San Francisco Facades

The Friends of the Biennale invited four San Francisco Bay Area architects to design additional facades to exhibit at Fort Mason Center. The facades — meant to convey “San Francisco urbanism” — were installed beyond the Strada Novissima, facing an eating area to create an urban plaza experience. The architects were given a budget of only $6,000 and constrained to the dimensions of 18’-6” wide (reflecting the grid of Pier 2), three stories tall (30’), and 4’ deep, with a 4’ ground-floor opening.

The four new facades were designed by Batey & Mack (also the local exhibition designers), Daniel Solomon, William Turnbull, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).

While these new facades were commissioned specifically for the San Francisco exhibition, the original Strada Novissima already had some Bay Area representation. Thomas Gordon Smith (born in Oakland) had studied architecture at UC Berkeley under Charles Moore — both of whom contributed facades to the original Venice Biennale exhibition. Moore had, of course, had designed Condominium 1 at The Sea Ranch with William Turnbull at MLTW, and designed his famous Orinda House while teaching at UC Berkeley’s Collage of Environmental Design.