More Openness in Government (Offices, That Is)
Tim Griffith/ Morphosis
The new San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Thom Mayne:
The exterior includes a screen that curls just over the top of the building.
NY TIMES
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
March 14, 2007
Architecture Review
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a good time to be Thom Mayne. A founder of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis, he has evolved from brash outsider into one of the country’s most celebrated architects in less than a decade by infusing his industrial-machine aesthetic with a slyly idiosyncratic sensibility. And he pulled that off while taking on an improbable mix of clients, including public school administrators and government bureaucrats.
His recently completed Federal Building in San Francisco is his most powerful government work to date, its slender form and perforated metal skin a clever play on notions of transparency in an era when the fear of terrorist attacks is prompting government agencies and corporations to turn their offices into armored compounds.
The building may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program, founded more than a decade ago to remedy the atrocious architecture routinely commissioned for government offices. Under the leadership of Edward A. Feiner, the agency’s former chief architect, it has pushed through some of the most important civic buildings since the New Deal, including a stellar courthouse designed by Richard Meier in Islip, N.Y., and Mr. Mayne’s new federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore.
Since Mr. Feiner left the agency in 2005, some have fretted that the program may be unable to maintain that level of ambition, raising the prospect that the San Francisco building, which will be formally dedicated in July, might serve as a bookend to a heady phase of government-sponsored architecture.
Its 18-story structure rises on a choice site across from the city’s imposing federal courthouse, at the seam that divides the densely packed towers of the downtown civic center and financial district to the north, and the more rugged, horizontal landscape of the warehouse district to the south.
Playing off that contrast, the federal building offers two radically different faces to the city. On the north side, a stoical rectangular green-glass facade conjures landmarks of late Modernism like the United Nations in New York, with its conflicting messages of social progress and bureaucratic conformity. A series of delicate vertical glass fins serve as brises-soleils, adding an unexpected note of refinement.
That image of postwar Modernism turns out to be a trick, of course, and the hint is in a barely visible, uneven stainless steel screen curling just over the top of the building. As you walk toward its south end, the screen unfurls across the entire facade, finally lifting at the base of the building to create a canopy over the edge of a small public plaza.
The effect is mesmerizing. The texture of the screen shifts with the quality of the light, turning hard and gray as stone on bright days and more transparent when the light softens, allowing you to discern the skeletal frame underneath.
The delicacy of the composition is offset by a big, cube-shaped terrace that punctures the south facade. A narrow seam extending down one side of the cube continues across the plaza, like a tear across the building’s fabric. (As part of a permanent light installation conceived by the artist James Turrell, the cube will glow in various colors at night.)
The play between transparency and opacity plays up the porous relationship between inside and out, as if the federal bureaucracy had been pried open and reconnected to the world around it. Parts of the screen will open and close mechanically to regulate the light, further breaking down the facade’s uniformity and hinting at the busy and varied activity taking place inside.
Tim Griffith/ Morphosis
San Francisco Federal Building At Seventh and Mission Streets,
a new structure tries to balance security and transparency.
As with all of Mr. Mayne’s work, this formal experimentation serves a heartfelt social agenda. Despite the high level of security the building demands, the architect forged a rich hierarchy of public zones. The concrete cylinder bollards that surround the plaza and protect it from car bombings are scattered in an informal pattern and double as stools; a cafe anchoring the southeast corner of the site will give government workers a chance to mingle with the masses at lunch hour.
The main entrance features a single tilting concrete column that braces one corner of the building, setting the entire composition slightly off balance. That effect is repeated in the lobby, framed by leaning columns that heighten the sense of the building’s looming weight above.
Like the plaza, the lobby is intended as a social mixing chamber. A staircase at the front descends to a day care center, a gym and a meeting room that will all be accessible to the public. A grand staircase anchoring the back draws you toward the elevator banks, which also serve as an informal seating area.
As you reach the top of the staircase and turn back toward the lobby, views of the busy lower level open up, including one of a playground. On the left side of the lobby, a long, faceted form that contains the upper-level offices shoots outward, punching through the front window and cantilevering over the street, smashing the boundary between inside and out.
Mr. Mayne’s nostalgia for Modernism reasserts itself in the elevator ride to the office floors. Modeled on the intricate skip-stop system that Le Corbusier invented for his 1952 Unité d’Habitation building in Marseilles, France, the elevators stop on alternate floors. From there, stairs lead up or down to big, loftlike spaces saturated with light.
The sense of airiness is magical. Protected by the perforated steel screen, the windows can be operated from inside, and when they are open, a cool breeze drifts through the space. Beautiful undulating concrete ceilings help channel the air from north to south, sensitizing us to the natural world waiting outside. (Unfortunately, some of this effect has been lost by the erection of a crude system of partitions and office cubicles.) Aside from the compositional inspiration, what the architect is clearly seeking to retrieve from Modernist forebears like Le Corbusier is an unflinching optimism. In a world where commercialism regularly trumps public service, Mr. Mayne seems to be telling us that the values of Old-World Modernism may not be so bad. Rather than obliterate this architectural past, he aims to imbue it with the human element that Modernism forgot, the quirks and odd delights that can root a building in personal and emotional territory.
The sad paradox is that this vision may be threatened, unless the Design Excellence program survives intact. The Federal Building was Mr. Feiner’s last major commission as director, and few architects believe that this level of ambition will survive his departure. Let’s hope they’re wrong, and that this project will inspire further daring government commissions.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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SF Federal Building - Morphosis
Originally Posted by ablarc
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