Last week, Xeni covered the opening of George Lucas's new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio. In the current San Francisco Magazine, BB pal Alan Rapp looks at the architecture of the Empire:
Outwardly at least, the Letterman center adapts the simplicity of much of the post's architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Numerous neocolonial, Mission revival, and Georgian revival structures dot the old Army base, but the features that most people identify with the Presidio are the unadorned brick and milky clapboard facades, the red roofs, shallow eaves, and small-paned windows. The center has retained these elements, and not just to win the lease.
Unless you're an employee or a select visitor, though, you won't be enjoying the fitness center, day-care facilities, and three state-of-the-art screening theaters. (The sublease tenants can use the first two.) Most of us will experience the Letterman campus by way of the verdant Great Meadow, created by the venerable but unflagging landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who designed the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, the Levi's Plaza fountains and park below Telegraph Hill, and the newly refurbished Stern Grove, among many other projects in his long career. Lucas didn't turn to Halprin solely because he's a local legend, though. Halprin plans his environments the way Lucas does his films: down to the last detail, even if it is not immediately perceptible. Halprin selected the stones and all the flora here, which include blue oat and autumn moor grasses, Japanese maple, several kinds of gum trees and lilies, and other fruiting and flowering plants.
Halprin's projects are a concatenation of elements to engage both sight and hearing; his hallmark water components tend to fuse or smooth out the arrangements. At the Letterman center, the water originates on one of two artificial promontories positioned along "view corridors," each of which aligns with Bernard Maybeck's 1915 Palace of Fine Arts. From these "stony belvederes" (the archaic, pastoral names of Halprin's features reflect his romantic streak), a man-made creek runs down to a small lagoon, following a conceptual path that would flow all the way to the Palace's pond were Gorgas Avenue not in the way. Halprin himself designed the meadow's green lamps, benches, and a small iron pavilion with restrained geometric and floral detailing that subtly evokes the Victorian age. As for the modern day, you won't find any tacky design references to the Star Wars franchise or any Lucas logos or signs. The only nod to the empire is a statue of wizened little Yoda presiding over a fountain right outside the visitor's entrance.
