12 Faceless Figures Outlive their Maker

We urbanists have all raged against Philip Johnson.  Superficial! Irresponsible!  Trendy!  A career made out of jokes!  I've said all those things many times, with voice raised and cocktail sloshing.  And I don't take back a single epithet.

Today, on hearing of his death, I visited his most notorious contribution to San Francisco, 580 California St., the one so notorious that we really don't like to talk about it.  You can see it from my office window:

The vast dark tower on the right is the Bank of America building.  But peeking out behind it, above the white building in the foreground ... Why, is that a mansard roof?  And what are those little white things along its edges?

Well, yes, it's a mansard roof, like you'd see on castles of the Louis XIV era, up there on top of an otherwise normal office building.  And those white things?  Well, you tell me (click to enlarge):

Jon King in the SF Chronicle calls them "faceless figures in togas," and adds "Johnson would privately hint they were the Board of Supervisors and the mayor."  Well, they're not togas; they're floor length hooded robes.  Their postures strike me as active, gesturing, perhaps even authoritative.  And they are far too striking to be passed off as political sculpture, though I don't doubt that Johnson was the first to joke about them.

Am I the only person who was reminded of the grim reaper or the Ghost of Christmas Future?  I saw these figures as angels of death even before they witnessed a horrific accident in 1986, when the crane working on an adjacent building collapsed into the street from a 25th-floor height, crushing several people in their cars.  I thought at the time that only a culture as rationalistic as ours would fail to tell some story about the faceless but active figures who gazed impassively on the carnage.  Any culture in touch with the foundational meanings of the human figure would have found a way to blame them, fear them, something.

But really now!  The figires are just silly, aren't they?  I mean, sheesh, it's a 17th Century roof for god's sake!  It's a joke!  Funny, see!  Let's see a good smile here!

By all means.  580 California can be both hilarious and ominous, and it can do that without being subtle in the least.  Was Johnson ever, ever accused of subtlety?

Comments

[Pica]

I moved to Boston from Cambridge, England. My first job was working in an architectural office (Cambridge Seven, specializing in aquarium design). My new friends (many of them Harvard products and subjected to Jorge Silvetti's decree of "jess, but it is very very oggly" for the duration of their schooling) were more or less enthusiastic about postmodernism but nobody at all was enthusiastic about Johnson. All those repeated "cute" windows. (They all were excited about Pei and reverential about Wright, but both of those things are totally predictable, I've learned, about architects.)

I don't mind the mansard roof per se -- it's not inherently a bad solution for an element whose function is to allow rain to fall to the ground before it seeps inside -- but those apocalyptic jedi, no thanks.

[Brian Miller]

I rather liked the shallow, undulating, "bay window thing???" on the facade. You're not alone in finding the building ridiculous, though. Still, I'll take his sly, urbane humor over the pompous gaudiness of the other building ervyone loves to hate-Marriott :(

[Peter]

Does every town have something like this? I used to live in a D.C. suburb where people working in a certain office building won't admit it without a wry smile and a vague sense of embarassment. The building looks as if it were struck by a six-story bowling ball -- the indentation mars a perfectly bad shoebox of a building.