The De Young Museum in the News: View articles from local news organizations following the history of the new Museum and broad spectrum of viewpoints on the project's site, design, funding, and impact on the city of San Francisco Case Study Process: View the case study team's minutes from meeting with various parties involved in the project Internet Resources on the De Young: Follow links to web sites which provide additional facts and opinions about the Museum, including the web site of the project's owner, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
  Who Was Involved: View a list of parties involved in the design and construction of the Museum as well as the members of the case study team What Were the Team's Milestones: View assignments for the UC Berkeley Building Stories (A229B) and Internship (A128) classes What was Found: View the case study team's initial findings regarding the key issues defining the project

 

Fall 2002 Department of Architecture
UC Berkeley

 

Critiques

Critique #1

Structure and Time Line

The 200 Brannan Story focuses on the relationship and interaction among government, developer and community, and their influence on the design process and final form. The menu on the left portion of the screen shows these three main categories of influences with details underneath each section about the specific entities relating to 200 Brannan. The main portion of the screen includes text about each of the entities, links to their homepages, and hotlinks to primary documents.

Basic elements that implement the final building should be taken into consideration as interactive players. In the story Pacific Bell Park, detailed narratives are given to Time, Finaning and Design Themes, but the omittance of the interactions and the lack of a tight story-telling framework weak the overall impressions.

In the story Pleasant Hill, the left portion of the web page is the project timeline. Events from 1950s to present are divided into 7 major phases in the time line. Abstract of the event links to detailed description in the main portion of the page. This gives a strong sense about the development of the project from its beginning to accomplishment.

In the case of Pottery Barn, the text and photos do not render each other very well, therefore some of the pages are pure text and some of the photos lack necessary description aside. Moreover, in the introduction the author wrote:" The development of the Pottery Barn in the Castro district of San Francisco presents a fascinating case study where the values of a tight knit community clashed with the objectives of a national large retailer. To develop some conclusions we focus on three main aspects of this case: Client/Architect Tug 'o War, Sustainability, Community Battles: Castro vs. Pottery Barn." But these aspects are depicted isolatively and their chemistry is not clear. The author even gives no consideration to time dimension of the project.

In the pages of U.C.S.F./Mt. Zion Cancer Research Center, the lack of an overall framework also leads to fractionally reading. The home.htm and the BACK button must be referred frequently in order to have a thorough understanding.

Critique #2

In the 2002 projects the Pleasant Hill team created an easily navigable and content rich description of the path the project took to get from its initial goals and concepts to its final plan. The Brannan Square project also contains alot of content but the sites navigation, and unfocused text hinder the view of the story as a whole.

Much like the story they told the Pleasant Hill team created their website as a relatively linear path that branches to explain details and discuss relevant influences on the project. The navigation is mainly in the text itself, but bold headers reference the viewer's location to a link bar at the top. The page also contains a timeline frame that helps to locate details of the project in time within its scope.

The story is also very coherent. It maintains focus on the issues relevant to how the master plan began and changed over time and who were the players and what were the issues that caused this. The story feels very developed and the focus on the design and architecture of the project helps the target audience, the building community, access the story.

At Brannan Square there is quite a bit of factual information but the navigation system does not link the elements together. It defaults to a sidebar for navigation that makes the site network visible, but that makes the groupings appear isolated.

Also there is a tendency to make general comments that we can only assume are relevant to the specific case. For instance the section on developers starts, "The role of the developer is the maximize profit through the construction and occupation of buildings." While in many cases this may be true it is very unspecific and the group doesn't discuss the relationship between the owner and management company that defines who the developer is until the end of the page. While the information exists, there is alot of superfluous text that clouds the understanding of the story.

Overall, the Pleasant Hill group benefited from their story being both linear and about the architecture and design of the project. The Brannan group did not have those elements to work with and are unable to make a story out of the project.

Critique #3

Each of the case studies in the past did a good job at isolating all of the major players in the history of each building. I was particularly impressed with the Brannon Square study which decided to separate Government, Developer, and Community into distinct categories. They had obviously spent much time in researching the viewpoints of all three groups, and presented it in a very clear manner. From reading the bullets and skimming through the minutes, one can get a clear picture of the issues hindering the progress of building design/construction. Similarly, the studies on the Castro Pottery Barn and the UCSF Mount Zion Building unearthed the major issues involved in their designs in a concise manner, and also seemed to attempt analyses of the process/outcome. In the study of pac bell park, it seems the investigation was kept fairly broad (which gives a good overview of the project) but at the same time perhaps it needs the additional, finer details to make its story really interesting and compelling. The exact opposite seems to be true for the Pleasant Hill study which overwhelms you with a wealth of information. Taking it solely as a webpage design, the information possibly could've been arranged better allowing viewers to get a better grasp of the project without first clicking through a multitude of links.

Each study seem to attempt to answer the following questions: 1. What are the responsibilities an architect has to the community and to the client? And how can one achieve a balance between the interests of both? 2. What role and by what magnitude does finance play in development? 3. What factors in public relations alter people's perceptions the most about a building/the design/the location? These questions among others should be addressed and taken to a much finer detail in our own study.

 

Critique #4

Critique of Pottery Barn 2002 Case Study

As a whole, this case study is organized in a very coherent fashion, allowing the viewer to quickly understand the key topics on which the study team focused. The structure of the web page enhances the clarity of the chosen topics: the opening screen outlines these topics and the menu bar at the bottom of the screen allows for easy navigation between the presentation’s sections regardless of where the viewer is within the HTML structure.

Further, the team has thoughtfully organized subsequent pages to allow the viewer to learn as much or as little about the issue as he would like. For example, the topic “Client / Architect Tug O’ War” is broken down into several sub-topics. Within each of those sub-topics are several sections which provide views of construction documents illustrating the various design revisions and a narrative describing the events which took place. The fact that the team organized each section chronologically further aided the clarity of the presentation. Each of the team’s chosen topics would have been easier to understand, in the broader realm of architectural practice, had the team more fully outlined the working relationship between MDG and WSI. It is eventually evident that the design development phase of the project continued all the way through store opening, however it is important to understand how MDG’s contract with WSI was established to determine if the firm was compensated for their additional time and if this process is typical of the types of work in which McCall is involved. These bits of contextual information are necessary in order to draw broader conclusions regarding this project’s relationship to retail architecture in general.

The topic “Sustainability” was successful in many of the same ways “Tug O’ War” was successful. The impact which the introduction of a sustainability focus had on MDG’s work was described along with the roles each MDG, WSI, and consultant team member played, allowing the viewer to see the inter-relationships. A graphical representation of these relationships would have been helpful. Additionally, as in “Tug O’ War” the viewer can draw several conclusions about the typical conflicts which arise in retail architecture, however these conclusions are not fully defined within the study team’s presentation.

While the topic “Tug O’ War” thoroughly outlined MDG’s role in the process, the topic of “Community Battles” was not descriptive enough of the firm’s role. The narrative provided under the topic was interesting, however the team failed to provide connections and conclusions relative to the practice of architecture. It seems imperative than any topics chosen for investigation as a part of the course need to be always defined in terms of their relationship and impact on architectural practice.

The team was successful in outlining key topics of discussion, providing substantial documentation in support of these topics, and narrating the process. However, more direct links (or conclusions) back to architectural practice in general seem to be lacking to make this strong presentation complete.

--Matt Bosserman