis Polk, or the Bank of California inspired by the Parthenon. But the most impressive witness of this eclecticism is the California State Capitol in Sacramento, whose neoclassical dome rises to 64 meters. The end of the 19th century was also marked by the advent of the first skyscrapers in San Francisco, of which the Mills Building, with its brick façade designed by Daniel Burnham, is the oldest.Rebuild
The turn of the century was marked by a quest for architectural identity as the city and its region tried to find the right balance between European influences and local traditions. The Mission Revival style was very popular. Pure volumes, curved gables, whitewashed walls and elegant arches characterized these buildings. The bell tower of Mills College, inspired by missionary church towers, is the work of Julia Morgan, thefirst woman to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris andthe first to exploit the architectural potential of reinforced concrete, a material whose spectacular resistance capabilities were revealed by the terrible fires and earthquakes of 1906. While its use had been limited until then, it was decided to use it for the construction of new buildings in the city, while adorning their facades with stucco or terracotta so as not to clash with the few historical monuments still standing. Metal frames and structures in brick and glazed earthenware, which also resisted well, became the new models to follow, while new technical solutions appeared: twisted iron elements were integrated into the concrete blocks to improve their resistance, and steel beams were used to dress the façades of the buildings, playing both the role of decoration and anti-seismic protection, as is the case with the US Geological Survey Building. These concerns seem very different from those of the organizers of the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915, who wanted to transform the city into a genuine imperial city. Inspired by the City Beautiful movement, its promoters imagined monumental complexes that looked like ancient temples. The Palace of Fine Arts, designed by Bernard Maybeck, is an ode to Antiquity with its octagonal rotunda and Corinthian peristyle. But the most astonishing achievement of the time is of course the Civic Center, of which City Hall is the central building. Its columned drum and lantern-topped dome are inspired by Mansart's chapel at Les Invalides. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, with its grandiose colonnades and arcades, is a perfect copy of the Hôtel de Salm (the Parisian original!) It was financed by the powerful Spreckels family, who also built the Spreckels Mansion, an immaculately white building nicknamed "the Parthenon of the West Coast". At the same time, the city continued to embrace modernity with its skyscrapers. While the Hobart Building kept a very neoclassical sculpted terracotta decor, the Hallidie Building launched the fashion for glass curtain walls.
Modern effervescence
The 1920s saw the appearance of the first residential complexes, such as the Bellaire Apartments on the famous Green Street, which can be recognized by their high curved porches and beautiful plaster ornamentation. It was in the 1930s that the two great symbols of the city were built: the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge
. The first one is at the time the longest steel bridge in the world... 7,200 m all the same. The second is the highest and longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, spanning 2,700 m long and 30 m wide... it is said that no less than 18,900 liters of paint are needed per year to maintain its legendary red-orange paint!The 1930s were also marked by the advent of Art Deco, of which the Maritime Museum, designed on the model of an ocean liner with steel railings and portholes, is the proud representative. Between the antique style and the pure Art Deco lines, the Coit Tower
does not go unnoticed from the top of Telegraph Hill! If you had to remember only one building from the 1940s, it would be the only one built by Frank Lloyd Wright in San Francisco, the Spiral Building on Maiden Lane, now occupied by a ready-to-wear boutique... so you can go and observe at your leisure the pure forms of this curved building! At the end of the 1950s, the city experienced a new architectural effervescence, but this time it was resolutely turned towards modernity. The Alcoa Building, by the famous SOM agency, offers an astonishing curtain wall façade on which steel beams covered with aluminum have been superimposed; while the Embarcadero Building stands out in the city skyline with the offsetting volumes of its 4 towers. But the most famous building of the time is undoubtedly the Transamerica Pyramid, a 260 m high pyramid whose isosceles tetrahedrons at the base serve as decoration and earthquake protection. It is also from this period that the famous Dragon Gate marking the entrance to the no less famous Chinatown district dates. With its pagoda-shaped roof and golden dragons, it is impossible to miss. The floating neighborhoods of Sausalito with their houseboats connected by floating bridges; the rehabilitation of the legendary Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory into a commercial complex with a charming maze of passages, patios and green terraces; or Sea Ranch, a residential development designed in the north of the city with redwood as the main material and the objective of creating open and luminous volumes in the Bay Area Tradition style, are some of the astonishing urban experiments carried out in the 1960s and 1970s.Since 1980
In 1985, San Francisco adopted the Downtown Plan, one of the most restrictive urban plans in the country. Refusing to transform itself into a sprawling megalopolis, the city chose to protect its urban environment and its heritage, to multiply green spaces, and to regulate the construction of skyscrapers, limited to one per year, whose height must not exceed 43 floors and whose asymmetrical forms are intended to be an antithesis of the uniformity of the time. After the earthquakes and fires of 1989 and 1991, the brick buildings and houses were reinforced, the subway tunnels were made watertight and consolidated... but all the inhabitants knew that in the face of the Big One, no structure could resist. Despite this acute sense of the precariousness of things, the city continues to transform itself. The greatest names in architecture have created amazing museums. The graphic juxtaposition of brick blocks and the enormous truncated cylinder that looks like a cyclops' eye bathing the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) in light were designed by Mario Botta, while its beautiful extension with a fiberglass façade and integrated Monterey silicate crystals to reflect the light was created by the Snohetta agency. The San Francisco Academy of Sciences building, with its green roof whose two domes follow the curves of the greenhouses and the planetarium and are covered with portholes, was designed by Renzo Piano. Daniel Liebeskind is responsible for the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which partly occupies a former power station, while the new De Young Museum, an astonishing monolithic volume punctuated by notches and hollows, is the work of the Swiss duo Herzog & de Meuron. They are also responsible for the superb Dominus Winery in Napa Valley, whose exterior cladding is made of irregular basalt blocks enclosed in steel grids. A link between vineyards and architecture that was initiated in the late 1980s by Michael Graves and his monumental Clos Pegase winery, a contemporary reinterpretation of classical architecture. Skyscrapers continue to feed the city's skyline, such as the SF Tower in the shape of a torch guiding travelers to the airport. As for Stanford and Berkeley Universities, they are a laboratory of experimentation where a sustainable architecture with simple and pure lines, with astonishing environmental engineering systems and above all with a human dimension is imagined!
