San Francisco Skyline

When the Transamerica Pyramid was proposed in 1969 the reaction was close to unanimous opposition — critics called it an intrusion, protesters turned out against it, and the design was defended partly on the grounds that a tapering tower casts a far smaller shadow and lets more daylight reach the streets below than a conventional slab of the same floor area.

It was finished in 1972 and spent decades as the tallest building in the city, and somewhere along the way it stopped being controversial and became the thing people draw when they draw San Francisco. Salesforce Tower passed it in height in 2018 without displacing it as the symbol.

San Francisco is built across more than forty hills, and the ground beneath the towers is not level. A building on Nob Hill starts hundreds of feet above one in the Financial District, so the skyline's profile reorganises itself depending on where you stand — a thing that is barely true of flat cities like Chicago or Dallas.

The model is cut from one specific viewpoint for that reason. Choose a different angle and you would get a genuinely different silhouette, which is unusual, and worth knowing when the piece does not quite match the postcard someone has in mind.

Salesforce Tower rises 1,070 feet and tapers to a rounded, perforated crown that glows after dark. The Transamerica Pyramid stands apart from the Financial District cluster, white and sharply tapering, with its two blank 'wings' housing the lifts and stairs.

555 California — the old Bank of America building — is the dark red granite slab, and the Millennium Tower is the one that has settled measurably since completion. Coit Tower sits alone on Telegraph Hill at a lower elevation but on higher ground, which is the kind of thing only a city built on forty hills produces. The Bay Bridge cables close the eastern edge.