The city's oldest building and its namesake, whitewashed adobe Misión San Francisco de Asís is better known as Mission Dolores (Mission of the Sorrows) - tragically apt for Native conscripts who built it in 1776-82. Subjected to harsh living conditions and introduced diseases, some 5000 Ohlone and Miwok laborers were buried on Mission lands. Today you can pay respects at a graveyard memorial, and glimpse recently restored Native handiwork.

Follow sculptor Andy Goldsworthy's artificial fault line in the sidewalk into Herzog & de Meuron's sleek, copper-clad building that's oxidizing green to blend into the park. Don't be fooled by the camouflaged exterior: shows here boldly broaden artistic horizons, from Oceanic ceremonial mask displays to Frida Kahlo retrospectives, and Black Power movement posters to AI-assisted artwork.

Like a fossilized party favor, this romantic, ersatz Greco-Roman ruin is the city's memento from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The original, designed by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck, was of wood, burlap and plaster. By the 1960s it was crumbling. The structure was recast in concrete so that future generations could gaze at the rotunda relief to glimpse "Art under attack by materialists, with idealists leaping to her rescue."

The mind boggles at SFMOMA, where boundary-pushing modern and contemporary masterworks sprawl over seven floors of galleries. International architecture firm Snøhetta designed a shipshape Streamline Moderne–inspired extension, which flanks Mario Botta's original black-and-white-striped periscope atrium.

The defining feature of San Francisco's skyline is this 1972 pyramid, built atop a whaling ship abandoned in the gold rush. A half-acre redwood grove sprouted out front, on the site of Mark Twain's favorite saloon. Although these transplanted redwoods have shallow roots, their intertwined structure helps them reach dizzying heights – Twain himself couldn't have penned a more perfect metaphor for San Francisco.

San Franciscans have passionate perspectives on every subject, especially their signature landmark, though everyone agrees that it's a good thing that the Navy didn't get its way over the bridge's design – naval officials preferred a hulking concrete span, painted with caution-yellow stripes, over the soaring art-deco design of architects Gertrude and Irving Murrow and engineer Joseph B Strauss, which, luckily, won the day.

The pastel, cookie-cutter Painted Ladies of famed Postcard Row on Alamo Sq's eastern side have long been celebrities of San Franciscan vistas (and served as the "Full House" sitcom backdrop), and they feature the key characteristics of the city's Victorian architecture: eccentric colors, gingerbread woodwork under peaked roofs, and gilded stucco garlands swagging wraparound, look-at-me bay windows.

The exclamation mark atop Telegraph Hill is Coit Tower, dedicated to SF first responders by firefighting millionaire Lillie Hitchcock Coit. The lobby is lined with 1930s murals celebrating SF workers - initially denounced as communist, but now landmarked. The murals depict city life during the Depression: people lining up at soup kitchens, organizing dockworkers' unions, partying despite Prohibition and reading books – including Marxist manifestos – in Chinese, Italian and English.