Presidio Officers Club preservation also an act of reinvention

The latest upgrades to the Presidio Officers Club, which reopens to the public Saturday, are a showcase of meticulous historic preservation. They also show how subjective a term like historic preservation can be.

While you can glimpse an exposed adobe wall from Spanish military days, most of the newly completed work involved the restoration of an earlier restoration from 1934 that relied on romantic visions of Californias roots. More recent additions to the complex, by contrast, have been altered freely in the latest round of work to bring them into sync with current design priorities.

Make no mistake: The $19 million rehabilitation designed by Perkins + Will for the Presidio Trust is another welcome step toward making the former Army post part of the Bay Areas daily life. But it is an act of reinvention as well as preservation, a case study in how turning back the clock is never as simple as it seems.

Other local examples of blurred history include such high-profile cultural buildings as the Contemporary Jewish Museum from 2008, which spills out from the shell of a much older Willis Polk-designed substation facing Yerba Buena Gardens. The lobby includes the original iron trusses and tile-clad columns, but they were stored off-site while a parking garage was inserted below. On a more mundane level, consider the frequency with which the facades of older buildings are retained while much larger structures are erected behind them.

But the goal at the Officers Club, billed by the trust as San Franciscos most historic building, wasnt to restore pieces of the past as much of an overall sense of what was.

We wanted to repair what needed to be repaired and leave everything else in place, said Christina Wallace, project manager for the trust, which manages nearly all of the 1,491-acre enclave at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The great thing about the Army is that they always added. They never took things away.

Relics of Victorian era

This is most obvious in the Mesa Room to the left of the main entrance: At the south end is a wall of exposed adobe bricks that were stacked there at some point between 1780 and 1812, a period during which earthquakes and fires periodically ravaged the Spanish garrison. The walls on either side are covered in thin strips of wood painted green, relics of the Victorian era when the small adobe building was expanded and, simultaneously, reclad in Old West style.

The overall tone of the room is set by the most thorough redo of all, 1934s Mission Revival makeover. The deep-set windows slathered in white plaster are from that era, as are the dark wood doors and beams that were artfully distressed back then to make them look old.

The faux historic 1934 details extend throughout the newly restored portions of the older wings of the complex, because thats what defined the building California Historical Landmark No. 79 when its period of historic significance ended in 1945. Army officials touted the Officers Club in 1934 as a faithful replica of the former building, complete with wrought iron grilles on the windows and a Mission Revival veranda and buttresses out front. Eighty years later, it feels more like a beguiling act of make-believe shipped in from Santa Barbara than a remote outpost of a fading empire.

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Presidio Officers Club preservation also an act of reinvention