Creative Class

Bloomberg reports:

Tour buses have hit San Francisco’s well-known gay district, and some residents are none too happy about it. While the visitors may consider themselves tourists just taking in another site, locals call them something else: quick-hit voyeurs who disrupt traffic and parking and rarely spend any money …  Castro residents say the buses started showing up about four months ago, and now arrive every Thursday and Sunday, typically between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.

The Castro district became a haven for gays during the political and social activism of the 1960s and 1970s. One of its merchants, camera shop owner Harvey Milk, became San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor. Milk was assassinated in 1978, further uniting the community. A movie based on his life is planned for release later this year, which may draw even more tourists to the neighborhood, residents say.

Your thoughts?

Seems the sixties and the hippie movement around the Bay Area had a big impact on architectural innovation a la Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, as well as music, popular culture, food (Alice Waters), and technology. Zahid Sardar, writing in the San Francisco Gate, reviews Alastair Gordon’s new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Creativity requires self-expression. It also appears to arise in clumps or clusters, not just in time but in space.

Gordon’s research makes it clear that the ’60s generated many of the ideas about recycling and protecting the environment that we consider normal today … [T]he ’60s may have inspired the most visually arresting buildings by some of the most celebrated and visionary architects today.

Some of those unconventional buildings, it turns out, were created because the amateur builders could not quite figure out how to construct Fuller’s dome of conjoined triangular components. Nevertheless, you might see links between those forms and the wild imaginings of architect Eric Owen Moss in Culver City; Frank Gehry’s roof forms for the Bilbao Museum Guggenheim and the twisting, shiny Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the wacky, wonderful main library in Seattle by Rem Koolhaas; and even the Federal Building in San Francisco by Thom Mayne.

What other areas of the U.S. seem to have been affected architecturally by the hippie movement?