AMT Faculty: Lucille Tenazas Featured on Cooper Hewitt’s “Object of the Day”
THE FOG CITY FREEWAY
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Cooper Hewitt is dedicating select Object of the Day entries to the work of women designers in our collection.
San Francisco is the city veiled in fog, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, known for its precipitous hills. Now, more often than not, the city is uttered in the same breath as Silicon Valley, skyrocketing rent prices and “those darn millennials.” These things aside, current residents, and indeed, many of those who have left their hearts in San Francisco at one time or another, may be astonished to learn that the a double-decker freeway once encircled the city’s downtown area and separated the city from its glistening bay.
This freeway, the California State Route 480, also known as the Embarcadero Freeway, was irreparably damaged during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and the elevated roadway was razed. One year after the demolition of the freeway, 2AES: The Art and Architecture Exhibition Space—the city’s alternative exhibition space modeled after New York’s own Storefront for Art and Architecture—launched a competition to envision how the Embarcadero could be transformed. Through the proposals gathered in this competition, San Francisco’s waterfront could again become the intimate linkage point between city and bay.
Enter AIGA medalist Lucille Tenazas, whose “Call for Vision” poster immortalizes this pivotal moment. As one writer noted in the San Francisco Chronicle of the subsequent competition, which drew more than 200 entries, the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway, “might be marked by future historians as a turning point in a revolt of Americans against the tyranny of the automobile, a recognition that there are other human needs than the need to be at the steering wheel of a car hurtling down a freeway at 60 miles per hour.”
One can’t help but imagine the layered, often hidden-in-plain-sight histories of San Francisco in the relationship between photograph, text, and type of Tenazas’s signature style, epitomized here in this poster.
