For San Franciscans, the prospect of change has all the appeal of an earthquake. But like natural disasters, change is inevitable. A flood of technology money in the last decade or so added to runaway growth that threatened the city's famous livability.
"San Francisco was steeped in the image of itself as a Victorian city," said Stanley Saitowitz, one of the city's better-known designers of modernist buildings. But the technology explosion, its culture of risk-taking and the wealth it generated created a seemingly unstoppable market for new architecture and design. Despite tough city building guidelines, much of the new work, from boutiques to civic architecture, is outspokenly modernist. While it may be frowned upon by die-hard traditionalists, it is nonetheless transforming this city into the country's epicenter of modernist design-and provoking soul-searching in a community that prides itself on its distinct character.
"These buildings," Mr. Saitowitz said, "will give people the opportunity to see that architecture can be good without imitating the past."
Locals nervous about any alterations to historic San Francisco can breathe easier on one score, at least. Their beloved Clift Hotel on Geary Street near Union Square had its grand reopening recently, and it looks better than it has in decades. Its new owner, , and his collaborator, the designer Philippe Starck, have not, as some feared, turned that 86-year-old local institution into an overdesigned, undercivilized, velvet-roped hangout for 22-year-old fashion victims.
The Clift's grand proportions and Old World charm remain (as does its legendary Redwood Room bar), but now they're engaged in a snappy repartee with modern design. Add equal parts wit, surrealism and glamour, and you have something brand-new to San Francisco: a luxury hotel with an edge, a contemporary hotel that doesn't look like a theme park. The city that produced both Herb Caen and Wired magazine finally has a fashionable place to see and be seen that reflects that creative tension between establishment and upstart. Mayor Willie Brown, no stranger to either (and no slouch on the social scene), dropped by the Clift before attending its opening party on July 31. He called it "reflective of tomorrow, but respective of yesterday" and predicted, "It's going to be one of the hot spots of San Francisco for a very long time."
Mr. Schrager locates his hotels, like the Paramount and the Hudson in New York and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, only in what he calls "international 24-hour gateway cities," and he has had his eye on San Francisco for half a dozen years. Whether he has a radarlike instinct for the next big destination or his interest confers that coveted quality-buzz-is a chicken-and-egg conundrum. In this case, it was probably a bit of both.
"San Francisco has the very old-line, European kind of tradition, side by side with old hippies and the technology boom," Mr. Schrager said.
In addition, it has what he calls an extremely progressive music scene-a critical concern for someone who treats music as an important element in his hotels-and "more great architects at work now than any place in the country."
The city's new design consciousness would naturally appeal to a man whose calling card is avant-garde design, and who recently hired Frank Gehry to design a hotel on Astor Place in Manhattan.
That there is any avant-garde architecture at all for Mr. Schrager to admire in San Francisco is remarkable to serious design enthusiasts. In an effort to preserve the low-rise late-Victorian character that makes the city so attractive to both residents and tourists, San Franciscans have resisted contemporary architecture with militant zeal.
"It's a bloody battle," said Mr. Saitowitz of being a modernist in a community that views any modification of the cityscape with suspicion.
So if the list of architects at work here reads like an international who's who, it didn't happen without a struggle. A radical remodeling of a 1907 Willis Polk-designed power substation into a Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind with enormous angular shards of facade jutting into the street and the remodeling of the Beaux-Arts main library building into a new home for the Asian Art Museum got speedy approval from the planning commission. But the copper-mesh-skinned building for the M. H. de Young Museum, with a 160-foot tower in the heart of Golden Gate Park, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, raised a ruckus before it got the green light, and a design for a new Prada store off Union Square, by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, has raised eyebrows at the commission for its 12,000 circles of varying dimensions that puncture its nine-story stainless steel facade. (The commission has yet to rule.) An even more radical design, for a federal building by Thom Mayne, a Los Angeles architect, with a futuristic tower near the predominantly Beaux-Arts Civic Center, is expected to go into the building phase next year. It might never have got this far except that a federally financed building doesn't need city approval, only that of the General Services Administration. Mr. Saitowitz's striking Yerba Buena Lofts project, nearing completion in the trendy South of Market area, was likened to Soviet housing by the planning commission staff, he said. But he believes that as the new designs reaches critical mass over the next few years, public opinion will come around.
Indeed, as the first of this wave, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was instrumental in changing public attitudes toward modern architecture when it opened its new home, designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, in 1995.
"Its success did not go unnoticed by other institutions in this city," said David Ross, the museum's director since 1998. "SFMOMA has more members than the Museum of Modem Art, in a city with one-fifth the population of New York. What does that say about an appetite for the new?"
This kind of cultural energy attracted Mr. Schrager to San Francisco in the first place.
"My whole life is about making a hotel feel like the city it's in," Mr. Schrager said.
Mr. Starck shares that philosophy, explaining that the city embraces both the past and the techno-generation, which is "only energy, no past, no rules, something sparkling."
Still, this city is all about charm and an unpretentious elegance-attributes that may once have seemed too fusty to make the Schrager-Starck door list. Moreover, the Clift is the first renovated Schrager property that was built as a luxury hotel; the Paramount had been a single-room-occupancy hotel, and the Hudson began as a clubhouse for the American Woman's Association. The Clift is "more grown-up" than his other hotels, Mr. Schrager said.
So a little decorum was in order-but not too much. The minute you enter the Clift, you can see that Mr. Starck has tempered his respect for the past with his trademark irreverence. The lobby was restored to its original 25-foot height (the previous owner had dropped the ceiling to accommodate a mezzanine). The space, which now has cool gray polished plaster walls and limestone floors, features an 18-foot-tall fireplace, cast in bronze by the French artist Gerard Garouste. Mr. Starck said it symbolized "the brain of a cybergeneration," but it also characterizes the lobby's give and take between tradition and modernity.
The reception desk, sculptured from a single piece of mahogany, has an organic look that contrasts sharply with the angular lines of the metal concierge desk by the architect Jean Nouvel. The giant Louis XIV bronze armchair is classic Starck; so is the overscaled floor lamp. While some furnishings are covered in traditional velvets and leathers, others, like a group of French Renaissance pieces, are covered in a decidedly more pop material-plastic. A wood-paneled wall that frames groups of aristocratic portraits couldn't be more suited to a grand old hotel-except that the pictures, on closer inspection, turn out to be photographs, by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, of plastic toy animals. Mr. Starck considers the space "more surrealistic" than anything he has done with Mr. Schrager.
But if the lobby has an Alice in Wonderland atmosphere, the bar and restaurant beyond are about old-fashioned glamour. Many visitors to the new Clift consider the remodeled Redwood Room its most successful feature, which is ironic, given that some locals organized a committee to save the 1934 Art Deco room from what they assumed would be demolition when Mr. Schrager bought the hotel in 1999. Instead, Mr. Schrager restored the room's famous paneling, which is made of redwood from 2,000-year-old trees, and which made the bar a sentimental favorite of San Franciscans like Herb Caen, the columnist who sipped "Vitamin V" (for vodka) there.
But Mr. Schrager got rid of the rest, and rightly so. The place had become tired and touristy. As Denise Hale, a San Francisco grande dame and tireless socializer, said to those who feared the loss of the old Redwood Room, "When was the last time you were actually there-10, 15 years ago?" Mrs. Hale, who held court at the recent reopening, called the remodeling "fabulous, and I'm not easily impressed."
The old bar is gone; it was not original to the room, Mr. Schrager said, and it was rotting. In its place is an etched-glass bar whose glimmer sets off the walls' burnished warmth. Gone, too, are the 1970's copies of Gustav Klimt paintings. "I hate reproductions," said Mr. Starck, who replaced them with plasma-screen monitors that display contemporary digital art.
Next door to the Redwood Room, the French Room restaurant has been replaced by a branch of Jeffrey Chodorow's Asia de Cuba. The old pastel-toned space is now paneled to harmonize with its neighbor, thus amplifying the aura of opulence. This may not be your mother's Clift, but she'd have a great time here.
The guest-room floors offer a more subdued version of Mr. Starck's twisted-chic aesthetic. In other Schrager hotels, the hallways are so dim you almost need a flashlight to navigate. Here, you step from the elevators (which are lined in colored mirrors) onto wide, sunlit corridors with mauve walls and white-paneled doors that look like something out of a 1950's Douglas Sirk film. You half expect to see Lana Turner walking down the hall in a turban.
In the rooms, Mr. Starck went for "a little less design" than in the past "and a lot more comfort." Mirrored walls behind and opposite the pale wood sleigh beds create infinite reflections, another movie-star touch. There's a more feminine feel to these spaces, with their pale walls and fabrics; as Mr. Starck said, "It's difficult to say what color it is." Actually, it's a light warm gray. Just ask Anda Andrei, the president of design and a partner in lan Schrager Hotels. The San Francisco light, she explained, was "one of the hardest things we've ever had to deal with. I think we painted the model room about 15 times."
The soothing dÈcor is part of what Mr. Schrager believes is the Clift's appeal to "people who go to hotels like the Four Seasons, but with a hipper sensibility."
So far, those people seem to be getting the message. Gavin Newsom, 33, is a fourth-generation San Franciscan who, in addition to being on the Board of Supervisors, is an owner of the Plum Jack group of restaurants, wine stores and a hotel. He is young and glamorous-the Clift's target market. But he understands that too much youth and glamour may not be a good thing.
"We have an aversion here to the New York-Los Angeles model," Mr. Newsom said. "I wouldn't be able to convince my father to stay at the Mondrian. The Clift has brought the generations together."
Mr. Schrager's big splash at the Clift comes at a pivotal moment for the city. The dot-com boom has given way to a bust; and two major competitors in the luxury field, the Four Seasons and St. Regis, are building hotels nearby. But it may be that San Franciscans, for all their grousing, are ready to be both pampered and provoked. Just as it served as a hatchery for the high-tech and biotech revolutions, the area has become the site of a seismic shift in the way cities regard innovative architecture. Mr. Schrager and Mr. Starck have embraced that shift, but from a slightly more comfortable position, just behind the fault line.
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