Between 1974 and 1976, city planners rated about 10,000 San Francisco buildings for their architecture. The survey was never published. This map plots every building with a scanned survey form. Click one to see its ratings, photo and the original form.
Between 1974 and 1976, the San Francisco Department of City Planning surveyed the whole city and rated about 10,000 buildings for their architecture. Surveyors scored each building on features such as setting, facade and detailing, on a scale from −2 to 5, and gave it a summary rating from 0 to 5. A committee of architects and architectural historians helped decide the final ratings. The department believed the finished list covered the top 10 percent of the city's architecturally significant buildings. People who worked on the survey considered a summary rating of 3 or higher to mark roughly the best 2 percent of the city's architecture.
This was a "windshield" survey: surveyors judged buildings mainly by what they could see from the street, not by archival research. It rated architecture only, so a building's history, such as who lived there or what happened inside, played no part. The ratings reflect the judgment of one group of reviewers in the mid-1970s.
The survey was never published. Its forms fill 60 volumes at the Planning Department. In 1977 the Board of Supervisors adopted it (Resolution No. 7831), and the department has been directed to use it. Its ratings still appear on the city's Property Information Map. The forms were scanned and filed parcel by parcel. This map puts them in one place so you can browse them as a set.
Each building with a scanned form is plotted on its parcel. An AI model reads each handwritten form, and a second model rereads any field the first was unsure of. Where neither the 1976 form nor the city's current survey (SF Survey) names a style, an AI model estimates one from the building's photo. A check mark means the style was recorded. Signal bars mean it was estimated, and more bars mean the model was more confident. Treat an estimate as a first guess and compare it with the photo.