San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King is a Bay Area treasure. From deriding the new LinkedIn building as "a well-tailored packing crate" to tipping his hat to 145 Natoma, the city's most underrated architectural wonder, his views on San Francisco design are as anticipated and polarizing as that of his colleague, food critic Michael Bauer.
Today King tweeted out his love of the stark and dark Glen Park BART station.
Detail shots from Glen Park, still and always the best BART station there is pic.twitter.com/UbMRSvn7uE
— John King (@JohnKingSFChron) June 9, 2016
This should come as no surprise as King mentioned the 1973 Brutalist style transit station, designed by Corlett & Spackman and Ernest Born, in his book Cityscape: San Francisco and Its Buildings (required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in local architecture and design).
In it, he writes:
With a name like Brutalism, no wonder the public never warmed to this raw strain of architecture that arrived in America from Europe in the 1960s. Yet the movement produced such evocative works as Glen Park's BART station, where the shadowy drama comes from the interplay of heavy forms, one pushing past the next. The boxy exterior with its drab plaza gives no hint of what's below: tucked deep inside the earth, under a raided muscular shell, trains rush in and out through a brooding grandeur of rough concrete against polished stone, blunt structural beams, and sharp shafts of light. BART has fort-three stations; this surely is the best.
As for the worst? One could make a strong case against the Powell Street BART Station, which is the busiest station while being the most unflattering and difficult to maneuver.
In 2014 ranking, SFist also gave Glen Park top billing, with Rockridge and San Bruno stations taking silver and bronze, respectively.
Here are some shots of San Francisco's best BART station:
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