So you walk through the streets of San Francisco thinking about sex. Not just on Market Street, although everybody thinks about sex on Market Street because of the way the Ferry Building rises from the base of the axis like a -- well, Aaron Betsky isn't afraid to say the word. Like a penis. Betsky has written an entire book on this subject, the subject of sex, the subject of men, and women, and men and women, and men and men, and women and women, and men and women and buildings of all things, buildings like the Ferry Building, the little tiny tower way at the base of Market Street there, flesh-colored in the misty air of a summer morning, almost invisible in the fray. Swallowed, that is, by the urban scene. Down the hatch of humanity.
"It's interesting because there've been all kinds of attempts either to get rid of it or make it larger," Betsky is saying, standing on the corner of Market and New Montgomery, looking at the Ferry Building, which seems slightly apologetic at the moment, for being what it is and not more and not less. Betsky is the curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and he has written a book about sex and buildings called Building Sex -- Men, Women, Architecture, and the Construction of Sexuality. The book, with its bright red cover with the word SEX in huge white letters, has been seen tucked under arms around town. Now Betsky has let us hitch a ride for an hour or so to see the city through his eyes, and his eyes are eyes perhaps more attuned than many other eyes to the sexuality contained in city surroundings -- sex in flying buttresses on building tops, sex in split skyscrapers, sex in sleek steel silhouettes and stiletto spires. If you wore glasses, you'd be taking them off to defog them. Betsky has stopped waving at the Ferry Building, and we are now turning the corner toward 1 Bush.
Perhaps you know 1 Bush. It is a green glass and green stone building, not very tall, with huge plate-glass windowpanes on the bottom level and a porch of sorts that lets out onto a courtyard paved with pebbles and a water fountain quite unmistakably in the shape of one of those Georgia O'Keeffe flowers people complained about, back in the days before Robert Mapplethorpe showed the world what two-dimensional sex really looks like. Compared to the Mapplethorpe oeuvre, 1 Bush is the kind of building you can definitely take home to Thanksgiving dinner, but that's not what we're here to talk about. Betsky is indicating the first floor of the building to us, because the space at ground level here is a mixture of indoors and outdoors: The skyscraper kind of cantilevers out over a polished stone deck, which is in the open air but still somehow inside the building as well, or at least directly underneath it. If you're discussing the sexuality of architecture, you're talking about in and out, and Betsky, looking at the building, describes it this way: "Everything pushes and pulls through each other." By coincidence, Betsky's flat leather shoes are exactly the same green as the building's stone.
In addition to his shoes, Betsky, on this foggy morning, is wearing yellowish checked pants and a dark, well-tailored blazer; his hair is going salt-and-pepper gray, which makes him, exteriorly, at once distinguished and young-looking. He walks quickly up Bush, and he has a habit of crossing streets against the light, as if time, on the opposite street corner, is tapping its toes at him. Time, however, is not the essential element of architectural sexuality in the realm of Building Sex. Space is -- more specifically, the difference between inside and outside. Here's what Betsky writes, in the introduction:
"We thus live in a strangely and unequally divided world. Our man-made world was made by men. Men founded our cities and designed the build-ings in them. Men decided what the world we travel through every day was going to look like. ... Where were women during all this? They were the ones who made this world livable. They made the homes comfortable and the streets places of activity. ... We are all women trying to make ourselves at home in a world of men. It means that we all inhabit two worlds: one of projection that is artificial, abstract, and male; the other of protection that is sensual, informal, and female."
Now we're at Union Square, and Betsky is disappointed. This slice of grass, he says, "is supposed to be the heart of the city," but it seems to have fallen short. The color of Union Square, green, is feminine, he says, but there's this monument to war sticking straight up out of the center of it, and the park, now as ever, is "filled with bums." The result? Mixed up, to say the least.
And what about the rest of San Francisco? Stubby skyscrapers, painted ladies, overdecorated buildings, the clipped cylinder of SFMOMA itself -- is this a city, sexually speaking, that knows what it wants? Ask Betsky and he hesitates for a moment, unwilling to sum up an entire city in one word, but then it comes bounding out of him: "Confused," he says, looking around. We follow his gaze. Suddenly, everything about everything seems to make a whole lot more sense, now that there's no reason for it to at all.
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