by
Heather Livingston
AIA San Francisco is hosting its second annual Architecture
and the City series throughout the months of September and October. Cosponsored
by the chapter and the new Center for Architecture + Design, whose mission
is to encourage and enhance public education and civic discourse on architecture
and design, the program celebrates the City by the Bay’s unique
architectural heritage and active design community. Envisioned and organized
in large part by local architects and community partners, the series
will feature architectural home, restaurant, and studio tours; panel
discussions; film screenings; exhibitions; and a sandcastle-building
contest with teams of architects, engineers, and elementary school students.
A time to celebrate
According to AIA San Francisco Executive Director
Margie O’Driscoll,
the program was very well received and attended by the community last
year. Although comparatively little outreach was done in 2004 to drive
visitors, she estimates that the series brought in approximately 3,000
designers, architecture-lovers, and tourists. She anticipates more than
double that number this year based on the amount of events and sponsors. “We
primarily have a Bay Area audience, but we’re working with community
partners—nonprofits, educational institutions, museums, as well
as design showrooms—to determine what we can do to celebrate architecture
during this time and broaden our audience,” says O’Driscoll.
Programs are offered in coordination with numerous local cultural and
educational organizations, including the San Francisco Public Library,
UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, California College of the Arts Alumni
Association, San Francisco Arts Commission, SFMoMA, de Young Museum,
and LEAP (Learning through Education in the Arts Project). In honor of
San Francisco’s rich architectural heritage, Mayor Gavin Newsom
has officially proclaimed September 15-October 15, 2005, as a time for
San Franciscans to celebrate “Architecture and the City.”
Of conferences and tours
David Meckel, FAIA, director of research and
planning, California College of the Arts, is leading the program’s
architecture studio tours. “These
tours are intended primarily for young professionals who are recently
graduated,” Meckel reports. “All of the studio tours this
year are geared toward very hip, young practices—teaching offices,
if you will—where the principals are involved in teaching at schools,
but also actively mentoring in their firms: Peter Pfau, Jensen & Macy,
and Yves Behar.” The main intent of the studio tours, according
to Meckel, is to show young architects that there is a support system
available to them. When they’re in school, there’s a tremendous
support community built in, but they don’t have that any longer
upon graduation. “These tours try to build a bridge between academy
and practice and reintroduce young architects to their support network,” he
says.
Two
offerings that O’Driscoll is particularly excited about are
the house tours and the “Architecture as a Cultural Destination
Conference,” which will explore the trend of hiring big-name architects
to design cultural facilities in the hope of drawing larger audiences
and replicating the Bilbao effect. The house tours, always a draw among
architects and non-architects alike, will differ from the “usual,
voyeuristic experience” of looking in on someone else’s lifestyle
in that the design architect will be on site for each tour to answer
questions. In addition, prior to the tours, the architects will present
a panel discussion on the houses and the design process, which O’Driscoll
says is a lively and thought-provoking discussion among the architects
on materials, land-use, and other correlating issues and a primer for
those attendees interested in retaining an architect’s services.
While O’Driscoll says that the tours will include “some unbelievable
5,700-square-foot houses, it also will include an affordable building
project in an effort to build a constituency.” With affordability
always an issue in San Francisco, the AIA San Francisco Board determined
that illuminating the possibilities of affordable-housing to owners and
architects alike is a priority, but whether the guests are viewing a
single-family Neutra or Eichler, or a multi-family development in Telegraph
Hill, the emphasis will be on high-quality design.
The “Architecture
as a Cultural Destination Conference” will
take place at Herzog and de Meuron’s new de Young Museum in Golden
Gate Park. The museum will christen its new facilities on the weekend
of October 15–16 with art tours, lectures, music, dance, shopping, and
dining throughout the facility. The following week, the museum will
host a 3-1/2-hour lecture on the increasingly commonplace practice of
hiring world-famous architects to “design cutting-edge museums
with the intention of bringing in larger audiences, influencing programming,
and creating destinations that are just as thrilling as the works they
display.” The
program will discuss the de Young as well as other San Francisco museums
coming on line by Libeskind, Piano, and Legoretta.
Local architects and designers have been integral to the planning of
Architecture and the City, O’Driscoll
reports. “This is a
very activist chapter,” she says. “The members have been
instrumental in developing programs and tours and there were many who
actively sought to volunteer. We had committees go out and look for projects;
we had a lot of partners who came together to make it work.” Speaking
on the potential impact of the program, O’Driscoll says that she
hopes that it can serve other chapters as a community outreach model
for AIA150, the AIA’s upcoming sesquicentennial celebration in
2007. For complete information on “Architecture and the City,” visit
their Web site.
Copyright 2005 The American Institute of Architects.
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