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Come See Our Hideous Slab 
As the world swoons over France's soaring beauty of a bridge, S.F. gets 
slapped
with an eyesore 
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 17, 2004 

And did you hear the one about how those gul-dang baguette-sucking antiwar 
French
just completed work on this astounding new bridge, a soaring, airy, delicate
thing erected in southern France, and it's all over the international press 
and
the French people are justifiably proud and even the venerable Le Monde has
deemed the new Millau bridge a "work of art," and the amazing pictures are 
being
featured everywhere, for good reason? 

And you look at the photos and see the breathtakingly elegant architecture (it
was built by the same company that did the Eiffel Tower) and you read about 
the
bridge's world-record height and its classy designer, renowned British 
architect
Norman Foster, the man who also designed the Millennium Bridge in London and 
who
believes, crazily, that "works of man should fuse with nature," and his 
bridge is
already being hailed as an instant landmark. 

The Millau. Its pillars poke the clouds and its design inspires the spirit 
and it
will surely be a major tourist attraction for decades to come -- a fact that, 
of
course, means little to most Americans, because most red-blooded patriots 
never
venture past the Wal-Mart on the outskirts of their home state. But still. 

And if you care at all about industrial design and the splendor of pure 
function
and of humankind's aspirations toward anything resembling ideals of grace and
simplicity and beauty, you take one look and you can only go, whoa. 

And then you get to spin right around just in time to have your face slapped 
by
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a giant slab of a B-grade actor and C-grade politician 
who
is right this minute advocating throwing a giant slab across S.F. Bay and 
calling
it the new Bay Bridge redesign, when anyone who looks at the artist rendering
just sort of feels this nasty tightening in their colon and they go, oh Jesus,
what the hell is wrong with us? 

Simple questions, really. Why can't we have something like the Millau? Are we
really that far gone? Are American-bred notions of imagination and creativity 
and
inspired beauty really that dead? 


Are we really all that twisted into little knots of bureaucracy and fiscal
congestion and small-hearted egomania and impotent political correctness and a
numb and tasteless BushCo-brand blandness like a national disease? You already
know the answer. 

It is to be an ugly viaduct thing, S.F.'s new bridge approach, a flat,
featureless "freeway on stilts" that looks like something regurgitated from an
abandoned East L.A. aqueduct, a long sloping ramp of constipation-gray 
concrete
without a design feature or a graceful note or a soaring architectural 
anything
to its name. 

This is the current plan now grunted forth by Arnie. It is supposed to lop 
$300
million or so off the ridiculously high cost of the current new Bay Bridge 
plan,
costs that have exploded to upward of a staggering $5 billion for some 
unknowable
Caltrans reason and is now a good time to mention the real kicker about the
Millau? How France's gorgeous and epic 1.6-mile span cost only $550 million?
Shhh. 

And sure, the Bay Area has seismic issues and environmental issues and a
difficult terrain that the Millau might not have faced, but is it really 10 
times
more difficult and expensive? Is it really so utterly impossible, given the
current social climate, to obtain designs at once visionary and affordable? 
Maybe
you already know the answer to that one, too. 

There is no longer any choice. Arnie's Slab Plan is the almost-foregone
conclusion now advocated by Bay Area politicos, and many now say that if we 
want
any damn bridge to be completed anytime in the next decade, we have to stop
bickering over design and accept Arnie's butt-ugly plan and get down to the 
real
business of who's gonna pay for the damn thing. What fun. 

And by the way, even if we go back to the original plan, we're still stuck 
with a
generic, symmetrical, single-tower lump that bores the seagulls and induces 
yawns
in tourists and that could exist in any city in the world. 

How far we seem from a potent sense of creativity and unity and spirit, even 
in
landmark-happy S.F. How hugely separated we seem to be in this country from
radical notions of pride and world-class industrial design and a spirit of
originality and imagination, of anything like the visionary forces that gave
birth to the Millau. 

Is it all just financial? Is it all just because we can't afford fancy 
designs?
Bull. After all, most Bay Areans would rather argue about how to fund a
visionary, landmark architectural "work of art" than a tepid eyesore of a 
bridge
that doesn't even inspire you to want to jump off of it. 

Here's a question: Do you maybe recall back in 1998, when they held that big
international design contest for the new Bay Bridge? Do you maybe remember 
any of
those lovely and often radical designs, one of which was deemed, if I recall, 
the
Sail? Or maybe it was the Wing? 

And the Sail/Wing consisted of a single giant support beam jutting out from 
the
center of the span at what I think was about a 60-degree angle, just leaning 
out
over the water, with support cables running from the length of the span out to
the beam, and it looked like, well, a giant sail tilted on its side and it was
absolutely gorgeous and sort of breathtaking and would have made us world 
famous
and proud of our bridges and our ingenuity and our sense of beauty and grace 
and
international integrity all over again. 

Do you remember? No? Doesn't matter. 

Because the Sail/Wing and every other truly interesting design proposed during
that contest was almost immediately nixed, killed, sneered at as too
controversial or too radical or too expensive (yeah right), and because some
bureaucrats and citizens' groups didn't like them and because no one in City 
Hall
or Sacramento had any sense of leadership or vision (well, except for maybe
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, but he was relatively powerless) and, because you
can't please everyone, we ended up pleasing no one. And here we are. 

Screw it. Let them build the Slab. It's too late, anyway. It will be our own
private joke. It will be our memento of a dreary and war-torn time. Tourists 
will
look at it and skip the photo. We will look at it and go, oh yeah, that was 
from
a time when San Francisco and California and the nation as a whole were all 
mired
neck deep in war and gluttony and bitter divisiveness and fiscal abuse, and no
one seemed to give a damn and if you did you were considered a traitor. 

And the City was broke largely because the state was broke and the state was
broke largely because the wildly irresponsible and reckless BushCo imbeciles 
ran
us all into the goddamn fiscal ground and gutted the value of the dollar and 
put
our country a trillion dollars in debt, and they just laughed like drunk 
hyenas
the whole time as they cashed in their oil portfolios and mapped out bombing
routes in Iran. 

It will be our soulless and generic little landmark. It will stand for 
decades to
come and we will say, sure it's ugly. Sure it's a giant concrete slab. Sure 
it's
graceless and uninspired and brutish and an architectural embarrassment and 
sure
it is, perhaps more than anything else, one massive and rather humiliating 
missed
opportunity. 

Hey, that's America in a nutshell, sweetheart. That's the Bush era, right 
there.
You want grace and beauty and dreams all coupled with soaring notions of hope 
and
progress? Move to France, hippie. 


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Mark's column archives are here 
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF
Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. 
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URL: 
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/12/17/notes121704.DTL 


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©2004 SF Gate 

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