David Prowler Blog

The scene: the unveiling of the conceptual design for the new Creative Arts Building at San Francisco State University. Waiters passed around wine and hors d’oeuvres, there was a pianist and everyone was dressed up. The architect, dressed in black with shiny black boots and a shaved head, talked about Architecture.

Courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture

We all got to see the model.

Courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture

It really is a sexy building.

I was invited because I played a key role on the project: I got the utility pipes moved to accommodate the building.

It took two years and we needed permission from

• the Department of Public Works;
  
• Public Utilities Commission staff (and Commission);
  
• Planning Department;
  
• City committees with acronyms like CULCOP and TASC;
  
• City Attorney’s Office;
  
• Department of Real Estate;
  
• a title company and an appraiser;
  
• two Board of Supervisor Committee hearings;
  
• And four votes by the full Board of Supervisors.
  

Here’s what we did:

Okay, it’s not much to look at.

The building was designed by an architect named Michael Maltzan from Los Angeles, but probably it was designed by a half dozen anonymous architects in his office. Plus hundreds of mechanical engineers and structural engineers and lighting people and geotechnical engineers and landscape architects. And campus planners and the people who put together the bond issue to pay for it and the voters who voted for it. And Mr. Mashouf who made an enormously generous contribution to get it started and the fund raisers who asked him for the gift. And the people who made the stuff that gets put together into the shape of a building and then the people who put it together.

We make a mistake when we think a building is “by” the architect in the way a painting is by an artist.

A Jackson Pollock really is by Jackson Pollock.

We take for granted all those pipes and wires which bring us water, take water away, heat our coffee, bring the juice to our lightbulbs and the pictures to our televisions. If they weren’t where they should be we’d look for someone to blame. But they do work, so next time you take a cold drink from your fridge drink a toast, please, to the armies of people who made it possible.

“[It is] one of the most marvelous books of contemporary art in the 20^th Century. There are many works of art in the 20^th Century, and I am an artist and I project only the work of art. These 280 pages are a work of art, with the nature, with the people, with the traffic, with the birds, with the ocean, and with the sky.”

Christo

You probably know Christo as the artist who (in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude) hung The Gates in Central Park -after 25 years of public review. They wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris. For two weeks in 1975, he ran a fabric fence through Marin and Sonoma, from Highway 101 into the sea.

The book he’s reviewing above is the “Final Environmental Impact Report, Running Fence” by Environmental Science Associates. In two volumes the EIR describes the Fence and what it might do to the environment. It lays out impacts on archeology, traffic, air quality, energy use, soils, water, noise, and wildlife.

The Fence is described in the EIR as

“18 feet high and more than 24 miles long. The structure would be essentially an assembly of 18-foot by 62- foot white nylon panels, supported by cables and poles, the latter anchored in soil or rock.”

In reality, there were two aspects of the work.

Obviously, there was the material object, which Christo, in the EIR, describes like this:

“The physical reality of the Running Fence will be a beautiful one. The fabric is a fragile material, like clothing or skin. And, like the structures the nomads built in the desert, it will have the special beauty of impermanence. The fabric is a light-conductor for the sunlight, and it will give shape to the wind. It will go over the hills and into the sea, like a ribbon of light.”

The other part, also described by Christo:

“Three years of teamwork, three years of study with engineers, surveyors, botanists, geologists. The Running Fence project also involves politicians and businessmen, supervisors and artists, students and – especially – the local ranchers and landowners.”

Running Fence was fiercely debated and this debate was an important part of the art work.

Pro: “Running Fence will depict the evolution of man from the sea, his enormous efforts to survive and build on the land, and the ultimate destruction of that for which he has strived with such intensity for so very long.”

Con: “It will bring tourists into the county and make it a crummy Coney Island.”

Those of us involved in planning and development usually view this process as an unfortunate series of steps on the way to a building or a plan. But there is an art to it and theatre too.

The Running Fence Environmental Impact Report is also an important part of the work.

I looked for a long time for a copy of the Report and found only one: for $750, listed by an antiquarian bookseller in La Jolla. But I got a copy, and you can too, by downloading it from the Smithsonian’s website, at

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/runningfence/eir.pdf

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1.Head on.

This morning I was in a meeting in a conference room on the 30^th floor of a high rise office building downtown, looking out at the Bank of America building, the tallest building in San Francisco. It looked different.

In fact, it looked pretty good, tall and slender and elegant. It was as if I’d never seen it. I realized it looked so good because I was seeing it, for the first time, head on.

But when do you get to see a building head on? You have to be up in the air yourself or way far away.

2.From above.

Why is this view so popular? I don’t get it. Hardly anybody ever sees buildings like this.

3.How we really see them.

4. On a table.

Everybody likes to look at building models. But they make a high rise look like a Brancusi sculpture.

Here are some other fans (identities listed at the end):

Donald Trump

Adolph Hitler

Charles de Gaulle

Le Corbusier

Johnny Depp