301 Rhode Island street in San Francisco /// Photograph by Léopold Lambert (April 2014):

The following article is a sequel and a synthesis of two past articles. While the first one, written in February 2013 was comparing the architectural design of the Western embassies to medieval castles (less in their aesthetics than in their spatial organization), the second published a few weeks ago was examining the colonial characteristics of gentrification especially in New York. I am continuing my American/Canadian West Coast trip for Archipelago and now finds myself in San Francisco where gentrification is particularly fast and violent. I recorded an Archipelago podcast with Alysabeth Alexander about this topic and in particular the role played by the privatization of transportation by the tech industry in the city of San Francisco where more and more of its employees are encouraged to live while working in Palo Alto. This podcast will be released on Monday, but before doing so, I wanted to present a particularly blatant example of the way architecture does not simply creates real estate value on a given land, but also organizes space in a defensive and antagonistic manner. One of gentrification’s characteristics consists in the fantasy of danger that gentrifying bodies have for their gentrified counterparts — hence the need for them to accelerate the process — and therefore requires from architecture to provide a semiotics of security.

I encountered the building on 301 Rhode Island street right before recording this podcast and coincidentally  – or rather, logically — a tech industry shuttle was parking right in front of it (see photographs below). This building is only one example among many others of what I would like to call “gentrifying fortresses,” yet it presents a certain amount of characteristics that makes it particularly paradigmatic of the role that architecture plays in this societal process. A look at the photographs below will show you how there has been a real architectural care in the conception of the design (spatially, materially, aesthetically, etc.), which encourages us to think that this building was created by an architecture office, which spent dozens of hours of work into it, and is likely to be proud of it for that matter. I would like to argue that, for this reason, the responsibility that architecture holds for the consequences of the spatial apparatus it embodies is even stronger than in the case of developers’ projects.....Continue Reading

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