John King

John King first wrote about the Ferry Building in the mid-1990s as a new reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Now he has an entire book on the landmark: "Portal: San Francisco's Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities," to be published by W.W. Norton on Nov. 7, 2023.

More than a history, it's an exploration of how single buildings can tell the stories of urban change. It's also the culmination of decades of observations and reporting by an urban design critic who's also a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.

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John grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley before heading to Boston, where his love of cities was strengthened by seven years in that metropolis, included a three-year stint at the Boston Globe.

A move back west led to him to The Chronicle and -- after stints covering a mayor's race and serving as a suburban columnist -- he created his current post in 2001. Through all of journalism's changes it has remained his gig, and he loves it.

This post led to John's prior books, "Cityscapes" and "Cityscapes 2: Reading the Architecture of San Francisco." Not only did he write insightful takes of 50 buildings in each volume, he took the photographs: the books spun off from a column that began in 2008. The paper's photo editor figured that if he going to write in such a focused way on an individual building, he might as well take the photographs too. Some structures are gone now, others are changed almost beyond recognition, but the insight on what buildings say about cities remains vivid and true.

John has written for such publications as Architectural Record and Landscape Architecture Magazine, and contributed essays and forwards to several books. In 2018 he was a Mellon Fellow in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.