Some good architecture reads for spring

Let’s face it. You can’t really lug a serious book about architecture to the beach, or even on the bus. Typically they are either hefty, hardback tomes, made even heavier by glossy, full-color pages of photography of the work being discussed, or they can venture into dry, academic treatises that often aren’t really fun to read.

This spring, though, fans of architecture can find some good books on our city, including one that you can easily carry on local walking expeditions. San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King has just come out with a very readable and portable book, “Cityscapes” (Heydey, 111 pages, $14.95).

Chronicle readers will recognize the buildings here as having appeared in brief homage in King’s Sunday column, “Cityscape.” The book presents 50 San Francisco buildings in all-too-brief description, and excellent photos, all taken by King for his column, with input from his editors and photographers at the newspaper. King, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, can write.  Readers who missed these columns will be engaged by his elegant prose; some may be flummoxed by a few of his unusual selections.

King knows that his choices may cause preservationists some pause. “This book makes no claim to be a definitive roster of San Francisco’s finest or most beloved works of architecture,” King writes in the introduction. “Instead, look on it as fifty facets of our urban scene: the charismatic stars and the background players; buildings defined by bold visual moves and buildings that offer tactile delight; the sort of structure you notice every time you pass by, and the sort that escapes notice until you catch it at a certain angle, in a certain light.”

That is probably my favorite aspect of this little book, which is also very affordable at $15. It captures buildings in a new light, and shares lovely aspects of some seemingly bland or unloved structures: the “pearly stucco” facade of the garage at 450 South Street, the “brooding grandeur of the rough concrete” of the brutalist Glen Park BART Station, the “clattering, metallic beast” that is the San Francisco Federal Building. Just last week I walked by the Flatiron Building in the morning sun and looked up at the  cornice and its “splashy parade of Gothic embroidery” which I hadn’t noticed in such detail before. One of my favorite city garages, George Applegarth’s circular Downtown Center Garage on Mason Street, is called an “unapologetic ode to automotive convenience” in a town where cars are scorned.

Architect Timothy Pflueger’s work appears twice, with both the Telephone Building and Roosevelt Middle School gracing its pages. So does the work of his contemporary George Kelham, and many other local architects, both revered and not so well known. (My quibble is that Kelham’s Shell Building gets treatment as an icon over Pflueger’s earlier Telephone Building). Author Jacquie Proctor will be pleased to see that the subject of her most recent book, architect Harold Stoner, appears twice, including a nice shot of his Lakeside mini-tower, which King calls a “streamlined explanation point.”

Cityscapes gives local architecture fans new looks at both stalwarts and underappreciated structures. King has been on the lecture circuit around the city, and has an upcoming talk and book signing at the Mechanics’ Institute Library, that gem of an institution at 57 Post Street, designed by Albert Pissis. King will be at the Mechanics’ Institute on Thursday, May 19, at 6 pm. On Tuesday, May 31, he will be at SPUR, 654 Mission Street, at 6 pm.

Preservationists will love Port City.