Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The administration building, above, has walls covered in exotic plants.

PARIS — No one relishes a grand architectural scandal the way Parisians do. François Mitterrand sprinkled the city with bold landmarks, from I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre to Dominique Perrault’s National Library, which was regarded by many as a noble failure. Georges Pompidou built just one, the colorful machinelike museum that bears his name, and if traditionalists were appalled by it, he is still best remembered for that masterpiece of 1970’s populism.

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The atelier and bookstore building has aboriginal ceiling painting.

Like its predecessors, the new Musée du Quai Branly should raise the hackles of people who hate to see Paris’s beauty tampered with. Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love. Its jumble of mismatched structures, set in a lush, rambling garden on the Left Bank of the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, hardly conforms to notions of Parisian elegance. And the relocation of African, Oceanic and Asian artworks from the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens has stirred considerable resentment.

Yet for all of its flaws, Jean Nouvel’s building creates a kaleidoscopic montage of urban impressions. And once you give yourself over to the experience, you may find it the greatest monument to French popular culture since the Pompidou.

Mr. Nouvel is best known for technologically refined architecture that distorts the way we perceive the world around us. His 1994 Cartier Foundation building on Boulevard Raspail is a hypnotic reworking of the conventional glass box, a play of transparent and reflective surfaces that dissolves into the city around it.

At Quai Branly, however, Mr. Nouvel did not want to impose Western technological values on a building devoted to non-Western art. Nor did he want to create a parody of tribal architecture.

“The building could not be an affirmation of the triumph of Western architecture,” he said, gazing down on his creation from the top of the Eiffel Tower on a recent afternoon. “If you understand the rules,” he said, the mystery is lost.

It’s a nutty idea. Without rules, how does an architect begin? Mr. Nouvel got started by observing his context. The museum rises from a 19-acre site anchored at its east end by a row of grand 19th-century apartment buildings. Their uniform facades represent the rationally ordered Paris of Baron Haussmann, who carved out the city’s broad boulevards. Haussmann’s efforts were seen as a way of cleansing the old city of its medieval squalor. But the aim was also to isolate the other: the downtrodden urban populace, among whom radical ideas festered.

To Mr. Nouvel this is not dead history, as recent rioting by immigrants on Paris’s outskirts has shown. Thumbing his nose at Haussmann, he offers an anarchic collection of motley structures that spill out over the garden. The main body of the museum, propped up on thick columns, extends through the center of the lush space. An enormous curved glass wall shields the garden from cars roaring by along the Seine. Two small buildings — one for artists’ studios, another for administrative offices — protrude from the ends of the Haussmann apartments.

The studied casualness is dumbfounding at first. The forms seem carelessly patched together. A cylindrical lobby and temporary gallery tucked under the main building seem squashed under the weight; the connection between the gallery buildings and the offices — a few small bridges — looks flimsy.

What’s more, each facade is different, as if the architect couldn’t stop fussing with his design. On one side of the building are rust-colored louvered brises-soleil. On the other, a row of colorful boxes projects out over the garden.

Some will attack the project as yet another example of a self-indulgent architect run amok. Others will take issue with the handicraft quality of some of the structures and the use of childlike colors, which raise touchy questions about how we portray non-Western cultures.

Yet as you explore the buildings, it is clear that a vibrant imagination is at work. The main gallery building atop the columns, loosely inspired by Le Corbusier’s 1952 Unité d’Habitation housing block in Marseille, suggests a ship drifting through the city. Yet the exterior is made intentionally crude by the rust-colored blinds and colored boxes.

The atelier structure seems like a simple Modernist glass box at first glance, yet a subtle pattern, reminiscent of aboriginal artwork, can be discerned on the building’s facade. Inside a number of aboriginal artists have painted the ceilings in bold, swirling patterns that are illuminated by night so that they are visible from the street.

By contrast, the exterior of the administration building is swallowed up by a vertical carpet of exotic plants punctured by big windows. On some stories, the plants invade the building, crawling down the interior walls. (“When you put in little flowers, people are happy,” Mr. Nouvel said of his design.)

Taken as a whole, the museum evokes an abandoned city, sprinkled with French Modernist landmarks, that has been taken over and transformed into a wondrous collage.

The approach to the galleries rewards patience. From the lobby visitors climb a long, spiraling ramp around one side of a towering glass silo housing hundreds of musical instruments. The ramp then doubles back, crossing the temporary gallery space before reaching a corridor that leads to the main galleries.

The journey is perverse yet also magical. Enclosed behind glass, the instruments are like exotic birds perched just outside of reach. As the ramp rises, and the silo is left behind, you feel as if you are being lifted up into the air.

The final payoff is in the main galleries, a cavernous, 650-foot-long hall. Two parallel leather-clad barriers embedded with benches and video screens weave down the middle. Mezzanine platforms at either end offer sweeping views of the exhibits.

The effect is of an informal warehouse packed with unexpected treasures. Bathed in an inky light, the artworks are in towering glass cabinets whose edges seem to fade into the darkness. At times the transparency allows you to view rows of artworks all at once that virtually float in the vastness of the space.

This project certainly won’t satisfy everyone. But should it? Mr. Nouvel did not set out to pay homage to history, be it Modernist, neo-Classical or otherwise. His message is that the old system doesn’t work: let’s invent a new one.

In that sense the Musée du Quai Branly is part of a historical continuum, linked to the Pompidou and to Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera in the way it melds social and visual experiences in a joyful promenade. Mr. Nouvel’s design is an act of dissent that forces us to feel the world again.

By Richard A. Webster Staff Writer, New Orleans City Business
2006-06-26 10:24 AM CST

NEW ORLEANS — Robyn Lewis, owner of Dark Charm fashion and accessories for women, represents the first line of defense for the Magazine Street shop owners. She is the first to see them come strutting in their pumps down St. Andrew Street, the bewigged pack of thieves who have plagued the Lower Garden District since May.

Like an SOS flare, Lewis grabs her emergency phone list and starts calling.

“They’re coming,” she warns Eric Ogle a salesman at Vegas, a block down Magazine Street. Ogle, who was terrorized by the brazen crew two months earlier, alerts neighboring Winky’s where manager Kendra Bonga braces for the onslaught.

Soon every shop owner in the 2000 block of Magazine Street has been alerted.

Sarah Celino at Trashy Diva eyes the door, ready to flip the lock at the first sight of the ringleader’s pink jumpsuit and fluorescent red wig.

Down at Turncoats, where the fashion-happy gang once made off with more than $2,000 in merchandise, store manager Wes Davis stands ready.

Davis said it wasn’t supposed to be like this. They survived Hurricane Katrina’s Category 3 winds and the ensuing looters. They reopened despite the long odds of doing business in a devastated city. The last thing the Magazine Street shop owners expected to threaten their survival was a crime ring of transvestites.

“They’re fearless,” said Ogle. “Once they see something they like they won’t stop until they have it. They don’t care, they’ll go to jail. It’s really gotten bad. You know it’s ridiculous when everyone on the block knows who they are.”

Expensive tastes

The transvestites first appeared in March when they raided Magazine Street like a marauding army of kleptomaniacal showgirls, said Davis, using clockwork precision and brute force to satisfy high-end boutique needs.

They first hit Vegas March 31 while Ogle was working.

“They come in groups of three or four. One tries to distract you while the others get the stuff and run out the door. It’s very simple,” Ogle said.

Next door at Winky’s, Bonga heard people screaming inside Vegas, then saw a blur of cheap wigs and masculine legs in designer shoes streak past her door.

“All of a sudden our UPS guy dove out of the store and tried to tackle them and there’s little Eric from next door on the sidewalk with a bunch of stuff he managed to grab from one of the guys,” Bonga said. “The other two guys took off down the street and jumped into a car driven by a real girl.”

Ogle gave police a description of the perpetrators — African-American males ranging in height from 6 feet to 6-5. They all wore the same midriff shirts and wigs with twisted, dreadnaught hair.

“They’re all very skinny and very flamboyant,” Ogle said.

Two hours after the police left, the transvestites returned to Magazine Street to storm Turncoats just a block away from Vegas, and made off with more than $2,000 in merchandise.

“They move like clockwork,” Davis said. “Two thousand dollars is a lot for our store to lose, especially being in the slow summer season. It makes it so I can’t even mark my stuff down as much as I want to because I’m trying to make up for what I lost.”

In the ensuing weeks, the gang of transvestites continued their reign of terror. Sometimes they come dressed as men, though Bonga said it is obvious who they are based on their delicately plucked eyebrows. Sometimes they bring 2-year-old children to add to the level of distraction. They once returned to Vegas holding an “infant” that really was a Cabbage Patch doll wrapped in a blanket.

“They’ll make themselves scarce for a few weeks and then one day you’ll be busy with a customer and all of a sudden there’s a whole slew of them in your store and there’s nothing you can do because you’re there by yourself,” Lewis said.

Scarce evidence

The New Orleans Police Department investigated the Turncoats robbery but unless police catch a shoplifter in the act or in possession of stolen property there is little they can do besides take a report, said NOPD spokeswoman Bambi Hall.

“If store security states that someone took something, and then by the time we apprehend them they don’t have the property, then there’s really nothing we can do because it’s their word against the (suspect),” Hall said.

Lewis said she understands the understaffed NOPD has bigger priorities than to “catch a drag queen running down the street with an armful of clothing.” So the store owners created their own watchdog system unofficially known as the “Drag Queen Alert List,” a comprehensive phone roster of every business on the block with stars next to those who carry guns.

When one shop owner spots a gang member, they immediately warn everyone on the block and raise their defenses in unison.

When they enter Turncoats, Davis said he locks them inside the store, which “freaks them out,” and they leave.

Celino said she doesn’t even wait for them to enter the store.

“A couple weeks ago, a group of them was outside and one looked like the guy who came in here and ripped us off so I locked the door on them,” Celino said. “I know maybe that’s rude, if they really were innocent people, but there’s nothing else we can do. You look like the queens who ripped us off so I’m sorry but I have to lock the door.”

Ogle and Bonga say they regret being forced to resort to such profiling but they feel they have no other choice. The transvestites, Ogle said, appear to be drug-addicted and fearless in their lust for designer shoes, jackets and jewelry.

“The city’s not functioning the way it was and I’m sure a lot of them were getting some kind of government aid, which they probably aren’t getting any more so they’re incredibly desperate,” Ogle said.

And sometimes violent.

When Lewis co-owned Trashy Diva, they attacked one of her partners in the French Quarter location, throwing her to the ground and tossing a heavy mannequin on top of her.

“They’re kind of confused because they think they’re women so they don’t mind hitting women, but they’re dudes. If you get hit by one it’s like getting hit by a dude. … Because the police are so poorly staffed, we’re kind of on our own but the system we have seems to be working. I haven’t seen them in at least a week but they’ll be back. They’re never gone for long.”•

Officials say work will begin soon on recreation areas along the neglected channel.

Taking an important step toward a long-sought dream of restoring the concrete-lined Los Angeles River, city officials today will announce the five sites where they intend to build a series of parks, pathways and pedestrian bridges to lure residents to the forsaken waterway.

There has been talk for years of sprucing up the river and placing it at the center of a string of new urban parks. But now city officials believe they have sufficient political consensus and funds to begin.

“We’re no longer just talking about this,” said City Councilman Ed Reyes, the chair of the council’s river panel. “People don’t realize how far we’ve gotten.”

In one spot north of Chinatown, officials hope to dig a second channel of the river that would slice through an industrial area and skirt the edge of the new Cornfields State Park that is under construction.

About three miles north in Taylor Yards, where another state park is in the works, city officials hope to obtain a parcel of land from the Union Pacific Corp. that would allow them to knock out some of the concrete channel to create a waterway that looks like a river.

Most daunting, perhaps, is a plan to build a park along the river downtown between the 1st Street bridge and the 10 Freeway — a stretch now occupied by railroad tracks and a forlorn industrial area that is anything but green.

The other two areas for major park projects are the river’s headwaters in Canoga Park, where Calabasas and Bell creeks converge, and a series of parks at the confluence of the Verdugo Wash and the Los Angeles River near the junction of the Golden State and Ventura freeways. The mouth of the Verdugo Wash would be widened by removing some concrete and made to look more natural.

The five sites were among 20 “areas of opportunity” that the city wants to develop. The remaining sites will likely get smaller projects.

Some of what is being proposed may not be completed for 20 years or more, officials said. Still they remain hopeful that construction on a few projects could be underway within five years.

“I don’t want to over-promise anything,” said city engineer Gary Lee Moore. “What we’ve now done is taken five areas and actually shown the greening possibilities and some of the changes that might happen.”

Council President Eric Garcetti and Reyes both argue that, even without money, the city can change zoning laws to rid the river of some nuisance businesses.

“With new zoning we can change the face of the river without the funding,” said Garcetti. “If we do get the funding, then we’re looking at things moving very quickly.”

Officials acknowledge that many obstacles remain.

Among them are improving the river’s water quality, accommodating railroad tracks that run along the river, obtaining property, keeping the public away from the river during big storms and, most important, paying for it.

City officials and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are hoping money could be available from bond measures on the November ballot.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) recently promised to seek $80 million from the federal government. Also working in the city’s favor is that several of its agencies, including the DWP and the Bureau of Sanitation, already own key properties along the river.

Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, after a series of devastating floods struck the city during massive winter rains, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and local agencies lined most of the 51-mile-long river channel with concrete.

That was a common flood-control practice across the U.S. at the time, but it soon prompted calls from environmentalists to restore some natural functions to the tarnished rivers.

Restorations already have happened in several cities, including Denver, Chicago, San Jose and Chattanooga, Tenn. With some irony, one of the major agencies involved is the corps, which in recent years has increasingly become involved in environmental restoration.

Three generals have visited the river in the last year, and the corps is working on its own feasibility study to determine how concrete could be removed while retaining the river’s flood-control capacity.

One project likely to be completed first is the extension of a bike path along the river that would one day connect Glendale and Atwater Village to downtown. The city attorney’s office has begun exploring ways to acquire rights-of-way through several properties near Elysian Park for an additional 2.6 miles of pathway south of Fletcher Drive.

Other ideas include planting thousands of trees to beautify river-adjacent residential and industrial neighborhoods, converting streets to parkland between the river and the Cornfields park and installing removable dams near downtown to create artificial lakes during the summer months.

“Twenty years ago we were cutting through chain-link fence to get people to the river,” said Shelly Backlar, the executive director of Friends of the L.A. River.

“I may be more optimistic than some, but I think it’s now only a matter of when restoration is going to happen.”

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Meeting schedule

The city is holding three meetings in the next few days to get residents’ ideas on Los Angeles River projects. Public testimony will be used to help shape a river master plan, scheduled for release in January, with the expectation that it will go to a City Council vote early next year. At that point, specific designs and plans for each of the five parks will be developed.

Nine more meetings will be held later in the year. The first three upcoming meetings:

Today, 10 a.m.: Goodwill Workforce Center, 342 N. San Fernando Road, Los Angeles.

• Tuesday , 6 p.m.: Oakwood Secondary School, 11600 Magnolia Blvd., Encino.

• Wednesday, 6 p.m.: Evergreen Recreation Center, 2844 E. 2nd St., Boyle Heights.

PARIS, June 22 — Louis Vuitton was certain it had found an ingenious way around the French ban on doing business on Sunday: it promoted its vast new flagship store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées as a cultural space.

Philippe de Poulpiquet/Le Parisien

 

Cultural spaces, it seems, are exempt from the country’s tough labor laws, which among other things prohibit most retailers from opening on what, in some circles here, is still called the “day of the Lord.”

But the small area on the top floor of its 20,000-square-foot store dedicated to art exhibits and Vuitton’s corporate history and the tiny bookstore below were not enough of a cultural statement for the French Christian Labor Union and the National Clothing Federation.

Accusing the luxury goods giant of violating workers’ rights to leisure time, the two groups won a lawsuit last month to shut down the Sunday operations, even though none of the store’s employees belong to the union.

“They argued that buying one of their handbags was a cultural activity and that their store is a place that amuses,” said Thierry Doueb, the lawyer for the two groups. “They argued that they sell books. For me there’s nothing cultural about carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag.”

Officials for LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the parent company of Vuitton, declined to comment pending the outcome of the company’s appeal, which will be heard by an administrative tribunal on Monday.

But Yves Carcelle, Vuitton’s chief executive, recently described the ban as “nonsense.”

In a country where unemployment is nearly 10 percent, the Vuitton case is part of a much larger guerrilla war over the meaning of Sunday.

The country’s century-old law limiting Sunday work has been amended and eroded, interpreted and flouted to such an extent over the years that it makes little sense. Proprietors who provide “urgent” economic needs, including those who operate restaurants, bars, tobacco shops, newspaper kiosks, florists and pharmacies, are exempt from the ban.

Retailers who can prove an “athletic, recreational or cultural” side to their businesses in “touristic” zones in cities throughout the country, including several neighborhoods in Paris, can be exempted, depending on decisions by the local prefect. So can retailers in depressed economic areas who can make the case that they might go bankrupt if they cannot open on Sundays.

Food markets and many food stores can open on Sundays, but only in the morning. Bakeries can stay open all day, so long as they close another day of the week to allow their “artisans” to rest.

Reflecting the changing patterns of French family life, the law was amended in 2005 to allow gardening and home improvement centers, DVD and video rental stores, and Internet service shops to operate on Sundays.

Violators can be subject to stiff fines, but the law is sporadically enforced. The Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Élysées, which sells DVD’s, CD’s and books, for example, challenged it nearly two decades ago, staying open until midnight and then later opening on Sundays.

“They told us we’d pay fines, but we did it anyway,” said Jean-Noël Reinhardt, president of Virgin Stores. “We were absolutely not allowed to be open, but we did it. It started a debate in France, and after many years the law was changed. There’s a kind of hypocrisy here — everyone knows the law doesn’t correspond to the needs and desires of the consumer.”

Now, Virgin is allowed to operate some of its stores legally in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux, because they have been designated “cultural” enterprises in designated tourist areas. By contrast, it has to keep stores in 15 other cities, including Lille, Avignon, Lyon and Strasbourg, shut tight.

Virgin France is required to have the 100 employees who work Sundays sign statements every week affirming that they are doing so voluntarily. They are also paid double time.

In addition to Virgin, Vuitton’s other neighbors on the Champs-Élysées that operate on Sundays include a soccer souvenir shop and Sephora, the perfumer and makeup emporium, which is also owned by LVMH.

The crackdown against Vuitton and other businesses is largely a result of an aggressive campaign against clothing, shoe and handbag sellers by the National Clothing Federation, an organization that represents 55,000 clothing merchants in France. Its main goal is to protect small merchants, for whom opening on Sundays is a bother and a burden, from big competitors.

This month, after the federation filed suit, the court of appeals of Versailles affirmed the prefect’s order of a Sunday closing for all the clothing stores in the Usines Center mall in the nearby town of Vélizy-Villacoublay, but allowed others to remain open.

Yet, with few exceptions, the local authorities have turned a blind eye to the Sunday operations, typically cracking down only when lawsuits force them to act.

“The government has been tolerating us and looking the other direction for 20 years,” said Jean-Patrick Grumberg, president of the Association of Usines Center Merchants and owner of a television and stereo shop there. “If the prefect had wanted to shut us down, it would have taken 20 minutes to send the police to close us.”

A one-page advertisement by the Usines Center last week in the newspaper Le Figaro branded the law incomprehensible “in a country that counts more than 2,500,000 unemployed at the moment and where the prime minister and his government declare creating jobs their priority.”

It also called “absurd” the clause in the law that allows stores to stay open on Sundays as long as they are staffed by the owner and his immediate family, not salaried employees.

Certainly it seems that the French people want the option of Sunday shopping. An Ipsos telephone survey published in April indicated that 75 percent of those polled said they approved of stores opening on Sundays.

But for the opponents of working Sundays, nothing less than the French way of life is at stake.

“Maybe I’m the last dinosaur in France, but if we continue like this, we’ll end up with no neighborhood merchants,” said Charles Melcer, president of the clothing federation. “We’ll end up with those huge malls that Americans adore. We have to be vigilant.”

But then he argued his case on more mundane grounds. “Why should merchants who respect the law and stay closed be punished?” he asked. “And why should those who flout the law profit?”

HOME STAGING A buyer, above, with a “family” of actors inside a model home in the Milestone development.

SANTA CLARITA, Calif.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

The actors Gena Poniatowski and Jaason Simmons and their “children” help stage a model home.

FORTY miles north of Los Angeles, in an area where hundreds of homes are cropping up among the brushy, treeless hills, several dozens buyers recently found an odd spectacle in a new housing development.

To visitors, at first glance, it was like walking into a domestic scene starring Colin Farrell and Cameron Diaz.

ONE RINCON
Building a High-Rise
Condos in the high-rise towers will start at $500,000 — it’s pricey, but there is a killer view from the top

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

At 10 a.m. Friday, a San Diego developer will open a sales office and model for a project that has only just begun — a project that when it is finished in two years will be an instant San Francisco landmark.

Just now it is hard to imagine: In the shadow of one of those big construction cranes is the foundation and first few floors of what will be a slender concrete and glass tower, rising 641 feet above the intersection of First and Harrison streets. The tower will be the first of two high-rise condominium buildings, a $290 million project to be called One Rincon Hill.

The first tower will change the city’s skyline. It is on top of Rincon Hill, one of the more obscure of San Francisco’s fabled hills, mostly known for the place where the Bay Bridge lands in San Francisco. Rincon Hill has a colorful past, but it is best known now for the Fremont Street off-ramp leading into the city and the First Street on-ramp leading onto the bridge.

The towers will change all that. “It will be the most dramatic thing people will see coming from the East Bay and coming into the city,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said when ground was broken for the project in the fall.

The towers will be tall and slender — “simple and strong,” said Michael Kriozere, the San Diego developer who is building them, and “meant to be seen at a distance.”

It is more than just location — and height — that makes the project important. One Rincon will help create a whole new San Francisco neighborhood in what is now a wind-swept area where the sidewalks are deserted at night.

One Rincon also intensifies two trends — the gradual movement of the city’s center south of Market Street into what was traditionally an industrial district, and a social shift in San Francisco.

The old San Francisco of middle-class and working-class families is vanishing, replaced in part by a city of more wealthy residents. Some of the new residents are only part-time San Franciscans, who reside elsewhere and have second homes in the city.

Over the last few years, with construction of new, expensive condos near the baseball park and in Mission Bay, the old image of San Francisco — as a downtown core surrounded by colorful neighborhoods like the Haight, Noe Valley, the Castro, North Beach and the Inner Sunset — is rapidly changing.

Rincon Hill, with 695 condominiums and 14 townhomes, “is not going to trigger the transformation of San Francisco,” said UC Berkeley urban geography Professor Richard Walker. “It is part of the transformation of San Francisco.”

Not everyone loves the change One Rincon will bring. Critics say such high-rise buildings mar the skyline, rather than enhance it. But others say such distinctive buildings are the wave of the future.

“This is the 21st century, after all,” said James Chappell, president of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.

When the taller of the two towers is finished atop the 100-foot elevation of Rincon Hill, it will be 741 feet above the level of the bay — 267 feet taller than the closest tower of the Bay Bridge. The Transamerica Pyramid is higher — 853 feet — but the Rincon Hill condos may well have a more dramatic location.

“A signature structure,” Kriozere calls the towers; like Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill.

Kriozere had his eye on the top of Rincon Hill for years. His firm, Urban West Associates, bought 1.3 acres at the top of the hill in 2002, and tore down the previous building — a clock tower that advertised first Union 76 gas and then the Bank of America.

“It is probably one of the most significant sites in the city of San Francisco,” Kriozere said.

One Rincon is not affordable housing — the minium price is estimated at $500,000 for a “junior one-bedroom” place, an apartment of only 613 square feet. Top of the line, top of the building will be a dozen three-bedroom deluxe condos, 1,967 square feet with drop-dead views. The estimated price: $2 million.

There is market in San Francisco for homes of that price. Despite talk about the bursting of the real estate bubble, the median price of a single family San Francisco house is now $760,000, and in desirable neighborhoods like Noe Valley the median price is now $1.4 million. The median for Noe Valley condos is $610,000, according to real estate records.

“Who is going to live at One Rincon Hill? People who can afford it,” Kriozere said. His firm — Urban West Associates of San Diego — was required to make a $20 million contribution to the mayor’s affordable housing fund and $18 million into a Rincon Hill community improvement fund as a condition for building the project. The cost, of course, is passed on down the line. “Basically it is a tax,” Kriozere said. “A tax on the people who buy the condos.”

The One Rincon sales office — in a converted industrial building at 511 Harrison St. — cost $2 million alone. Inside is a full-size model apartment of 1,200 square feet, which will sell starting at $800,000 depending on which floor it is located. On the 40th floor, the unit might cost $1.2 million.

The higher the floor, the better the view, the higher the price.

One Rincon threw a lavish preview party Tuesday night with oysters and caviar, local cheeses and a “signature cocktail” called One Gincon.

“You have only one chance to make a first impression,” One Rincon spokeswoman Julie Chase said.

The first impression of One Rincon, architect John Lahey hopes, is of two slender concrete and glass towers. They will be slender because the site for the whole project — two towers, 14 townhouses and an underground garage — is jammed into a space bound by Harrison and First streets, the Fremont Street off-ramp and the Bay Bridge. This means that each of the towers has a “footprint” of only 9,800 square feet, less than a quarter of an acre on a 1.3-acre site.

The interior of the building is built around a concrete and reinforced steel core anchored in a foundation 12 feet thick.

The exterior is a curtain wall, off-white in color; the window glass is tinted slightly. It will not be a mirror, but the towers will reflect the morning and afternoon sun. In two years, the first of the towers will be there; in a few years other towers are on the drawing board for the area south of Market Street. There is talk of a 100-story skyscraper, not on Rincon Hill, but near the Transbay Terminal, only blocks away. San Francisco will not look the same.

This is not necessarily a good thing, according to Allan Jacobs, a former San Francisco planning director. He doesn’t like high-rise buildings like the one on the top of Rincon Hill. “Nothing,” he says, “should be higher than the (bay) bridge deck.”

These towers will soar over the bridge deck like spikes, a major change in the skyline.

The city’s skyline, Jacobs thinks, should preserve what he calls “the nature of San Francisco,” which he says is “simple, light-colored buildings.” Viewed from the bridge, San Francisco should be tall buildings, set off by hills. “A city on hills,” John Steinbeck once wrote, “has it over flatland places.”

“If you build all these big buildings, will you see its hills? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said.

Chappell, of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, thinks slim towers “can be very beautiful,” and he cites Vancouver, British Columbia, a city that bears some physical similarities to San Francisco.

Vancouver has built whole new neighborhoods in old industrial districts. Slender towers, he says, are the trademark buildings.

“I think this is the right move,” he said of One Rincon. “It will make a much more interesting skyline. I am glad to see modern architecture.”

Walker, the Berkeley urban geographer, thinks these kinds of changes are inevitable, given the forces driving the economics of housing in the Bay Area. They are moving so fast that San Franciscans may not recognize their city in a few years.

“There is a worldwide land bubble, and the Bay Area is the prime land area,” he says. There is a shortage of supply and an excess of demand. The boom “is demand driven,” Walker said. “There is a lot of wealth in the Bay Area and high wealth per capita. There is income, wealth and mortgage money; there is excess capital.”

The economic forces keep driving prices up. “There is no question that this is driving working people out of San Francisco,” he said.

And, Walker says, the trend is moving quickly. “You can’t believe how fast things change,” he said, “We live in a very volatile and fast-moving environment.”

This is the first in an occasional series about the anatomy of building a high-rise project. Next: building a tower in earthquake country. E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.