Customer Reviews

San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to the Outstanding Buildings, Public Art Works, and Parks in the Bay Area of California

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The new edition of San Francisco Architecture is everything a portable guide to the built environment should be: organized, accessible, and with enough detail to expand one's sense of time, place, and people. Fortunately, from this reader's point of view, it was written for a lay, rather than specialist, audience; the result is neither exhaustive nor exhausting, merely highly informative. As with any reference book, it must address specific information needs of a specific audience, and, in my estimation, this guide does so very well for a reader with general interest in buildings around the Bay Area.

San Francisco Architecture is unusually well designed and produced: the photography, layout, information structure, typography and printing (espcially the halftone reproduction) are all exemplary and reinforcing of each other. Visually, it is as satisfying as it is workmanlike -- free of excess or caprice and dedicated to serving information effectively.

San Francisco Architecture is the best field guide around if you want to find out about both old and new architecture in the Bay Area.It not only covers San Francisco,but does a a good job of tours in San Jose,Oakland,and Berkeley,and up to Sonoma, and Napa with the wineries.I took several of the tours with my friends and we all found it a very insightful and pleasurable experience that i highly recommend.It is loaded with photos to help with the selection of what you want to see and not too big and bulky to take along comfortably.I give it an enthusiastic five stars.

The very best and most comprehensive guide to San Francisco Bay Area architecture. Informative for anyone who is interested in architecture. A wonderful way to see the city - have lived in this city 40 years but there was still much to discover with this guide in hand.

The information and pictures work to help you find the most treasured pieces of architecture in San Francisco. It is a real must for anyone who wants to find treasure.

If you want an AIA-style guide to the Bay Area architecture, this is the book to buy (despite another reviewer's claim to the contrary). While still somewhat selective, the building sample is exactly what it should be. Most of your favorites will be in here, particularly if you like San Francisco's classical tradition. There are small but effective black & white photographs with almost every entry (but not all). The descriptions with each entry range in length: Some are quite long (maybe 500 words) while others are absent altogether. There's nice coverage of Palo Alto, San Jose, Berkeley and Sonoma too. Oakland gets a few pages that are not nearly enough to do justice to its important architecture, and there's more than a few important structures along Van Ness (back in San Francisco) that are conspicuously absent. There's an emphasis on public buildings, so residential architecture gets something of the short end.

A really comprehensive guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area doesn't exist (yet). This is your best choice until someone chooses to take up that project.

Caution! My copy arrived with typsetting errors, printing errors, missing pages and blank pages. This is a quality control issue that customers (and Amazon) should know about.

This book will be handy for walking and biking around SF as we always want to know the details and history of all the buildings we pass by!

Not the average tourist guide.

Instead of pages wasted on Fisherman's Wharf (which is as much San Francisco as the Wax Museum), you are guided through small streets and crannies of the City.

Because of the fire of 1906, the architecture is vastly different neighborhood by neighboorhood and this guide decribes them plainly and with grace.

Reading the book a week before a trip out will educate you and create more excitement than any Fodor's or Mobile can do

Although I've lived here 30 years, I didn't know how much I was unaware of about San Francisco. This little guide let's you see the history and its architecture in a delightful way.

If you're looking for the equivilent to an AIA guide for San Francisco, this is not the one.
Issues:
It's full of typos
The building descriptions are bad.
The authors give little or no context to the structures they highlight and no real reason why they selected them.
This makes what is outlined look totally random.
Many of the blurbs are pointess musings or anecdotal info.
They appear to have very little to say and are unable to write a simple building description.
As historicans and architects, you'd think they would have a firm grasp on historic preservation. they don't. A few descriptionsgive the impression that they see facadism as a perfectly legitimate form of historic preservation when in reality it is one of the most loathed "last resorts" preservationist's are forced to use.