Exit Interview with San Francisco Chronicle Architecture Critic John King

A staff writer for more than 30 years and critic for two decades, King is retiring from his perch as the Bay Area’s leading voice on architecture.

The Ferry Building has survived San Francisco’s booms and busts over the past 125 years.

Photographer: Noah Berger/sfc via Getty Images

Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer for Bloomberg CityLab, and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things.

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San Francisco’s Ferry Building, the subject of architecture critic John King’s third book.Photographer: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

John King has covered the Bay Area from many angles. As a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1992, he started on the City Hall beat before carving out a column on the suburbs. Since 2001, he’s served as the paper’s urban design critic, covering trends in planning and architecture for a city that’s changed dramatically over that time. He’s the author of three books: the Cityscapes guide to San Francisco’s best architecture (in two volumes) and Portal, a history of the Ferry Building.

As the Bay Area’s leading voice on urban design, King has written about much more than buildings. He’s covered how tech has transformed the city and vice versa, from the dot-com bubble to the post-pandemic era. He’s written about the uncertain future for Mission Creek in the face of rising sea levels. And he’s trained his lens on other cities too, writing a defense of the height limit on buildings in Washington, DC, while visiting as a Mellon Fellow in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks.After more than 30 years as a newspaperman, King is retiring. His final dispatch for the Chronicle ran on Oct. 2. King spoke with Design Edition about what he’s learned about San Francisco as one of its closest observers.

Bloomberg CityLab: For one of your first stories as a critic, in 2001, you panned 2 Folsom Street, the corporate headquarters for the Gap designed by Robert A.M. Stern. You didn’t mince words: “The problem with Stern’s design for the Gap, in other words, isn’t that it’s conservative. The problem is that it’s dull.” How did readers react?
John King: I hit a chord right off. People here really care about the look and form of the Bay Area. I got so much email on my early pieces, because people really appreciated it, whether it was good or bad. People appreciated that this is a guy who’s speaking out for what this city and what this region should be. People in the Bay Area have a very high-falutin’ notion of the region as a special, exceptional place. Somebody in the big regional daily staking out a position, saying that big buildings in prominent spots in this city or region need to earn it, so to speak — it was a lot of fun just to charge into the scene. This was 2001, the d0t-com boom that so quickly turned into the dot-com bust, which means buildings that were started two or three years ago were all getting finished. I had a lot of new buildings to write about the first year.

You’ve had more than 20 years to think about the buildings from that era. Have you changed your mind about any of them?
Thomas Phifer’s building at 222 Second Street is an example. I did a pretty harsh piece on it that said, this building is absolutely not what should be on this corner. It feels like a New York building made by New Yorkers for New Yorkers. What shifted in the next few months, and has continued to shift, is that while the building does not fit this location, it’s such a good building. It’s a really well done building, with a clear design vision. The details are super good. And then it also has a good ground-floor privately owned public open space. This was one where it genuinely felt open to the public, as opposed to ones that put out so many tacit messages saying you’re not welcome. This building genuinely draws passers by in.

I definitely have found myself to be guilty in retrospect of grading on the curve, all things considered. Sometimes, you know, I’ve given the C+ building a B-. I’ve never had one where, boy, I called that wrong, that’s a dog, or I was too full of myself, it’s actually a masterpiece.

King described architect Jeanne Gang’s design for the Mira Tower as a “flat-topped corkscrew.”Photographer: Smith Collection/Gado/Archive Photos

As a newspaper critic, how did you approach the really big stories, like the Salesforce Transit Center or San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion?
It was so exciting. To be writing for a general circulation metropolitan daily that is to some extent a defining voice for the region, to know there’s a visible building coming up and you’re going to be weighing in on it, that is terrific. For me, I rarely felt comfortable just taking a pure aesthetic viewpoint on something proposed, because buildings can be so different when they’re actually done. Value engineering can make good things that look good in renderings look not good, and conversely, there might be latent qualities in a building that emerge when you actually see it in real life and the lights are on inside it all. There was an international competition for what became the tower in the Salesforce Transit Center, with three firms, Richard Rogers, SOM and Pelli Clarke Pelli. I wrote the news pieces announcing the competition, I wrote the analysis giving the context for what was going on and I did the news piece on the unveiling, and then I did a critical piece on my thoughts about which was the best entry. It was never just the criticism.

Certain proposals were very significant. In 2014, there was a competition to develop a museum site right across a national park marsh, almost at the Golden Gate Bridge. George Lucas wanted it. He was really pushing for it. I ended up writing a couple of pieces saying, this is the wrong building for this site. It’s absolutely wrong, and here’s why it’s wrong. [Former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and [former US Senator] Diane Feinstein were weighing in. They were not with me on that one. I went to an editorial board meeting where Pelosi just started tearing into critics of Lucas, and she definitely had me in her sights as she was talking.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art pictured in 2016, just ahead of the opening of its Snøhetta-designed addition.Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty images

What did the pandemic change about your beat?
So much of what urban design means. What is a financial district in the 21st century, after the pandemic? What is the role of a retail district? Why did this neighborhood spring back and that neighborhood didn’t? So much of what I have done is that. Because that is urban design at the moment. If I were just driving around the region to find anything new that was built of some form of distinction, and then writing about it, readers and editors would have said, who cares? We want to know if the doom loop is real, and you’re telling us there’s a contemplative monastery outside of Stanford University? Who cares?