When New York-based architect Peter Eisenman unveiled his vision of Yerba Buena Center’s plaza last week before San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency, Rabbi Brian Lurie, the Jewish Museum director, called his new museum “a building for the 21st century.”
But critics called the adjacent plaza design “cold and elitist,” as well as inaccessible to the elderly and disabled. Representatives of neighboring institutions that surround the plaza — the Mexican Museum and St. Patrick’s Catholic Church — complained that they were never consulted in the planning.
Now the Jewish Museum leadership is making plans — and making amends.
“If I had to do it over again, I’d do it differently,” Lurie said of the Jewish Museum’s treatment of the plaza design. “In retrospect, we should have had the meeting [with the church and the Mexican Museum] before. It was a mistake.”
The Jewish Museum thought that the Redevelopment Agency meeting was just a workshop where the new design ideas would be discussed. But others there, as well as daily newspapaer reporters, considered the architect’s model to be much more than just a concept.
To iron out misconceptions and concerns, Jewish Museum leaders are scheduling a meeting between Eisenman and Mexican Museum architect Ricardo Legoretta in Mexico City to hammer out a new design together. But first, the Jewish Museum leaders want to meet with their neighbors in Yerba Buena.
Mexican Museum Chairman Antonio Salazar-Hobson called the proposed meeting between the two architects “a strong symbol of good faith.
“We’ve passed the critical stage,” he said. “We have a shared community. We’re looking forward to sitting around the drafting table and working out our differences in an amicable fashion.”
The controversy over the Jewish Museum’s plan erupted at a Jan. 17 meeting of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and Yerba Buena tenants. Eisenman displayed a model of a plain, sunken space with terraced steps on three sides. Above the plaza and behind the Jewish Museum would be a giant video screen attached to the back wall of a proposed Market Street residential tower.
Jewish Museum leadership presented the concept to neighbors just hours before the meeting.
“We were already behind schedule. We rushed,” said Fred Levinson, chairman of the Jewish Museum board of directors.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had already commissioned a plaza proposal that included palm trees, lighting pylons and tables for outdoor seating. The Mexican Museum, St. Patrick’s Church and Yerba Buena Center’s elderly community had informally OKd the design.
However, when the Jewish Museum grew from an original proposed 38,000 square feet to 70,000, Eisenman designed an alternative plan to the redevelopment agency’s. As the museum’s design changed and became bigger, “we wanted more input into the plaza,” Lurie said.
The redevelopment agency’s design “dealt with our museum being much smaller and being hidden away,” he said. “The plaza is our front door. We’re dead center. The design of the plaza is important to us.
“But there was no intention to foist this upon our neighbors,” Lurie said, adding that he and Eisenman should have discussed the plaza idea with neighbors before presenting it.
Levinson added that the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner “reported it like we came with a fait accompli. It’s not true. The papers made us sound arrogant. That’s just not the case,” he said. “But it might have been better to talk to the people around us first.”
Salazar-Hobson agreed.
“Any novice would know this wasn’t a winning approach. We could have fixed it easily,” he said. “But that’s yesterday’s news. We’re prepared to be good neighbors. We’re proud of their endeavors and we know we can work out all our differences.”
The redevelopment agency’s Helen Sause, project director for the Yerba Buena Center, said it is “very uncommon and not frequent” that an architect will design an area for which he was not commissioned.
“It has only occurred once in 30 years,” she said, adding, “but we’re always open to new ideas.”
However, Sause said Eisenman’s plan “seemed contrary to achieving the objective of all communities — to use the plaza equally…to be a glue for the disparate communities…and to provide a sunny space to watch the world go by. There’s a lot of seniors that do that and want that.”
Lurie said he would never accept a plan that didn’t accommodate the elderly or disabled and that Eisenman’s design “is strictly an idea.”
The redevelopment agency will make a final decision Feb. 11.
“In the meantime I want to visit with all the parties together and talk about goals and objectives, then move forward with some modified designs,” Sause said. “Ideally we’ll have something everyone is OK with. But we don’t want to compromise an important piece of public work either.
“We want it to be right.”