page_title: Paffard Keatinge-Clay
section_title: SFAI
hierarchical_section_title: Paffard Keatinge-Clay / Built works / SFAI
caption_attribution_description: English: San Francisco Art Institute roof.
context_page_description: Paffard Keatinge-Clay is an English-born architect in the modernist tradition who spent most of his professional life in the United States of America, before moving to southern Spain, where he has increasingly focussed on sculpture.
  Practicing architecture in San Francisco from 1960 until 1975, Paffard Keatinge-Clay left behind a legacy of architectural work in the Bay Area, some of which is realised, but for a large body only paper documentation exists. These buildings and projects are indices of a career marked in equal measure by synthesis and ambition and which is characterised by a series of apprenticeships with major architectural figures that were active between late 1940 and early 1960: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He also shared an association with a host of other notable designers including: Myron Goldsmith, Mies van der Rohe, Siegfried Giedion, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Ernő Goldfinger, and Rafael Soriano. He has lived for many years near Mijas, in Spain, where he maintains an architect's office and has developed interests in "very pure large-scale sculpture".
context_section_description: The 1969 SFAI project is an informed response to a unique and topographically challenging urban site to create a new city scape as functional as it is compelling. Here, an elongated north-south ramp (similar to LeCorbusier's 1961 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts) is driven into and through (instead of between) the "working" art studios. Workshop space is shaped as a mass supporting a great, publicly accessible belvedere from which the entire city can be viewed in a 200-degree. This horizontal datum is then broken, horizon-like, by an architectural landscape of steps, terraces and pavilions that frame views of Alcatraz, Coit Tower, and the shifting pastoral maritime landscape of San Francisco Bay beyond. In so doing, the roof becomes the frame through which the viewer perceives both the city and its occupants. Quotations from similar Corbusian buildings of the period are everywhere such as the light cannons of LaTourette or the hand railings standard in the Atelier. On the other hand, concrete columns in the open studio spaces are monolithic cruciforms typical of Mies Van der Rohe rather than the rounded pilotis of Le Corbusier.
caption: San Francisco Art Institute roof.
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