What the out-of-town experts say about S.F.

Monica Coakley of San Francisco takes her lunch break from work to enjoy the beautiful weather along the Embarcadero on the edge of San Francsico Bay, kicking back on Pier 14. Mild temperaures and blue skies grace the Bay on Thursday July 17, 2008.Photo By Michael Macor/ The Chronicle less Monica Coakley of San Francisco takes her lunch break from work to enjoy the beautiful weather along the Embarcadero on the edge of San Francsico Bay, kicking back on Pier 14. Mild temperaures and blue skies ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close What the out-of-town experts say about S.F. 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Talk to San Francisco architects for any length of time and unless they worship at the shrine of Victoriana, the complaints begin. Our buildings are too conservative. Our skyline lacks drama. Sharp designs are dulled by small-minded neighbors and planners.

Talking to out-of-town architects is a much different story: If they're disappointed by what they see, they aren't letting on. In fact, except for the liberal use of such words as "fabric" and "scale," they sound like any other besotted tourists.

"San Francisco - what's not to like?" laughs Ed Feiner, former chief architect for the federal government's General Services Administration and now a principal with the national firm Perkins + Will. "You come here and you're so overwhelmed by the natural beauty and the sculpture of the man-made terrain."

Feiner and thousands of his peers were in town last week for the 141st annual convention of the American Institute of Architects. By all accounts, most spent as little time as possible in the bowels of Moscone Center, instead exploring a constellation of neighborhoods and settings where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts - not that there's anything wrong with that.

"San Francisco hasn't historically had the singular iconic buildings, but that's OK," shrugs Larry Scarpa, whose Los Angeles firm Pugh + Scarpa doesn't shy away from bold colors and forms. "It's great for the water, the views ... essentially it's the fabric. I love to walk around."

The city's overall allure is also emphasized by architect David Jameson of Alexandria, Va., whose residential work received two national honor awards this year from the AIA. To illustrate his point, he referred to a mode of transportation - tourist alert - renowned for climbing halfway to the stars.

"You can ride a cable car up Powell Street, turn your head and have a visual connection to what seems like the entire city," Jameson says. "You can spatially feel so much of San Francisco at once."

The designer in him offers a mild criticism ("It's surprising how few good buildings there are downtown"), but the rest of him doesn't care: "It's great to be in a small city with a walkable scale."

One architect took a novel approach to the formal sessions: He blew them off.

Instead, Michigan's Michael Poris spent three days on convention-arranged tours of affordable housing, private homes, Golden Gate Park and the redeveloped blocks of Yerba Buena Center. It was his first visit here since the early 1990s, and he's startled by the changes - in a good way.

"I used to think of San Francisco as a museum, locked into doing buildings with bays," says Poris, who worked for such architects as Cesar Pelli before moving back to the Detroit region where he grew up. "There's a different feeling now. You still have the nice old neighborhoods, but there's good contemporary design all over ... I'm blown away."

Another observation of Poris' might startle locals convinced that things like graffiti and panhandling make San Francisco come off as an urban basket case.

"It's so civilized," Poris says. "I don't remember it being so clean, or Golden Gate Park being so well kept. ... I'd live here in a second, and I never felt that way in the '80s."

To be sure, Poris' Detroit is a troubled metropolis where arson routinely claims dozens of abandoned buildings on the nights before Halloween. But San Francisco's shine also was noted by one of the best young architects in Chicago, a city whose burly reputation has been polished of late by such features as colorfully landscaped boulevards and sparkling Millennium Park.

"What I've been noticing about this city is the fresh-scrubbed appearance. I remember it being grittier," muses Jeanne Gang, whose 82-story Aqua residential tower near Millennium Park opens in the fall.

This doesn't translate to homogenization, though; Gang and her husband, architect Mark Schendel, were struck by the variety of shops and restaurants between Moscone Center and their Union Square hotel: "You've been able to maintain the small-scale activity we've lost in (central) Chicago. That's a side of city life that hasn't been erased here, at least not yet."

Variety of another sort is relished by David Rubin of Olin Studio, a Philadelphia landscape architecture firm.

"When I come to San Francisco, I see the democratic process in full swing in terms of the people who congregate in public spaces," says Rubin, whose firm has worked on portions of Mission Bay and the Presidio. "It's not like the East Coast, where like peoples tend to gather together. I go to Yerba Buena Gardens or Union Square and I see people from all walks of life using those spaces."

Ah, Union Square: It reopened in 2002 with a stony look that made many local architects wince at the earnest pomp. Isn't that a problem?

"I wish it were a little less heavy-handed," Rubin concedes. "Honestly, though, my eyes are drawn away from that to the people who are enjoying the space."