Saturday, November 03, 2007
Put Off: The Ritz
This is one that’s taken a long time to pull together, but I think it’s time to let it go. The building is, for all exterior intents and purposes, complete. I remain bitterly disappointed and I think this is the only way I’ll be able to move forward in a spirit of constructive forgiveness. We’re all people, people. That said, the below is about a building so if that is not your idea of a good time I recommend to you any of my seventy billion confreres out here in internetland. I’m doing architecture today and you can’t stop me. None of you can stop me. Not when I no longer stop myself. And in this cathartic spirit:
It’s been a while since the backyard got paved. A profusion of sweet William is partying out around the roots of the rhodos and fruit trees at the borders, and the paving stones have taken on a weathered mottle that - at least on damp days, and we do have our share of those – lends a softness to the stern new surface where grass once held sway. It’s been long enough that the harshness I once felt from, and reflected back to, the paved yard has largely softened. And, as is the nature of the universe, as one emplacement has mellowed, its opposite has evolved otherwise.
I hear you out there, quoting Dean Venture: You DARE me to make less sense. All I can do in response is to bring you back to the corner of Market and Kearney, and the de-rehabilitation of the DeYoung building. I wrote once about how great it was to see the alabaster sarcophagus coming off an aggressively undistinguished late-mid-century building, revealing to my delighted eyes an
elaborate façade of brick columns and bays, iron capitals and sinuous traceries in mortar and terra cotta climbing 15 stories over the boulevard, meeting the sidewalk with a broad welcoming arch of rusticated sandstone. As, piece by piece, the century-old building emerged from its banal cocoon, my delight at its old-newness was great enough that, had I paused to consider it, I’d have supposed that somehow somebody would mess it up. Imagine my gratification, now, to have been proved right.
I think they’re pretty much finished now with the new Ritz Carlton Residence Tower – a soaring structure built around the old DeYoung edifice. It’s been two years of blocked sidewalks, streetside cranes, and my own fragile hope that something more was coming. Well, it’s pretty clear now that they’re not. They’ve done as much as they’re going to do with the structural work – and unfortunately, that ain’t much. Behind the DeYoung building’s
streetcorner elegance,
a
pale yellow wall bursts 25 or 30 stories without a setback, cornice or detail. Okay, every so often there’s an awning jutting out over a few windows, flat and sharp-edged and unadorned; and the windows, though boring, don’t look cheap. The stone cladding does have a texture of vertical ridges, though they’re barely deep enough to catch a shadow on a bright day and are effectively featureless on our many foggy ones.
The extensions erupting peremptorily from the
side elevation
resemble nothing so much as Lego construction with their squared corners and crude geometry. The overall effect is vapidity, cloaking and overshadowing a
delicate gem of stonework and brick that valiantly tries to preserve some sense of style from under the clumsy bulk of new construction.
The lot, being on a major corner, enjoys three main prospects. The old building looks great from each of them; the new addition sucks right across the board. At least on
Kearney, a stroller’s street, the old building takes up the sidewalk footage and it’s only higher up that the new pale blankness makes an abrupt appearance. At the corner itself, the builders set the new construction back behind the old, forming a view in which the original structure pops out from in front of the new, putting their manifold differences into sharp relief. It’s the east-facing façade, on Market street, though, that really rankles. As one gazes up the central artery of the city’s main business district, the Ferry Tower soaring at your back and the panoply of architectures that is downtown bursting forth from the pavement, variously brilliant and failed, commercial imperialism and pure modernism and whatever the ‘70s were, one’s view crawls up the unadorned brick east face of the DeYoung building, above which the new building is crudely grafted without any sense of transition, bays popping out with abrupt rectilinearity. In the midst of so many excellent buildings, the finest of which lies directly beneath it, the lost opportunity is tangible and tragic.
On the plus side, planting has begun on the new science museum roof across from the new art museum near my house. The art museum is new-century brutal in overall design on the outside, but a warm and serene place within. The science museum that will face it across the concourse will likely be among the most beautiful and interesting buildings I’ll ever visit. Good architecture is out there – though sometimes it’s hiding in plain sight. And those backyard pavers don’t look so bad as I thought they would back when they first went in….
