Glen Park BART Station could soon be an official national...

San Francisco remains a city whose architectural worth for many people is measured by colorful Victorian homes, or such nostalgic icons as the Ferry Building. But the merits of a much different local structure are now being extolled — a cavernous BART station with rough concrete walls.

The stark subject of merit is BART’s Glen Park Station, which opened in 1973. The California State Historical Resources Commission will vote Thursday on whether the station and 10 other buildings statewide should be nominated for placement on the National Register of Historic Places. The list includes another San Francisco treasure, 1907’s Swedish American Hall on Market Street in the Castro neighborhood.

While the Swedish American Hall has ornate woodwork beneath a steep gabled roof, Glen Park Station is a muscular tour de force where light streams down to a subterranean train platform past thick structural forms, illuminating marble panels that cloak the walls behind the trains.

Not everyone might share this view of a structure that, seen from outside along Diamond or Bosworth streets, has an undeniably glum look. But when the proposed nomination was reviewed recently by San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission, not a dissenting voice was heard.

“I’m thrilled, because I’ve always loved that building,” said Jonathan Pearlman, an architect on the commission. To him, it’s a triumphant work of Brutalism, a design ethos that flourished in the 1960s but soon fell out of favor. “It’s the cathedral of the BART system, one of the very few stations that is exhilarating.”

The nomination report strikes an appropriately studious tone, pointing out such details as how “the delicate butterfly roof supported by lightweight metal purlins betrays the influence of the Bay Region Tradition” (“purlin” being a scholarly term for a supporting beam). But it also conveys the aura of the space, the spell that it can cast.

“A stair and two escalators provide access to the platform level underground, which appears to have been carved out of the surrounding stone strata,” wrote Christopher VerPlanck, the architectural historian who prepared the nomination for the Glen Park Association. “Streams of sunlight pierce its dark recesses, playing off the rough-textured stone cladding and board-formed concrete walls.”

The association received a grant to fund its research from San Francisco Heritage, a preservation group with offices in the Haas-Lilienthal House, an ornate mansion from 1886 in Pacific Heights.

“We feel it’s important to focus our efforts on being more diverse in the places that are recognized as significant,” said Heritage president Michael Buhler.

So does that make the Glen Park BART Station a token — an architectural oddity located in the southeast quadrant of San Francisco, where relatively few buildings have landmark status?

Not at all.

“This is the best example of Brutalism in San Francisco, if not the entire Bay Area,” Buhler argued. “The station deserves to be elevated in this way.”

This was the final building by Ernest Born, whose long career explored realms beyond architecture, at scales ranging from the Ocean Beach home where he and his wife, Esther, lived, to a redevelopment plan for the Embarcadero that, thankfully, never took off. He consulted with BART on its station locations and graphic design standards before being selected to design Glen Park and Balboa stations.

Buildings can be placed on the national register for many reasons, including association with noted individuals or larger cultural trends. The listing process also can be abused. A nondescript branch library in North Beach was nominated in 2011 mainly because opponents wanted to stop construction of its proposed replacement. The city demolished it anyway — listings don’t guarantee survival — and the much better update opened in 2014.

The only objection to Glen Park Station’s proposed nomination comes from BART: a letter filed by the transit agency asked the state to hold off because BART is planning a systemwide historic survey.

The state’s Historical Resources Commission brushed aside the concern and will proceed.

San Francisco’s historic preservation commission sent a letter as well, this one in fervent support. It also supports the proposed national listing of the Swedish American Hall.

To Pearlman, the pair make an apt contrast.

One shows the richness of San Francisco’s traditional legacy. The other shows that architectural values, like modern life itself, continue to be redefined.

“The Swedish American Hall is so delicate, and crafted so beautifully — it’s grandma and old Europe and that sort of way,” Pearlman said. “Glen Park BART is a little scary, a little dark, a little heavy. But it evokes a true grandeur.”

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron