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Posted Nov 15, 2007, 9:35 PM
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The State of Mayne's New Federal Office Building
Quote:
The State of Mayne's New Federal Office Building
By DAVID LITTLEJOHN
November 15, 2007; Page D7
San Francisco
In San Francisco, architectural heritage buffs still harass politicians and builders in every possible way to preserve old buildings they profess to love and prevent new ones they expect to hate from replacing them.
No one has risen to the defense of the building that stood on the site of our latest star-architect creation, the San Francisco Federal Building (actually, the third San Francisco Federal Building) at Seventh and Mission, designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis in Santa Monica, Calif. (Pritzker Prize 2005). All that stood here before was an unlamented Greyhound bus depot. There was some grumbling about Mr. Mayne's decision to ignore its proud neighbor to the east, a heavily rusticated and decorated granite courthouse of 1902-05 (now home to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) that has survived two major earthquakes and been lavishly restored. Mr. Mayne's plaza, at least, gives the old building room to breathe.
The new Federal Building is basically a 240-foot-tall slab with 18 floors, most of them 345 by 65 feet, set far back on a barren, bollard-protected plaza filled mostly with sand (actually decomposed granite, which is more ecologically correct). A four-story glass-walled wing that reaches out on the west half-closes the plaza, and a glass-box café stands all by itself in its southeast corner, across from the old courthouse. The unusual narrowness of the main building's floors was determined by the goal of reducing energy use and the resultant CO2 emissions. Almost all work stations are placed within reach of natural daylight from floor-to-ceiling window walls. Natural ventilation is tempted to flow through the skinny floors from north to south. The building uses almost no air conditioning, except in the first five unwindowed "security" floors. (Actually, most buildings in this cool city do without it.)
Three goals were set for Mr. Mayne and his associates by their client, the U.S. General Services Administration. First, the building had to be as clean and energy-efficient as possible, in response to the demand for "green" or "sustainable" buildings that the global-warming crisis has created. Buildings are among the greediest consumers of energy and the most prodigal spewers of greenhouse gases, and they can now be measured against a detailed list of Good Things to Do and Bad Things Not to Do. The U.S. Green Building Council awards a maximum of 89 points for things like building near bus stops, providing parking for bicycles rather than cars, conserving or restoring green space (or creating some on the roof), reusing rain water and waste water (waterless urinals and composting toilets are favored), making use of natural ventilation rather than air conditioning and daylight instead of electric lighting, using solar or geothermal power, building out of recycled materials or (better yet) recycling an old building. Any nonrecycled wood used should come from sustainable forests. Using bamboo, cork and straw wins you points, because they grow back so quickly.
The council offers four levels of approval for what it regards as an environmentally responsible building. "LEED-certified," the lowest level, requires 36 points out of 89. ("LEED" stands for "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.") With 44 points, you're LEED silver; 53, gold; 71, platinum. Since 2000, about 1,100 buildings in the U.S. (not counting homes) have passed muster -- 50 at platinum, 289 at gold, 339 at silver. San Francisco has 18 LEED-certified buildings, eight of them gold; New York has 11, and seven of them are gold.
The most important energy-saving features in Mr. Mayne's new building are the sun-shades he has applied to the long north and south façades, designed to let in desirable daylight but keep out unwanted heat and glare. On the north, 55 building-high sets of frosted green glass fins are bolted to catwalks outside the glass wall, to provide shade from the late northern sun. On the more visible, vulnerable south side, a huge screen made of stainless-steel panels has been tossed over the building, like a sheet over the back of a chair, and allowed to roll in angular rumples over half of the plaza. Parts of this screen open and close automatically to respond to changing sunlight and temperature. Mr. Mayne professes not to care about LEED ratings -- after all, those acres of stainless steel were not dug out of the earth -- but his Federal Building seems likely to win LEED silver when it officially opens later this year.
A second goal of the GSA was to make the new Federal Building more "worker friendly," by designing it around the needs and comforts of 1,700 employees. Reversing the usual configuration of office floors, all the desks next to the glass walls are reserved for the worker-bees, each of whom can open one window just a bit. Executives are concentrated in glass-walled cabins in the core of the building, over which fresh air can circulate. Standard elevators stop only at every third floor, forcing most employees to walk up or down a flight of sheet-steel stairs to get to their destinations. This may be Nanny Mayne's way of making people exercise (one expects the candy machines to dispense carrot sticks), but it is also intended to encourage "interaction" among people passing on the stairs or lingering on landings in front of big box-framed windows on the south façade.
A third major consideration in the design was to make it "connect" to the surrounding community. Hence the café on the corner (open to all, except perhaps the homeless who still congregate here); a semi-underground child-care center with its own outdoor playground; and conference rooms in the basement that can be rented by community groups. The plaza, with its barren sandpit, bunker-benches and ubiquitous security cameras, is probably better suited to protest demonstrations than casual lunch breaks.
From the 11th floor to the 13th, a square hole has been poked through the building -- an idea lifted from a sleek 25-year-old condo by Architectonica in Miami, which did it better. This provides views over low-rise buildings to an edge of the bay at the south, and an impressive vista of San Francisco's elegant Civic Center just a few blocks away to the north. From this angle, you can see the original neo-classical Federal Building of 1936 and the dull modernist façade of Fed II of 1963, the latter of which still houses most of the city's federal courts and offices. (Fed III is used by the departments of Labor, Agriculture, Health and Human Services and Transportation; the Social Security Administration occupies the west wing.) This "Sky Garden" -- still a bit bleak when I visited -- is open to members of the public, after they pass a security check in the lobby. Of course, the gray slab that provides these views now blocks the views of people in the buildings you are looking at.
Very few people other than employees or their clients ever get to see the interiors of office buildings, private or public. But we are all obliged to look at the outsides of such buildings, especially when they are built in such a central location as San Francisco's new Federal Building. People looking south from Civic Center now have their view stopped by its greenish north face. Some 175,000 vehicles a day pass on Interstate 80 alongside the southern front, which is punctured by square holes and strangely tilted on top. As you drive in the city to or from the Bay Bridge, it rises up like a quirky, oversized drive-in movie screen.
John King, the San Francisco Chronicle's astute urban design critic, has defended this strange building from the start, partly because of its strangeness. Whether you like it or not, he has written, the building matters because of its novelty, its daring, its potential to shake San Francisco out of its smug sense of self-satisfaction. But for all of its trumpeted contributions to green building, community outreach and employee welfare, the building most people will see is ultimately the product of one architect's own self-indulgence -- mainly in the bland gray steel scrim that is thrown over the south side of the building, curling over the top like an Elvis flip, then crumpling into meaningless, decorative folds over the day-care center and café, where it is supported on needlessly large triangular props.
Only in the long, soaring main lobby, propped up by six colossal concrete columns that lean against a wall inset with glazed light boxes like open drawers, does the building inspire. Best of all, I think, is the view from the far end of the lobby, over an open pit that looks down to the basement. Here the intricate stone carving of the 1905 courthouse is framed by one huge jagged, triangular window.
Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal about West Coast cultural events.
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Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119508321151693328.html
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