What if skyscrapers still looked Californian...

I had an exciting rabbit hole today. I was drinking coffee at a cafe and saw this building. I really want us to build more housing in San Francisco, but I do love this aesthetic and would be sad to see it gone.

So it got me thinking, what is it about this aesthetic that I really like? What makes it look characteristically Californian? And not just Californian, but coastal Californian? Like, why do we know that's a beach home in San Francisco or San Diego, but definitely not Beirut or Marseilles? And what if we could design large buildings that feel local and are still cute and charming. What if city skylines were more than just how the Tetris blocks lined up?

My goal is to learn what these characteristics are and then use an image generation model to generate new images of a "californian skyscraper" because we can do so much better than this lame proposal for the sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, which belongs back in the powerpoint it came from:

Characteristics of California Architecture

I'll summarize the characteristics quickly but if you're curious see below¹ for a helpful guide I found. Californian architecture has a few main styles: Victorian, Craftsman, and Mission Revival/Spanish Colonial Revival are the main ones.

The house I saw was more Mission Revival, which is characterized by red roofing brought over from the Spaniards, arches in the doorway, bay windows (those 3 panel windows), and fun terrazzo tiles.

Time to prompt Midjourney

I'm using Midjourney's AI image generation to prompt for images because it's likely the best image generation model out there without me fine-tuning Stable Diffusion on Spanish architecture & Skyscrapers. Maybe next post?

Prompt 1: "A building in the architectural style of mission revival, with red roofing, fun terrazzo tiles, the size of a typical Parisian building."

I'm asking for a Parisian sized buildings because if we just build Parisian density into SF², we'd have enough housing to triple our population.

Not bad but it's not big enough. Also, Spanish courtyards look cool, I tried including that

Prompt 2: “A building in the architectural style of mission revival, with red roofing, fun terrazzo tiles, the size of a skyskraper. White arches. A spanish courtyard on the roof with a pond and lots of plants”

These look AWESOME, but in the words of Harper, it just looks like any rich person’s home 😂. It might be getting hung up on the word skyscraper. Also, I really liked Spanish colonial revival instead of mission revival.

Prompt 3: “A building in the architectural style of spanish colonial revival, but with 50 floors”

This feels warmer!! But I miss the red roofing and terrazzo tiles

Prompt 4: “A building in the architectural style of spanish colonial revival, but with 50 floors, red roofing, fun terrazzo tiles.”

If the sunset neighborhood of SF looked like this, we'd have enough housing in SF for anyone who wanted to live here, and it would be able to keep it's unique character and charm.

Here's a good description of California architecture: https://la.curbed.com/2018/6/21/17412090/los-angeles-architecture-modern-spanish ↩
Yay Density! Let's Parisianize SF ↩