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.

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