This page is a repository of posts devoted to great buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it will be updated as new stories are posted.

Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco
Yerba Buena Cubed, 9 June 2008

San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum opened in 2008, making it the most recent major addition to the Yerba Buena cluster of museums located South of Market. The museum consists of two parts: Willis Polk’s former PG&E substation, a brick structure that dates from 1907, and Daniel Libeskind’s bold shifting blue cube. Set off by St. Patrick’s Catholic Church — a rare (for San Francisco) 19th century landmark that was redone after the 1906 earthquake — and downtown skyscrapers, this musem is a highlight of Yerba Buena Alley. This story describes the museum and includes a chronology of museum additions to South of Market.

Fox Theater, Oakland
21st Century Fox, 2 February 2009

One of the very grandest of the few remaining Bay Area movie palaces, Oakland’s Fox Theater opened on Telegraph Avenue in 1928 with almost 3,400 seats. At the time of its opening, it was the largest theater on the West Coast. The theater was actively used for about forty years, and then it was closed for forty years after that. Although most of the Bay Area’s old theaters have been demolished, by a stroke of good fortune, the Fox Oakland was saved. After a restoration process that has taken close to a decade and over $70 million to complete, the Fox is back in business; it reopened on February 5, 2009. This story describes the history and context of the theater, and the role that it could play in revitalizing Downtown Oakland.