No compromise message.

East Mission Street, SF. G3, kit lens @34mm.

Beyond impressive.

I finally corrected a major omission in my visual history of San Francisco. At last I went inside City Hall and I must say the experience was simply overwhelming. While the present 1915 structure is smaller than the original which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, its proportions are far more pleasing. The dome is one of the largest in the world and, as befits America’s most productive state, the building is taller than the Capitol in Washington DC. The floor space is some 500,000 square feet; Buckingham Palace, by comparison, is over 800,000 square feet. It looks like several marble quarries were called into service in its construction and the quality and condition of the building are breathtaking.

As befits a great democracy, access is amazingly easy. You have your bag checked and pass through an airport-style scanner and that’s it. You are free to wander wherever you want and no one hassles you if you take pictures. As luck would have it someone was having a marriage celebration during my visit, and the sound of Vivaldi lofting into the great cupola while I gazed on in awe made for a wonderful visit. I made my way up many back staircases and engaged several City employees in discussion, finding them to be invariably helpful and as thrilled to be there as was I.

All the interior snaps were made on the Panny G3 at ISO 1600 in RAW format. The G3 has two incredibly useful click-stop settings on its mode dial – C1 and C2. I have both set for aperture priority with C1 at ISO320 and C2 at 1600, making switching simplicity itself. No need to dive into fiddly LCD menus. Compared with the G1’s sensor I estimate the G3 is not one but two stops finer grained – ISO 1600 is close, as regards noise, to ISO 400 on the G1, which is pretty amazing. I switched on that auto dynamic range control in the G3’s menu (a feature not available in the G1) and it did a fine job of taming some of the extreme contrasts on what was a very sunny day, with sunlight pouring through the windows. No need to mess with multiple exposures and HDR techniques. The following snaps are mostly straight from the camera, converted from RAW to JPG in Lightroom 3.5 RC.

All snapped on the G3 with the 14-45mm kit lens at ISO 1600 (except for the exterior which was at ISO 320), all interiors at full aperture and handheld.

If you find yourself in San Francisco, take some time to visit this special building.

Other domes of western civilization worth a visit? Start at the top – Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City – Bernini’s spherical original stretched just so by a wizard, transmuting the ordinary into the magical. Brunelleschi’s Cathedral in Florence – was anything more perfect ever built? One of the great meldings of art and engineering. Then the Pantheon, I suppose, if bigness is your thing. And St. Paul’s in London, remarkable for its light airiness from a nation more given to the lugubrious in its architecture. And, frankly, it would be unfair to exclude City Hall from that short list.

Original City Hall destroyed in 1906. Note the ungainly proportions.

Almost faded away.

This lovely brick building soldiers on, dwarfed as it is by the poor later efforts of structural engineers who designed the boxes around it.

G1, kit lens @36mm, 1/100, f/5.6, ISO 320.

Located at First and Clementina Streets in San Francisco, the original tenant’s name is barely visible in the brickwork. But there’s no disguising the beauty of the brickwork or the architect’s sense of style and proportion. It’s now home to a German manufacturer of high end kitchen cabinets, doubtless made in China.

A memory.

1982

No one could accuse them of being great architecture. Minoru Yamasaki’s sole nod to aesthetics were the Mayan columns at the base. Everything else was just bigness. Get as many rentable square feet in as possible. Then double it to save money on design fees.

The plaza was one of the most soulless places on earth. Dominated by an ugly spherical sculpture in its center, you rarely saw anyone out there at lunch. The ugliness was one reason. The wind tunnel that the design had created was the other.

On some days the upper floors would quite literally have their head in the clouds. My client on the 95th floor of the south tower could see nothing but white from the windows. On others, it was so clear that the sheer gargantuan overkill of these monoliths left all around them dwarfed. The lovely art deco Bankers Trust building at 1 Wall Street seemed like a miniature. All you could see was the steam rising from the rooftop air conditioners.

They were so large and housed so many that the Postal Service gave them their own zip code. At traffic hours the flow of people through the giant rotating doors was a spectacle that simply said ‘New York’ – energy, speed, bustle.

Windows on the World was the restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower. You took a separate elevator for the last few floors. Once, when I was in it, the high winds made the tower rock and twist causing failsafes to lock the elevator car half way up. We waited patiently, helpless, for the thing to restart. At 100 floors up you are the obedient, hapless servant of structural engineers. The restaurant, strangely for a tourist location, was as good as it gets.

The only time they really came to life was on a clear night. I was walking up Broadway from 1 New York Plaza, late, where I worked at Salomon Brothers, to the Chambers Street station inside the towers, and was dumbfounded by the sheer beauty of the digital art they portrayed. I simply stopped and stared. Some windows lit, others black, it seemed like a perfect realization of the synapses of a digital computer, silently coming on and off in their obedient response in Ones and Zeroes.

I lived on West 56th Street and would take the subway downtown at weekends to Wall Street to wonder at the architectural wonders everywhere to be seen. The area was always deserted. No one lived in the financial district back then. And, try as I might, I never did take a good picture of WTC. I’m not sure it was something that was possible.

(Snapped with a Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64).