Beverly Willis in the 1980s and 1990s (2021

The 1980s was the high-water mark of the Bay Area phase of Beverly Willis's long career. Over this decade, she made her mark here as a pioneering woman architect and architect-developer, part of a circle of ambitious women in San Francisco involved in politics and real property—two fields that were open to them in a way that architecture, still a boys' club, was not.

While leading her eponymous San Francisco architecture firm, Willis often turned to development to self-finance its work, including a five-story adaptive re-use project on Mission Street downtown that housed her office. Another significant project in the city was Nob Hill Court, a multi-unit residential building on Nob Hill commissioned by Huntington Hotel owner Dolly Cope.

Willis's interest in ballet led to her most important and visible project, the San Francisco Ballet Building on Franklin Street, west of the beaux arts Opera House. The Ballet Building defers intentionally to both its neo-classical and high-modern neighbors in the Civic Center precinct, including Charles Edward Bassett's Davies Hall. Its attention to scale and its classical massing contrast with the machismo of the nearby State Office Building by SOM's Larry Doane. SOM's David Childs and Brian Lee's late-1990s addition to Bliss & Faville's neo-classical State Office Building similarly gives a classical organization to its modernist main façade.

Within its four loft-like stories, the Ballet Building accommodates a full array of rehearsal and support spaces for the ballet company. Motivated by her love of ballet and her friendship with the company's principals, Willis took great pains to meet their specific and exacting needs—no small achievement in a sponsored project with all of the usual budgetary constraints.

Willis's visibility and her working knowledge of real estate development in San Francisco led Paul Reichman's Olympia & York to engage her, along with the Toronto architect-planner Eberhard Zeidler, to produce a new master plan for part of the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area, which extended south from Market to Folsom Streets between Third and Fourth Streets and incorporated San Francisco's convention center on its southmost block. Zeidler and Willis's Yerba Buena Gardens envisioned a public park and promenade, anchored by cultural uses, between

Mission and Howard Streets, connected by a bridge to the roof of the convention center. The roof provided a platform for Tivoli-like children's attractions. A mixed-use program of towers, fitted into the two-block site, would pay for the public benefits.

Zeidler and Willis broke with the Metabolist-Brutalist tone of a plan by Kenzo Tange and MBT. Its connected outdoor settings were framed by new buildings along the addressing streets—an orchestrated sequence of landscape elements, promenades, and overlooks. Despite Olympia & York's rolling collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, their plan caught the public imagination and provided the template for the site's subsequent redevelopment.

Willis sold her pioneering Mission Street adaptive re-use project at the height of the market and bought vineyard property in St. Helena, building a house there and living in semi-retirement for several years. The flood-prone Napa River made an island of her vineyard—her house safe on its hillock but her vineyards submerged. Once property values recovered, Willis sold her house and moved to Manhattan, presciently buying and renovating a four-story brownstone near the Morgan Library and launching the next phase of her career as her foundation's doyenne.

Willis shared the ambition of other Bay Area architects of her generation to be known beyond the region. As a woman in what was then a male-dominated profession, she made full use of the routes to prominence available to her, including real estate development. Her love of ballet led to a notable civic commission that became a reference point for ballet companies elsewhere. That building also spoke to her cultural interests and her ability to read the city as a socio-political landscape—a field for her creativity. Had she lived on as a vineyard owner, we would remember her as a pioneer woman architect and as a civic planner whose humane sense of place made something of value in what could easily have been one more soulless superblock. Yerba Buena Gardens thrives precisely because of the cultural park at its heart, still the best and most humane of the city's downtown civic spaces.

Written for an obituary-in-advance for Architectural Record, 17 April 2021.