San Francisco, California
Source: SF Examiner, 6/1988
This was going to be a post about Delancey Street Restaurant, which is a great place to eat in San Francisco. Click the Yelp link above to learn details about the restaurant.
Okay, mind the mainsail, tacking now...
'Most rewarding project'
The architect for the restaurant, indeed the entire city block, was Howard Backen at the firm of Backen Arrigoni Ross (BAR). A San Francisco Chronicle headline once announced him as, "Napa's go-to architect for understated drama." Architect William Leddy states. "Howard is the strongest intuitive designer I've run across at picking up on the characteristic of a place." Backen's projects are not designed to make one gawk.
Backen has said of his own work, "It does what it has to do as simply as it can. There’s an underlying geometry, but no gymnastics at all." The Delancey Street project successfully recreates an atmosphere similar to an Italian seaside village on San Francisco's bayside Embarcadero.
Delancey Street Foundation
(Excerpt) "Delancey Street Foundation President Mimi Silbert called on Backen to 'be my pencil' in 1984 ... the client would be an organization where, according to the Delancey Street Foundation website, 'the average resident has been a hard-core drug and alcohol abuser, has been in prison, is unskilled, functionally illiterate, and has a personal history of violence and generations of poverty.'
(Excerpt) "Delancey Street Foundation President Mimi Silbert called on Backen to 'be my pencil' in 1984 ... the client would be an organization where, according to the Delancey Street Foundation website, 'the average resident has been a hard-core drug and alcohol abuser, has been in prison, is unskilled, functionally illiterate, and has a personal history of violence and generations of poverty.'
'You couldn’t meet those guys and not take the job,' Backen recalls with a smile. 'That design was all listening. There’d be 200 people in a meeting, and they all wanted something that looked like ‘home’.'
That’s not easy to do with a 336,700-square-foot facility at Brannan Street and the Embarcadero in what then was a remote redevelopment district. Many building materials were to be donated, so Backen and BAR left blueprint details vague. Another reason to simplify: more workers than not were Delancey Street trainees.
'The general contractor, he had learned by taking courses in San Quentin,' Backen says. 'He was absolutely brilliant. He just had been in jail.'
Backen focused on watching out for the basics and keeping everyone grounded.
'Howard is the nicest man, and he never put on the ‘great architect’ act,' Silbert says. 'I’d come up with some terrible idea, and he’d listen and then say, ‘That’s good, but let me show you some other things’.'
As Delancey Street prepared to open in 1989, it was hailed as 'a masterpiece of contemporary social design' by The Chronicle’s then architecture critic, Allan Temko. The complex won awards for architecture and urban design from the American Institute of Architects. Backen [74 years old in 2010] still returns each year for the foundation’s seder.
'I love what’s there,' Backen says. 'In a lot of ways, it’s by far the most rewarding project I’ve taken part in.' "
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 9.5.2010
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 9.5.2010
Delancey Street Restaurant
Source: BAR Architects - Delancey Street
ON TOPIC UPDATE:
"Hitting Bottom Can Be The Beginning" by Hank Whittemore
Parade Magazine, March 15, 1992
Source: Delancey Street Foundation > Print Media > 1992
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Post No. 287
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Post No. 287
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