Sunday,
January 13,
San Francisco New City
Plazas: Digital Interactivity Conduit to City History including Italian
American
The
ANNOTICO Report
Voice and motion
triggers will be incorporated in the $90 million museum - not just to be au
courant, but because it will make the museum truly interactive. Computer
chips embedded in walls and tabletops will enable people to summon information
for their own versions of history, allowing them to chart the progress of their
own ancestors from the time of the Gold Rush. For example, Italian Americans with roots
in the city will be able to call up maps that show where Italian Americans
lived in the city and find documents or photos provided by the California
Historical Society that might even lead them to the first place their family
lived.
In San Francisco, two relatively new pedestrian lanes - Mint
Plaza and Yerba Buena Lane - each linked to
These clearings
in the urban jungle point to what we can expect as the city grows; the best
designs and spaces will be interactive in the way these plazas are, with
new stores, arts and music venues and digital playgrounds.
They are
interactive in the simplest way - you walk through them. In addition, venues
linked to them use technology to make it possible for visitors to personalize
their experience, whether it is while looking at art or engaging with a
history museum.
These plazas
are not Disney-fied in the way of Belden Alley or other
gentrified alleys in the city, which have French or Italian themes.
Instead, the new spaces provide a smorgasbord that you can mix and match at
will, just as you do when you go inside some of the buildings. Museum placards
and curators' captions alone will not be the only voices you hear. You will
hear artists' points of view, too.
Mint Plaza, the
$3.5 million, 290-foot-long, L-shaped paved piazza that opened in November next
to the dilapidated Old Mint building, took the place of dingy sections of Mint
and Jessie streets off
It is the
harbinger of an even more ambitious interactive space, the Mint Project.
This project, including the restoration of the Greek Revival
building, built in 1874 by Arthur Mullett, is being
designed by Patri Merker
Architects and museum designers Christopher Chadbourne
& Associates of
Upstairs, digital
presentations related to important Bay Area milestones - the quake in
1906 and the rebuilding of the city, the rise of newspapers, the first
television, the first motion pictures, the era of Beat poetry, the '60s, the
advent of computers, the Internet - will be shown through interactive digital
maps, documents and holographic moving images of poets and singers such as
Allen Ginsberg and Janis Joplin.
A room called "The
Big Story" will be lined with historic newspaper clippings and headlines
from the Examiner, The Chronicle and
other Bay Area newspapers. Clicking on a classified advertisement, for
instance, will bring up an archival image of workers.
Chadbourne, who has also planned
exhibition spaces for the Smithsonian Institution, will include a multimedia
presentation of Bay Area history in a new sunken courtyard (formerly a
cistern). The goal is to take an honest look at the Bay Area's history since
the 1860s, and its remarkably exclusionary underbelly - it was anti-Chinese,
anti-black, anti-Japanese, anti-gay and anti-labor at various times.
Voice and motion triggers
will be incorporated in the $90 million museum - not just to be au courant, Chadbourne explains, but because it will make the museum
truly interactive. Computer chips embedded in walls and tabletops will
enable people to summon information for their own versions of history, allowing
them to chart the progress of their own ancestors from the time of the Gold
Rush. For example,
Italian Americans with roots in the city will be able to call up maps that show
where Italian Americans lived in the city and find documents or photos provided
by the California Historical Society that might even lead them to the first
place their family lived.
Because the
museum will not be set up in a chronological fashion, self-guided podcasts will let visitors customize their visits.
On the ground
floor, the
"The
experience does not stop at the four walls of the Mint," says
Those who want a
quick glimpse of the city will be able to view periodic sound and light shows
in the new central two-story courtyard.
To get people to
stop and enjoy the new plaza space right away - its east/west and southern
exposures allow the sun to shine in - Patrick McNerney,
whose Martin Building Co. owns several condominium loft buildings along the
former alley, and his newly formed Friends of Mint Plaza nonprofit, provide
bright orange plastic chairs designed by Jasper Morrison. The chairs, as they
get moved around through the day, stipple the simply paved plaza with random
color.
People are
relaxing on the long wooden benches, which are also containers for excess storm
water when it rains heavily. Come summer, as musical performances, cafes (four
restaurants and a coffee stand are planned) and activities intended for the
plaza go into full gear, more people will come.
The space is
crowned by a coast live oak tree at the
The storm-water
filtration system is low tech, but landscape architect Willett Moss says that
it is the first time it is being used for public space in the Bay Area, in part
to alleviate the stress on the city's sewer system during storms.
"It is a
prototype that the city may use elsewhere," says Moss. The system,
functioning imperfectly because the sandy soil is too porous and the water
percolates through too rapidly, is still being fine-tuned.
But even as it
is,
To get an idea of
what to expect at the Mint, walk over to
In use - and
evolving - for nearly seven years, the lane is a living, interactive history
walk where new discoveries can be made on every visit.
The lane connects
Yerba Buena Park and Mission Street to Market Street between Third and Fourth
streets, taking you past several cafes, the historic 19th century St. Patrick's
Church....
Just beyond it,
the
The lane ends at
the Four Seasons Hotel on
Tim Halbur, who interviewed the artists in their studios, sees podcasting coming into its own as a way for people to
interpret art and the history of art for themselves.
Rather than a
museum catalog or caption interpretation regulating visitors' points of view,
"artists can tell their own stories," says Halbur.
"And listeners can reach their own conclusions."
www.fourseasons.com/sanfrancisco/art/podcast
Zahid Sardar
is the Chronicle design editor. E-mail your ideas for Design Spotting to him at
zsardar@sfchronicle.com.
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