San Francisco has an elegance.
Even as the city morphs and changes, there is a fusion of linear forces that vivifies.
We mourn the loss of the old places, and funky personality.
Economics, largely driven by tech, disrupts, it is true.
As in any city with real imagination, the architecture is a kind of code; who we have been, and who we are becoming.
It is not about architecture only though, at least to those of us with cameras. It is also how it all comes together; angles, spaces and the juxtaposition of style and line.
This post tries to celebrate those LINES AND RHYTHM.
Old and new, edged and rounded, light and space
creating feel and flow.
After a year and half of pandemic restrictions, we were excited just to see The City.
As a kid, when westerns were the fare on television, my midwestern sense of the West was Dodge City, Tombstone, Boot Hill and such, until Have Gun Will Travel changed all that.
Paladin, a sophisticated well tailored bon vivant, graduate of West Point, a Chinese martial arts specialist, president of the San Francisco Stock Exchange Club, chess player, and swordsman made his home a city that appeared as exotic as the problem solving hero. No Roy Rogers or Marshall Dillon, he.
In 1957 that was a mind blowing concept-a gentleman gun fighter private eye who quoted literature.
"Wire Paladin San Francisco."
After that the old west was, old and primitive, but San Francisco locked in my mind as, exotic, unique, a place where Asian and Western culture mixed and in a place that looked unlike anywhere else.
There is something else in this city that deserves a look,
Urban Alchemy. That is coming in a future post.
See you down the trail.
