Watch out for the POPOS

January 3rd 2013 was the start of a great taste of what the winner would do in Rome. Our Context contestants all took a trip to San Francisco to do a walking seminar on the architectures there. On the way to San Francisco there was surprisingly no traffic so we arrived there kind of early. While we had time we took a walk over to the St. Mary’s Cathedral, it was very inspirational and made me think of a comparison to this church and how the churches in Rome would look like. After that we took a trip down Chinatown and as we walked down and looked at all the different stores, Mrs. Everett  made me realize that there was more to it than a couple of stores on a street. There is a lot of history to how and why the Chinese arrived there, it was mainly because of the gold rush. After we briefly passed by Chinatown the biggest physical challenge of the trip occurred to us and we had to walk up a huge hill to reach the Coit Tower, by the time I got to the top I felt like death, but it was worth it because we all got a really good beautiful view of San Francisco. The travel down was way easier than the way up, but after it was over we walked to the Galleria park hotel to meet up with our walk guild Mr. Rick Evans. He took us to the top of that hotel and introduced us to a little secret about San Francisco; privately-owned public-open spaces or POPOS for short. He told us if a company owns a building in San Francisco they have to give a space of land back to the community for free, but because its for free the companies don’t want people to go there and mess it up because they would have to pay to take care of it, so they hide them. There are 56 POPOS in San Francisco so look out for them. Mr. Evans introduced us to a really famous architect named Mr. Willis Polk he designed the worlds first glass curtain wall on 130 Sutter Street, the Wells Fargo 1908 Banking hall, and Hobart Building that survived a earthquake. The best title for Willis Polk would be a master architect in San Francisco’s golden age of office buildings. We also walked and seen some other buildings made by other architect but I think Willis Polk was the most inspirational. As we arrived to the end of the walking seminar I stared to think about what a fun time I had and all of the new things that I've learned in such short time, and how that feeling would differ from being in Rome. -Malik Lee

Willis Polk

Hallie Building