Buchanan Mall - Ruth Asawa's Fountains
Photo: HaeB, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
Walk north from Post Street into the pedestrian block of Buchanan Street, designed in the 1970s to recall a Japanese village lane, with a cobblestone channel running down its center like a stream.
The folded-metal fountains along the channel are by Ruth Asawa, the San Francisco sculptor famous for her looped-wire forms. As a teenager she and her family were incarcerated during the war, first at the Santa Anita racetrack, where interned Disney artists gave her drawing lessons, and then at a camp in Arkansas. She designed these origami-inspired fountains for the mall in 1976. The originals corroded and were replaced by bronze copies made under her supervision in 1999, though they have not run in recent years.
Asawa spent her life making public art for the city that once sent her away. Look closely at the folds and you can see the paper shapes that inspired them.
More on Wikipedia: Ruth Asawa · Santa Anita Assembly Center · Rohwer War Relocation Center
Stops on this tour
- Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
- Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
- Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
- North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
- Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
- Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
- The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
- Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
- Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
- Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
- The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
- The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
- Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
- South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom