Exterior View: Unbuilt San Francisco: The View from Futures Past at the California Historical Society.
Installation view of Unbuilt SF with Model of Marincello Development, 1967. Wood, plaster, plastic, paint, architectural flocking and other medium. Courtesy of National Park Service, Golden Gate NRA, GOGA-1701
In these galleries we survey three ambitious efforts to reimagine the city of San Francisco and the Bay Area as a metropolitan region—the Ferry Building and plaza, Marincello in the Marin Headlands, and Yerba Buena Center—reaching beyond plans and models to depict the political, social, and economic challenges to each. Throughout, architectural drawings, letters, photographs, artworks, videos, and newspaper clippings represent the voices of advocates and detractors.
Unbuilt San Francisco: The View from Futures Past presents the forms of resistance behind the currency of preserved coastal views: the rising environmental movement of the 1960s that defeated the Marincello proposition, the organized citizenry protesting displacement at the Yerba Buena Center, and the public outcry about transformational plans at waterfront. What is evident is that a history of intense public wrangling over the built environment has conferred a kind-of postscript of leisure. Here, the use-value of parks or plazas becomes as enclosures for types of display, participation, and memory collection.
Cydney Payton, Curator
PRESS
Zarrow, Rachael. "Exhibition Images a Different SF Skyline." SFGate. August 27, 2013.