Solid Month of Architecture

Would you enjoy an insider's tour of the two snazziest venues to open in San Francisco this year—the SFJAZZ Center and the Exploratorium—led by the people who designed them?

Or would you rather meet the man whose firm is transforming the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art into something both immense—and intimate?

Attend then to the 10th annual 'Architecture and the City' festival, which runs all September long in San Francisco (with an occasional excursion across the Bay). Tours, talks, exhibits, films, and parties—40-plus events in all—appeal variously to design fans, dreamers, would-be clients, and professionals.

The festival is put on by the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Center for Architecture + Design.

Fans of tract homes from the past will enjoy Lorri Ungaretti's tour of San Francisco's Inner Sunset district, which takes in the office of Henry Doelger, who gave the Sunset so many of its characteristic boxy row houses.

Fans of tract homes of the future should catch a talk by San Diego architect-developer Jonathan Segal, whose inner city residential complexes are glassy, sleek, edgy, and amusing—sometimes all at once.

For more on 'Architecture and the City,' click here.