Most people fly in, but we recommend you set foot here at the Ferry Building at the bottom of Market Street. After a $100 million renovation, it’s now a spacious, bustling artisanal California food-and-craft market. The building’s 600-foot-long nave has been completely restored (with mosaic floors, terra-cotta arches and clerestory windows), as has the 245-foot clock tower.
It took $1 billion and 200 architects to create the soaring, cantilevered, aluminum-and-clouded-glass International Terminal at San Francisco’s airport. Enough fine art has been installed to make SFO the American Association of Museums’ first fully accredited airport.
Of course, you can’t leave a city this beautiful without having a drink. We recommend the historic Clift Hotel and its Redwood Room, redesigned by–who else?–Philippe Starck. For the truly adventurous, there’s Beau Timken’s True Sake in fashionable Hayes Valley. No bamboo or rice paper, just sake. A couple of glasses and you’ll leave your heart here.
The Big Apple: All About Food
A guide to New York design in a few hundred words? We’d only leave you hungry for more. But if you’re going to be famished, best to get yourself to one of these edgy new restaurants. In the cobblestoned meatpacking district, Ali Tayar has designed Pop Burger, a cleverly configured beef-patty joint and stylish bar. The burger counter is framed by a backlit aluminum panel proclaiming firm fries warm buns creamy shakes, so maybe you should leave Aunt Nellie at home.
Farther downtown, in the shadow of Richard Meier’s two new luxury-condo buildings in sea-green glass and concrete, sits the bar West–where only booze is served with your sunset. At Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s nouvelle Chinese 66, Meier has designed the whole interior, from the airy, Zen-like dining room to the giant fish tank. On the Lower East Side, there’s the Andre Kikoski-designed Suba, a new eatery featuring a subterranean dining room surrounded by a moat; submerged lights cast reflections of waves onto exposed brick walls.
In midtown, it has to be the just-opened Lever House Restaurant, designed by Marc Newson. Patrons walk down a jetway to enter a spaceship-like dining room. A few lucky customers get to sit in an elevated “control room” and gaze at diners below. And that’s the true New York visual pleasure: looking at other people.
The View On High
Standing on top of the sparkling 54-story Mori Tower in the sprawling commercial and residential complex called Roppongi Hills and commanding a view of the city at night just might be the ultimate Tokyo experience. After the ear-popping, high-speed elevators have whisked you more than 800 feet above the bay in a mere 35 seconds, the Tokyo City View floor affords (along with a bar) an unobstructed 360- degree spectacle of twinkling lights. The floor opens at 9 a.m. and doesn’t close until 1 in the morning. This new urban pastime has become so popular that travel agencies now offer packages called Twinkle Night and Room with a Night View. The new crop of luxury hotels that’s popped up in Tokyo within the past year all boast of their fine yakei, or night view, available in their bars and guest rooms. Park Hotel Tokyo (which opened in September) occupies 10 gazer-friendly, upper floors of a new high-rise in the recently revamped Shiodome neighborhood.
Still, because it throws in a genuine art museum (designed by American architect Richard Gluckman) on the 52d and 53d floors, the Mori Tower is indisputably the primo spot.
If You Build It, They Will Come
The real thing in architecture–Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe–has always been Chicago’s way, and the city is not about to back off now. Dutch star architect Rem Koolhaas’s new $48.2 million stu-dent center for the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology campus actually sits under the city’s elevated transit tracks–encircled overhead by a giant, 530-foot-long steel tube. ITT also has some brand-new dorms by Helmut Jahn. Meanwhile Frank Gehry is building a $50 million band shell in the new Millennium Park: steel shingles on the outside, nicely acoustic Douglas fir within.
We haven’t mentioned yet the $681 million (yep, that’s right) redo of venerable Soldier Field by Wood + Zapata of Boston. Detractors are already calling it “the monstrosity of the Midway.” We say, take the buildings and run with ’em.
Dolce & Exclusivo
Since way back in the ’70s, this industrial town has embraced–and flaunted–a polished modernity. Now the city’s high-end retail shops as well as its products are headliners. Take the “concept” emporium Corso Como, 10. It has couture and home furnishings on the ground floor, a gallery upstairs, a cafe in the courtyard and some retro-’60s hotel rooms included for good measure. You can wake up in your Commes des Garcons sweater and pop right over to Gianfranco Ferre’s new Total Lifestyle Store (which includes a spa). You can probably start a fight by wearing something from competitor Dolce & Gabbana’s menswear shop–designed by Ferruccio Laviani (best known for his modern lamps) but housed in an 18th-century palazzo. Shopped but still not dropped? Try consummate designer Antonio Citterio’s B&B Italia, a vast glass box of a store that sells ultramodern Milanese furniture along with Australian Marc Newson’s much curvier chairs. If you wait until spring, you can visit another Citterio project, the Hotel Bulgari. Reportedly, it will be a luxury hotel that is also completely contemporary. In Milan, what else?
Midnight’s Children
Time can be redesigned, too. Museums–and Paris is practically a city of them–used to be open not much more than banks. But for the hip, art-hungry kids of Paris, that just won’t do. Ever since the contemporary showing space Palais de Tokyo–designed by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, young architects previously known for their residences–debuted in January 2002, it has stayed open: noon to midnight every day except Monday. You can traverse spaces marked off by barbed wire, and navigate at night by way of dangling rice-paper lanterns.
The epicenter of cool is Colette, Paris’s first “concept” store. It has spurred imitations (the funky Surface to Air), and pushed fashion designers to redo their boutiques. Belgian designer Martin Margiela has wrapped his entire store–even the chandelier–in white cotton cloth. Push this trend a millimeter, and these shops might end up exhibits at the Palais de Tokyo.
Back to the Future
In L.A., it’s hard to believe that tail fins on cars are almost a half-century old. The city seems still locked in the ’50s. Not the conformist, togetherness-obsessed Beaver Cleaver ’50s, but the Elvisy, greasy-pompadour, atomic-age drive-in side of the decade. Very hip, very young people prowl the groovy stores of West Side Los Angeles searching for pink and turquoise artifacts from the doo-wop days. They slip into OK to find a perfectly edited collection of ’50s dishware. At Modernica, they discover reissued Eames chairs and chaises longues. If they’ve got a bit more cash and more educated tastes, they venture north to Blackman Cruz. While Blackman Cruz does indeed sell Eisenhower-era goodies, they tend to be superchoice, like a chandelier designed by architect John Lautner or a pair of bright-yellow rubber chairs from a New York sanitarium. Before the happy shoppers head home, they often pick up some wine and Fossier Champagne biscuits at Diamondstar Liquors. To celebrate their trophies? Perhaps. But it’s more likely simply because Diamondstar is located in a refurbished Richard Neutra building, circa 1961.
Out of the Old: New
If you’re looking for cutting-edge design in London, look east. Such formerly sketchy neighborhoods as Shore-ditch and Bethnal Green have, over the past few years, attracted adventursome artists and designers. And, London’s being a seriously old and seriously dense city, much of what’s new and hip has been insinuated into what was once aged and worn. Take the bar-hangout Shore-ditch Electricity Showrooms. It’s been created in old industrial space, in this case–surprise!–a former electricity showroom. In Bethnal Green, hot young architect David Adjaye built a house for two artists and treated it with dark antigraffiti paint to make it less noticeable. Nope. The residence, which was originally a 19th-century timber mill, became one of London’s most-talked-about edifices, the Dirty House. The big daddy of all reclamation projects has to be the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron’s Tate Modern gallery, carved from a humongous old power plant. While their latest building, the Stirling Award-winning Laban Dance Centre, may not have been wrested from an old building, it’s located in gritty Deptford. A plastic surface of polycarbonate allows multhued light to pour into the building during the day, and at night makes it glow as if lighted from within.
