John King, the architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, occasionally displays reasonable judgment, which is considerably more often than most architecture critics. But in his piece for Metropolis defending the city’s rejection of a free, $700 million museum to be donated by filmmaker George Lucas, King’s convoluted reasoning does not successfully mask the truth.

The truth is that the powers that be in San Franciso, mostly filthy rich foundations, rejected Lucas’s offer because its design, by the Urban Design Group of Dallas, would have been forthrightly classical.

No other conclusion is plausible. King tries to gently insert in the reader’s mind that the public rejected the proposal, but it is clear that it was rejected so that some other facility – another museum or something else – could be designed by one of their modernist friends.

Yes, plain and simple: social corruption disguised as public concern.

King says the Lucas proposal “would make most municipalities swoon,” but that in fact, they should learn from this that “big, easy answers aren’t nearly as persuasive as the underlying logic of place.” But King does an unusually poor job of backing his case up with evidence.

Apparently, a big empty lot with a big-box sporting-goods emporium should not be replaced by a grand classical edifice housing a museum that would, indeed, make most civic tourism offices swoon. Readers can glean from King’s article what would have been put in there by Lucas. I found it alluring. But King’s description of the context into which would fit whatever is built did not even begin to persuade me that a museum would be unworthy of the space, or anything but an addition to its sense of place. Maybe that’s why he used the curious phrase “logic of place” rather than “sense of place.”

Then, on the last page, he brings in, as an honest critic would have to do, the “private foundations who have donated $75 million to make today’s Presidio what it is” out of federal land, once a military base, near the Golden Gate Bridge. In other words, the fancy pants who, in all probability, wanted a big museum, yes, but rather one designed by one of the usual suspects to deface yet more delicious land in San Franciso.

I have a feeling that Lucas, however much he’s accomplished in the film world, is simply not part of the in crowd, and that the rejection of his more-than-generous offer was an example of local artist wannabes circling the wagons on behalf of their own tainted gods.

I wonder why this piece appeared in Metropolis rather than King’s regular space in the San Francisco Chronicle. Probably because the readers of the Chronicle would be more likely to see through the bullshit than the readers of Metropolis, who are easily seduced by vague incoherencies that mimic (and urge) their preferred types of architecture. I don’t know, and perhaps I’m being unfair to King, who is a fine writer and, so far as I know (having met him only once and chatted online with him a couple of times) a good regular guy and amiable fellow. But I think he’s paying some sort of dues with this clearly unconvincing piece of claptrap. Read it here. You decide.