Gyo Obata’s architectural work is seen mostly in the Midwest, and St. Louis, where his firm HOK is based, is graced by many of his buildings.
Impressive to me is his work in San Francisco’s Levi’s Plaza. Gyo narrowly avoided being placed in a Japanese internent camp during WWII with the rest of his family by transferring from Berkeley to Washington University in St. Louis. I wonder what it was like for him, years later, to be asked to design the city-scape for the region which denied his family their rights.
Walking through the plaza feels like a time warp to the corporate world of 1982, but the attention to detail still shines through. The building was designed to blend in without overshadowing the historic warehouses in this section of the city, to be stylish without taking over. For this reason the campus is relatively low (no gleaming skyscrapers here) and made of comfortable brick like the other buildings of the Embarcadero.
The plaza itself is like a city in miniature where employees could wander down small streets, where each building had its own little plaza. True to Levi’s casual ethos, it’s “never symmetrical, easy-going and relaxed.”
P.S. – the tower on Telegraph Hill above Levi’s Plaza is Coit Tower and is a story in and of itself.