Re: 2021

 WINTER

 

My birthday and those of our son Ross and daughter Elizabeth. My Costa Rican friends Daniela and Richard Hammond paid a surprise visit. I saw my old design professor Leslie Laskey on Zoom, painting while a cellist tried to accompany him. I watched Biden and Harris's inauguration, moved by the poet Amanda Gorman's recital of her poem. My friend Christopher Arnold (above) died at 96 of Covid-19. He was an industrialized building pioneer and seismic expert. I was his TA at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. 

     My poem "Close observation" appeared in issue 10 of West Marin Review, an annual designed by my friend Madeleine Corson. Dorit Fromm and the late Els de Jong's Cluster Housing Revisited appeared, edited by Elizabeth. This was our editorial studio Snowden & Parman's first completed book project. It was well-received in the Netherlands—Dutch housing is its focus. Elizabeth's friend Ashley Chambers' marvelous, book-length poem, The Exquisite Buoyancies, came out. Richard Ingersoll (above with Kurt Forster), founding editor of Design Book Review, died of heart failure at 72. He lived in Italy with his wife Paola Neri, who died before him, and in Spain with Patrick Ducasse. He taught at Ferrara, Florence, Milan, and Zurich; wrote for Italian, Spanish, and US design mags; and promoted urban agriculture and the work of his late friend, the artist Tino Nivola. We had lunch at Chez Panisse in 2014. I expected him back.

     My review of Amanda Kolson Hurley's Radical Suburbs posted on ARCADE. Ashley Chambers' poetry reading at Bellingham Free Library (above) was livestreamed. Volume IV of Anthony S.C. Teo's Univer-Cities, arrived. I have a chapter in it written with Emily Marthinsen and Richard Bender. Emily and I gave a talk based on it in Singapore in November 2019, my last trip abroad (or anywhere, for that matter). 

 

SPRING

 

We hosted Easter dinner—our first family gathering in a long while—after Kathy and I had our Covid-19 vaccines in February and March, along with everyone else. Elizabeth began rebuilding her bookstore–gallery in San Francisco after an unreliable collaborator made a mess of the first version. Karma will deal with him. My friends Peiting Li and Jane Brown came for drinks in the back garden. My cousin Chuck Davis visited the river house near Dunsmuir (above) we designed in 1971 for the structural engineer Bill Holmes. Soon after it was finished, the river flooded. Bill's deck is supported on what looks like a freeway overpass strut. It was hit by a house that the flood carried away, but stayed upright. Bill told Chuck at the time that when he went to look at the damage, a neighbor came by. "Your deck isn't like the other decks!" he complained. Bill looked around. "What other decks?" he asked.

     My son Michael's birthday. My UK friends Valerie and Geoff Wigfall gave me a Zoom tour of the Hampshire house that Geoff has beautifully renovated and expanded. And then Art Gensler (above with his granddaughter Aaron) died at 85. I was lucky to have known him and been part of a firm that took the business of design seriously. Marc L'Italien said of Chuck Davis that he never lets any of it go to his head, and this was also true of Art. I wrote an article for Common Edge on Art's theory of the firm (had he been a theorist). He wrote his own book, Art's Principles, but I wanted to set out what I'd seen while serving as his firm's editorial director for 21 years. No sooner had Art died than Ed Friedrichs, part of the firm's founding generation, followed him. Someone on social media joked that Art, launching a new enterprise in Heaven, needed more help than his wife Drue could give him.

   I had lunch in Orinda with former colleagues at the villa—there's no other word for it—of Judi Wellens and Scott Dunlap. Sherman Takata, friend and photographer, gave me a lift. Leslie Laskey (above, left) died at 99. He taught second-year design at Givens Hall, borrowing liberally from Zen. I saw him once in San Francisco, and we occasionally corresponded. His colleague Buzz Spector, who also teaches at Washington University, reconnected us in 2020. Our granddaughter Sarah turned one. Thomas Gordon Smith (above, right), a postmodernist who became a classicist and the architecture chair at Notre Dame, died at 73. I met him at Wurster Hall; he sat next to my friend Kristen Lewis in a graduate studio led by Joe Esherick and she introduced us. I interviewed him for Room One Thousand in 2017. I saw him last at his son Innocent's first mass, in El Cerrito, a few years ago.

 

SUMMER

My email friend Kristen Richards, founder–editor of ArchNewsNow, died of cancer at 69. She often reposted things I wrote. She paired one with a piece by NYT critic Michael Kimmelman and gave them top billing. I got 1,000 hits, a high-water mark. (Kenny Caldwell, Design Stream curator, is my other champion.) Kathy and I went to a potluck that Susan Filter and Peter Koch hosted at his Berkeley studio. Elizabeth spent Saturdays there helping print a book of poems, which we saw. Rocky Hanish (above)—architect, artist, and writer—visited from Phoenix and gave me a drawing. He and Peiting met Elizabeth at her almost-open Pallas. I had dinner at Chuck Davis's Albany Hill house with him, Helen Degenhardt, Karen Fiene, and Laura Hartman. The women orchestrated Dinners with Chuck, the oral history I've been editing. (It will appear this winter.)

   Kathy's birthday and our 47th wedding anniversary. Elizabeth's Pallas opened. I went with Michael, Bo, and our grandson Conor. Next up was CousinFest, nine wonderful days with Ross, Alison, their girls Caroline and Sarah, Charles (above) and Liz Opalak, and their three girls and baby boy. (Kathy also went east in 2021 to see her sister Lenore and Michael Opalak, nephew Tom and Emily Opalak, cousin Shirley McClintock, and family friends Linnea and Bill Ehri.) Marika Wilson Smith, widow of Thomas, visited to discuss his drawing archive. After a harrowing journey through wildfires, Ashley Chambers stayed with Elizabeth and we finally met. My cousin Steve Rieger, the younger son of my father's sister Evelyn, lost his wife Margarita to Covid-19. The writer Fred Bernstein put me back in touch with Beverly Willis, whose SF Ballet Building is a favorite.

     Our son John's birthday. We stayed twice at the family's Inverness Ridge house (above), enjoying the warm weather. Conor turned 16 and a week later, Caroline turned four. Manifold, Rocky Hanish's new book, arrived. I finished the first volume of Subject Matters, a collection of articles on different topics. My review of Signe Mayfield's The Object in its Place: Ted Cohen & The Art of Exhibition Design, posted on ARCADE. 

 

AUTUMN

Sallyann Wright and John put a new roof on their brick alehouse (above). It's tiny but high enough inside for a loft. I edited my sister Alice Parman's Trade Secrets, her memoir of life in and around museums. We had a dinner party for the artists Vivienne Flesher and Ward Schumaker, Jack Fischer, their gallerist, and his wife Valerie Koehn. My visiting scholar appointment at Berkeley CED was renewed. Peiting moved to Los Angeles to help run the medical humanities program at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. On Alice's birthday, I met my friend Emily Wang and toured her firm's affordable housing project in downtown Berkeley.

     Lunch with CED dean Renée Chow. Conversations on Zoom with my NYC friend Michael Bell, and with my former classmate Norm Spatz, an architect in Montréal who now teaches English as a second language, writes novels, and leads walking tours. I finished Subject Matters two and three. The design management guru Paul Nakazawa came for coffee. At Thanksgiving dinner (above), hosted by Kathy's sister Laurie Snowden and Chuck Smith, I met Shawn McLenon, who helped Elizabeth rebuild Pallas.

    Elizabeth's bookstore-gallery hosted the NYC-based dance company Nishikawa Collective, led by Kay Nishikawa (above) in early December, proving the flexibility of that wonderful space (at 1111 Geary in San Francisco). She began work as a consulting writer to CED Dean Renée Chow, drawing on her knowledge of environmental design. I did the final proofreading of Dinners With Chuck. We went to Michael's wife Bo's birthday at their house nearby, and then we hosted Christmas dinner at our house, with our niece Roz Smith and her fiancé David Killian in attendance. Our Christmas tree (below) was harvested by Michael on Inverness Ridge. On to 2022! Hope to see you!