From the Curbed inbox:
Does anyone know who was/is the architect responsible for The City Center at Geary and Masonic? Would or has anyone taken ownership of the design?City Center was once voted Ugliest Building in SF by Curbed readers, so which architect gets the blame? The honor goes to local San Francisco architect Wilber Peugh, but in his defense the building took a bad turn in the 1990s. Along with partner Walter O'Brian, they designed over 2000 buildings, like 120 Montgomery, it's skinny Moderne neighbor at 130 Montgomery, and the very cool corner building that was once the West Portal branch of the San Francisco Bank. Peugh was known for his Moderne style, which sadly didn't read on the old City Center building. One reason it didn't fit in with his other Moderne buildings was that the City Center was originally designed as a Sears Roebuck, which had its own large-scale windowless suburban-style department store model to follow.
When completed in 1951, the building was the largest Sears store in the Bay Area and one of the largest in the nation. Sears left the location in 1991, leaving the building to be chopped up and subdivided into other stores and creating the look that earned it the "ugliest building" title.
Luckily the recent project by Studio One Eleven to convert the building into a Target (plus some other new tenants) has spruced things up considerably.
· Historic Resource Evaluation Response - 2675 Geary Boulevard [SF Planning]
· Previous Coverage of City Center [Curbed SF]
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