Paffard Keatinge-Clay (* 1926) is probably best known—at least among Northern Californian and some scattered European cognoscenti—as the architect of the San Francisco State University Student Union (1969–73), although the building’s bold presence amidst mostly undistinguished campus buildings (figs. 1a/b, 2, 5, 18) is now considerably obscured by a patchwork of later modifications. Still, the building’s relative invisibility cannot solely be attributed to subsequent neglect, nor to its absence from Paul Turner’s canonic monograph on American campus architecture (1984). There must be other reasons, connected perhaps with the complexities of its origins. The architect himself gives the following, rather candid description of the dilemma inscribed in this sort of commission:


“In the days of the turbulent life in the campuses of America and the wave of the Hippie movement to San Francisco, an extraordinary challenge was presented whereby the work of the architect had to fulfill this revolution and at the same time be approved by the establishment. No easy task. One architect had already tried and failed.”


In fact, previous to the choice of Keatinge-Clay for the job, the Student Union had become notorious because of a widely publicized project by Moshe Safdie for this site, a design allegedly “initiated and approved by the students,” and whose “rejection by the College Board of Trustees in 1968 incited Campus riots,” as the Safdie saga would have it (fig. 4). Though Keatinge-Clay had already participated in the first round of the competition, it was only the second, limited competition that finally brought him the commission. 


As a result of these events, the campus was endowed with a colossal architectural curiosity, expressive both of San Francisco’s status of a “hippie Lourdes” and (albeit more indirectly) of the cultural surplus generated, throughout the sixties, by the Bay Area’s booming war industries. In its plastic gesticulation, the student center thus proclaims nothing so much than a “howl of freedom” against conformity, evocative of the “Summer of Love” and of the Beat rhetoric of “being roughed up by life.” As to the structural acrobatics involved and the dramatic cost overrun it engendered (and that ultimately forced the architect to declare bankruptcy and to leave the country shortly after the building’s completion in 1975), it tells its own story about the more down-to-earth politics involved. 


Keatinge-Clay’s addition to the San Francisco Art Institute may be less spectacular as a project if compared to the SFSU. Yet it is...