1977-84, Northern California, Monterey Bay Aquarium
N end Cannery Row, Pacific Grove
Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis
A complex of buildings, some old, some new, all meant to reflect the scale and atmosphere of the older industrial buildings of Cannery Row (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 467).
1979, Telegraph Hill, Trinity Properties
333 Bay St., San Francisco
Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis
This group of three–story condominiums on a lower base—so that each reads separately—seems to be a characteristic design of the 70s and 80s. Here it is very well carried out (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 59).
1980, Sunset, San Francisco Zoological Gardens
Skyline Blvd. at Zoo Rd. street st., San Francisco
Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis
The 1980 Esherick and Assoc. section is natural and woodsy while the 1983 Primate Discovery section by Marquis and Assoc. is, through its use of metal and concrete, high tech (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 114).
1981, Telegraph Hill, Garfield School
420 Filbert St., San Francisco
Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis
As Bay Region domestic as any school building could be. Its rusticated arched entrance is its only nod to its public function (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 59; 550).
1984, Russian Hill, The Hermitage Condominiums
1020 Vallejo St., San Francisco
Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis
No comment (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 55).
To build in an historic Bay Tradition context is a rare opportunity these days. The Hermitage, a 7–unit condominium on the top of Russian Hill, resulted from a lengthy battle over zoning for the hill which, among other things, demonstrated that San Franciscans had become conscious of their city's architectural heritage.
The generally modest character of the hilltop's residential development made it refreshingly different from Nob Hill, its complement to the south, where residential towers and hotels are the norm. In the postwar lull of the 1950s when most prospective home builders went to the suburbs, development of the quiet hilltop seemed unlikely. The only contemporary building was a house built on its Taylor Street slope.
Still, the growing market for in–town dwellings with views made Russian Hill an obvious target for new towers. In 1959, when the zoning for the hill was reviewed, residents lost their appeal for single residence zoning. Instead, the hill was zoned for highrise residential structures for which there were several building applications. Battles followed between the hilltop community and a developer who acquired the property on which two of the hilltop's earliest buildings stood. These were one of the three simple shingled houses built by a Mrs. Marshall in 1888 and the cottage at the end on the brow of the hill where Joseph Worcester had lived. These and other neighboring buildings (discussed in Chapter Two), such as the Polk-Williams house, testified to the hill's fame as a turn–of–the–century gathering place for Bay Bohemians. In one day, without any notice to the neighbors, the two humble buildings were demolished.
This act aroused the community to action. Organized as the Old Russian Hill Association, residents launched a series of appeals which lasted until 1962, when the developer tired of waiting and offered the group the opportunity to purchase the site, which they did. The Association also acquired the site across the street in front of the original Livermore farmhouse and a site on Green Street which backed up to the Vallejo Street site. There the matter rested, for no developers came forward to build what the group wanted: 18 units on the north side of Vallejo and 8 on the south side, instead of the 120 originally planned.
In 1970, a 40–foot height limit was applied to the hill. By then the group had reduced its program to 18 units with a two–and–one half to one ratio of parking to residential unit. The design was to be in the tradition of the two best known architects represented by houses on the hill: Willis Polk and Julia Morgan, and also compatible with the two remaining Marshall houses next door. Esherick Homsey Dodge and Davis were hired to design a building for the north site.
The work of this local firm threads its way through the second and third phases of the Bay Tradition. Joseph Esherick, whose work of the late 1940s and 1950s imbued postwar Modernism with a regional character, founded the firm. In the 1970s, George Homsey, Peter Dodge, and Charles Davis became partners. The firm continues an approach to design that is relatively resistant to fashion. In designing the Russian Hill condominiums, George Homsey, principal designer on the project, studied houses by the first generation of Bay Tradition designers. Although the building's massing appears to have been freely derived from historical precedent, it was almost wholly determined by restrictions on the site. The legal constraints generally concerned the view rights of the neighboring buildings. Easements and air rights held by apartment houses fronting on Green Street modeled the north and east sides of the structure, while consideration for the scale of the Marshall houses next door influenced the west side. Although no legal restrictions existed on the Vallejo Street facade, the clients and the designer agreed that it would be an affront to the character of the street to have a wall rising abruptly from it when the adjacent houses were set back from the roadway in a traditional suburban pattern. The schematic model the architects built to demonstrate the effect of the restrictions on the building's mass conformed almost exactly to the final design.
The building materials—wood shingles and painted wood trim—and architectural features: gable roofs and balustrades patterned after Polk's design for the Vallejo Street balustrades, relate the building to its context and persuade the viewer that the tradition is still lively.
The condominium structure is significantly larger than its neighbors. At about 3,200 square feet, each unit is comparable in size to the houses Esherick was designing for individual sites in the city in the 1950s. Seven houses are packed into one envelope—a jump in density which hardly responds to current market demands. Since many of the older houses on the hill are by now multi–unit dwellings, the pressures for increasing the density of the hill's population have, in a modest way, been accommodated through internal adjustments. Though not the rural enclave it once was, Russian Hill has preserved its distinctive character and its continuity with the past (Woodbridge 1988: 344-46).
1986-88, East Bay, South Hall (seismic upgrade & restoration)
UC Campus, Berkeley
Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis
Designed in the fashionable French Second Empire Style by the architect who made a plan for the campus in 1869, South Hall was one of the first two buildings erected on the campus. The building served several purposes. To fireproof the physical and natural sciences laboratories, the building had double–walled brick construction and a mansard roof of slate with multiple chimnies and flues. The bas–relief panels on the end walls below the cornice are made of cast–iron dusted with sand to mimic stone and depict California grains and fruit. The main entrance with a branching stair was originally on the west side of the building to conform with the general orientation of the campus buildings to the Golden Gate (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 275).
1986, Peninsula, Red Barn & Stock Farm
Stock Farm Rd. off Campus Drive West, Stanford University
Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis
The Red Barn was the centerpiece of Leland Stanford's horse farm. Today the individual horses may be forgotten, but Eadweard Muybridge's motion–study photographs of them, which Stanford funded, are internationally famous. The barn, a massive wooden structure with High Victorian features, is still in use (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 233).
1990, Pacific Heights, House
2550 Divisidero St., San Francisco
Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis
No comment (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 160).
1992, Pacific Heights, St. Dominic's Church (restoration & seismic upgrade)
2390 Bush St., San Francisco
1927, Arnold S. Constable; Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis
Academic Gothic revival, well executed throughout. Concrete buttresses were added for seismic bracing after the 1989 earthquake (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 156).
1992-94, East Bay, Doe Memorial Library Information Center and undergound Gardner Stacks
UC Campus, Berkeley
1907-11 and 1914-18, John Galen Howard; 1927-28, Morrison Library interior, Walter Ratcliff, Jr.; 1975, Theodore Bernardi, Wurster Bernardi & Emmons, East Reading Room restoration; Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis
When Charles Franklin Doe's posthumous gift to the university decreased in value after the 1906 earthquake, the available funds fell short of paying for the library building. The Regents then decided on two construction phases, which meant that the library was completed eleven years later. The main entrance is centered in the facade of the north-facing wing, which contains secondary reading rooms on the ground floor and the main reading room on the upper floor. Howard eschewed the grand entrance stairway, which devoured space in major libraries such as the New York and Boston Public Libraries, in favor of a non-monumental branching stair on the south side of the entrance lobby that leads to the main floor and the 210-foot reading room that stretches the length of the north wing. Skylights and ceiling-height windows on the north side as well as large arched windows on the east and west ends illuminate the interior--second in size only to that of the New York Public Library. A coffered barrel-vaulted ceiling completed the majestic space, decorated with Classical motifs by the San Francisco interiors design and furnishing firm of Vickery, Atkins & Torrey. The library's south block contained nine floors of stacks, seminar rooms, and a second large reading room on the east side. The north wing is a major architectural statement both for the library and for the campus as a whole. If the university was proclaimed the Athens-of-the-West the library was a temple to Athena/Minerva, represented by a bronze sculpture mounted over the entrance portal. The north wing recalls a Greco/Roman temple with giant engaged Corinthian columns. The heads of round-arched windows break the pediments on the east and west ends, and the carved granite ornament is richly detailed and original, particularly that of the column capitals, which feature open books upheld by coiled serpents, more symbols of the goddess of wisdom.
In the 1990s the original stacks were removed for seismic reasons, and the books were transferred to undergound stacks beneath the north wing's terraces (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 273).
