At this moment in San Francisco, we’re faced with questions argued by philosophers for centuries: what constitutes beauty, why is it important, and what is the danger of ignoring it? Our politicians, funded by—or in the same social circles as— ultra-rich developers could care less about such trivia. The soulless big boxes they can’t wait to build are devoid of aesthetic merit but shine for them with the gorgeousness of dollar signs.Aa
Since ancient Greece, philosophers have pondered the issue of aesthetics—what makes things beautiful? Since philosophers are so inclined, this question has gone through innumerable interpretations. The ancients proposed a range of possibilities, including proportion, functionality (as in an object that performs its use well), the male body, and so on. The various schools of thought and individual thinkers came up with their own points of view about what made things beautiful for nearly 30 centuries.
In the 18th century, several major German philosophers explored aesthetics and why it was important to have beauty in our lives. Few were more vocal about this than Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, who thought that without aesthetic education, social problems only get worse. The inclination to see positive social change as a function of politics is false, he said—we remake the world through beauty. And few things do more damage to the human spirit, he said, than utilitarianism.
San Francisco, built on gold rush fortunes, celebrated wealth with architectural splendor. Even North Beach, a district built to house the fishing industry, equipped housing with cornices, cupolas, turrets, pilasters, columns, bay windows, ornamental pressed tin walls, Ionic capitals, and other visual attractions. It was anything but utilitarian. Until the mid- 20th century, almost everything was built to please the senses, even the big temples of capitalism, adorned with sculpture, lavish marble lobbies, and architectural embellishments built by artists and artisans.
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The inclination to see positive social change as a function of politics is false, he said—we remake the world through beauty.
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After World War II, we got Brutalist architecture instead, a style described in an article in Architectural Digest as “the aesthetic of raw concrete,” and “the deliberate rejection of decorative elements.” In other words, bleak. Not much was built in San Francisco in that chilly aesthetic.
An especially bleak example of Brutalist architecture
However, Brutalism wasn’t the last brutal architectural movement to challenge our skyline. The Big Box style came soon thereafter, the aesthetic of steel and glass devoid of decoration. Developers sought ego dominance through the number of stories they could build and sunlight they could curtail.
In recent years, builders have attempted to do something to improve the boring box design, like add colored panels, apply smaller boxes instead of bay windows, reshape a corner of upper floors, or make it look like a giant penis. It didn’t help; when the pandemic allowed workers to work from home, no one wanted to return to the office. It wasn’t just the commute or the problematic co-workers, either. It was humans unconsciously rejecting the soulless utilitarianism of big boxes, when home was full of things that gave them visual pleasure.
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In recent weeks, the lovely old former fishing village, North Beach, built and decorated to delight the senses, has been in an uproar, because elected officials have decided to disrupt the aesthetic with a bunch of 19-story buildings in a neighborhood with a mandated height limit of 40 feet. Not only would they be steel and glass devoid of decoration, they’d also block views and cast long shadows over a neighborhood where sunlight is as undisrupted as possible.
North Beach is so charming as it is that 12 tech billionaires have moved in, where fisherman and poets once lived, and made it horrifically expensive. Presumably these 19-story boondoggles will also be overpriced, and available only to those who are overpaid. However, as we’ve seen in other parts of town, the big, unadorned, and architecturally uninteresting residencies are mostly not full. One new building on Van Ness has had the “Now Renting” signs plastered across the entrance for about a year.
At the most recent official count, we currently have 61,000 empty units in the city. Some of them are in old buildings, owned by people hoping to sell them when the real estate market crawls out of the doldrums, without pesky rent-controlled tenants to discourage buyers. There are no statistics to tell us how many of those empty units are in new big boxes, but there are very few lights on in them at night, suggesting a lot of vacancies. Perhaps that’s because the only charm they have to offer new tenants is better plumbing.
What would these 19-atory buildings do for North Beach? Would they make the neighborhood more appealing than it already is? As the image opening this essay shows quite clearly—of a proposed building in the Sunset district furiously opposed by the residents—the monstrously tall ovoid big box does nothing to add to the aesthetic of this neighborhood whatsoever but instead is a clueless disruption of the existing one. Instead of a thing of beauty that fits into the landscape and makes it lovelier, it’s a giant sore thumb that doesn’t belong there at all.
Schiller was right. A beautiful building that fits into the aesthetic of a place would solve the theoretical problem, meeting the state-mandated need for more housing—in spite of all the existing vacancies. Disrupting the aesthetic and blocking views and sunlight makes people extremely mad, creating a genuine social problem. This is what happens when aesthetics are discarded by utilitarians as a fundamental concern. The world gets uglier without them, leaving fewer and fewer things to gladden the human spirit, and more things to make us furious. The politicians steamrollering these decisions set themselves up for hostility, recall, and, somehow, the quickest possible expulsion from city government.
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If Proust had seen the trend to boring, big box architecture, he would have said the same thing about it he said in a different context:
“…They lack precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, which is peculiar to beauty and happiness.”
—Marcel Proust, Within A Budding Grove
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Proust Said That 