Art School, with facilities including indoor and outdoor auditoria, a café, sculpture and painting studios, offices, and a flexible exhibition gallery.

The structural integrity and primary forms of the overall building are unaltered. Several changes have been made including the addition of mezzanine offices in the sculpture studios, new toilets and a ticketing booth at the plaza level, and the installation of concrete deck pavers over the original decking. A number of additional drywall partitions have been erected within the exhibition gallery to create smaller rooms and additional offices.

This building is the most comprehensive realization of the spirit and experience of a Corbusian architectural environment in Northern Caliornia, on par with the related Carpenter Center by LeCorbusier at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. The architecture of the building is distinct from the prosaic Functionalism typical of contemporary Bay Area modernism. The Art Institute responds boldly to its steeply sloping urban site. Studios are placed below a rooftop plaza populated with a rich collection of elemental volumes. The result offers a dramatic yet urbane experience on a characteristic hillside San Francisco setting. The building is an informed response to a characteristically “San Franciscan” topographic urban site. An elongated north-south ramp drives into and through a suite of large-scale, loftlike, sculpture and ceramic studios. The ramp is publicly accessible during building hours and allowing midblock passage connecting Francisco Street to Chestnut Street through the new addition. The ramp overlooks various workshop spaces grouped within a volume one hundred and fifty feet square and twenty feet high, the mass of which supports a publicly accessible belvedere from which one can view the city. Cleverly inserted to capitalize on an approximately two hundred-plus degree panorama, the building was unique as a semipublic midblock artifact, in a neighborhood of closely spaced houses and apartment buildings. The horizontal datum of this artificial landscape is broken by an architectural topography of steps, terraces, and pavilions, which frame views of Alcatraz, Coit Tower, and the maritime landscape of San Francisco Bay beyond. The roof, by virtue of its deft arrangement of public program elements, includes gallery, lecture hall, seminar rooms and café. A civic forum facilitating uses planned and unplanned, the roof is pierced by a series of sculptural truncated conical skylights that admit light into the studios below and was drained by an array of demonstrative and emphatic roof scuppers that came to life during the city’s rainy winter months. Five truncated, conical skylights celebrated the vertical admission of natural light to the studio spaces below. The two-story rooftop gallery was accessed from the exterior upper and lower terraces by a custom steel-and-glass pivot door at the main level, and from within by a monumental cast-in-place stair.The main feature on the roof is the main lecture hall, whose roof doubles as an outdoor performance venue. Effectively doubling the space of the interior on the roof in an open air amphitheater-type configuration, the lecture hall is a microcosm of the entire project, in which the roof is a civic stage.

The building was constructed primarily of board-formed, cast-in-place concrete. The exception was the auditorium roof, whose stepped-roof form was built of post-tensioned concrete planks, whose jacking pockets were mortared over and left as indented “runes” and were read as smooth voids set within the expanse of the heavily textured, board-formed walls. Large expanses of glazing-set, painted-steel channel frames filled punched openings in the exterior wall. The bulk of the building is structured on a thirty-foot by thirty-foot grid of cruciform concrete pilotis. At the building perimeter these columns are articulated as angled, brise-soleil elements that helped organize the building façades and provide privacy to the studios within. Drainage throughout the extensive roof ares is consistently emphasized in keeping with other works by the same author. From atop the conic skylights, water is channeled through a custom cast-in-place weep at the lower apex of the circular safety glazing. Beneath the glass was an intentionally redundant, painted structural steel “student catcher” whose grillwork was designed to resist the imagined failure of a glazing unit under the weight of a person. From the auditorium roof and other expansive terrace areas the water was shed from a series of custom, cast-in-place scuppers, smaller versions of which took water from the amphitheater steps and the stepped roof of the gallery. The building was altered during the course of construction when one of the uphill neighbors complained that the sloped roof of the café blocked their views of San Francisco Bay. Already cast, the wall was cut down and the roof flattened while the matter played itself out publicly in the newspapers and in a series of public hearings. The building opened to the public in 1970.

The site is a steeply sloping, urban corner lot at the confluence of San Francisco’s North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Russian Hill neighborhoods and has unobstructed panoramic views in three directions. The sloping site was originally the garden for the existing arts school, and was bounded on the north by Francisco Street and on the east by Jones Street. It is surrounded on all sides by a variety of existing residential properties. A narrow band of the site on the Jones Street side remains undeveloped to facilitate future expansion. The existing 1927 building is accessed from the Chestnut Street side through a monumental, baroque portal which leads to a small courtyard with an octagonal Spanish-tiled fountain. This courtyard, in turn, provides access to the addition.

The building was intended as a rough, factory like, flexible \"loft" type space which would be able to meet the future programmatic needs of a dynamic arts school. The building was the first instance of continental seating used in an auditorium in San Francisco. Materially it is in keeping with the concrete vocabulary of the existing building to which it was added.

Intended to serve the academic needs for creating larger scaled art works which were increasingly the norm in the sixties and seventies, the addition allowed the school to keep pace with the needs of the growing Art Institute community. The building remains a vibrant, well used facility today.

The building is a rare example of orthodox, International Style Modernism in Northern California. Works of architecture idiommatically characterized by uncompromising, challenging, and hard edged vocabulary have become increasingly difficult to realize in the contemporary social and political climate of the region. The unique scarcity of this highly specific language, combined with the difficulty of its making, result in a work all the more unusual when one considers its presence in a wealthy, residential enclave located in the heart of the city.

As a former employee of both LeCorbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, its author, Paffard Keatinge-Clay brings a unique voice to this large scale comission for the arts. The project is the most complete, and \"pure" work in his ouevre, which along with his own house, the Tamalpais Pavilion, and the San Francisco State Univeristy Student Union, form a triumverate of sorts in the Bay Area. His practice existed in San Francisco for approximately 15 years, during which time it executed relatively few buildings including 6 in the Bay Area, and two in Los Angeles. Within this relatively small portfolio of works, the Art Institute represents the pinnacle of his practice and is one of relatively few buildings exectued in the United States by direct employees in LeCorbusier's studio (Albert Frey being a notable, and perhaps only other, Californian examplar of this unique pedigree).

The building is a carefully studied and well built essay which was, at the time of its completion, as pure an example of an essay written in the language of LeCorbusier as could be found anywhere in California. its clarity of organization, straightforward construction, and unique urban presence mark it as a discreet but forceful piece of architecture which successfully negotiates the varied requirements of program, site and identity all while respecting without genuflecting, to the original building. The building today retains much of this original spirit but suffers a benign neglect while continuing to function in largely the same manner for which it was designed.

A great amount of original material exists regarding the building, and the builidng process in the collection of the Art Institute library. The librarian has an extensive photographic and drawing archive, shared with the facilities department, including the architects original presentation model, and master plan report: Master Plan Program Report for the San Francisco Art Institute. January 27, 1966. Additionally, a brocure generated for fundraising purposes documents the buildings design: An Expansion Program for the San Francisco Art Institute. 1967.Upon its completion, the building received minimal attention in the press including: Montgomery, Roger. “Building for the Arts. San Francisco’s Art Institute.” Architectural Forum. v. 132. Jan.-Feb. 1970: pp. 80-89 and “San Francisco: Beautiful, Spendthrift Sybarite of a City”, Interiors, vol. 129, no. 12, July 1970, pp. 80-81.A forthcoming monograph of the work of Paffard Keatinge-Clay includes extensive documentation of the project: Keune, Eric R. Modern Architect(ure)/Modern Master(s). The Work of Paffard Keatinge-Clay, Architect. SciARC Press. 2006.