94708

Year's End

2011-12-23T02:13:00.000-08:00

My friend Kenny's year-end summation leads me to tote a few things up.

Best book: Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living. Runners-up: The Care of the Self by Michel Foucault; The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder.

Best restaurant: Flora in Oakland. (I didn't go very far afield). Runners-up: Rivoli in Berkeley, Fringale and Hayes Street Grill in SF. (Tradition runs rampant.)

Best wine shop: Kermit Lynch, Berkeley. Runner-up: North Berkeley Wine Company.

Best play: "School for Scandal" by Richard Sheridan (at the Barbican, London).

Best film: The one by Tacita Dean on Merce Cunningham rehearsing at the Ford Plant in Richmond. Although a friend compared it to watching paint dry, I found it remarkable, both for the play of light and view in that huge, open space and for the way the piece came together with MC's ever-so-polite direction of his thoroughly professional company.

Best live event: The 17 May parade in Bergen, Norway, for which neighborhoods, schools, and university faculties fielded small bands, all of which played well, and everyone dressed in gorgeous handmade, colorful, traditional clothes with silver buttons. Runners-up: Davitt Moroney; Scandinavian Festival in Junction City, Oregon; UC Berkeley MFA presentation at Richmond Field Station.

Best bookstore: University Press Books in Berkeley. Runners-up: Daunts in London, noted by my friend Andrew; Stout's on Solano Avenue in Berkeley (best used architecture books on the planet); City Lights in SF (better even than the London Review of Books bookstore in London); Analog on Euclid Avenue in Berkeley (tiny, but excellent selection).

Best (and possibly last) classical CD store: Musical Offering, Berkeley. Worth preserving.

Best newspaper: The Guardian, which I read now on my iPad; runner-up: weekend FT.

Best place for architecture criticism: Sam Lubell's CA edition, Architect's Newspaper.

Best architecture mag: The redesigned, Catherine Slessor-edited Architectural Review. Runner-up: sister publication Architect's Journal.

Best music video: The wedding Bollywood riff made by my cousin Jonas in honor of his cousin Marius's marriage to Nina. (I'll find a link for this one.)

Best musical discovery: Sviatoslav Richter, noted by my friend Stefan. A lot of Russian classical music recordings from the Soviet era are coming out of the woodwork.

Best company: At this point, the most occasional. Runners-up: lunch division: Kenny; family division: my daughter Elizabeth.

Best news: Nephew Tom on the mend. (He was hit by a truck while walking on a sidewalk in Austin, TX.) Runner-up: Kim Jong-Il joins his dad.

Best reason to be appalled: The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Best reason to fight nascent fascism: Andres Breivik.

Best reason to riot: David Cameron.

Best signs of better times: Women marching against army ugliness in Cairo; SF designers having babies; Pirate Party doing well in Germany; Blue Labour.

Best opportunity for innovation: Higher education.

Best financial quote: "I have no idea what happened to the $1.2 billion."

Best Chinese saying to apply to high finance: "Kill some chickens to scare the monkeys."

Best election to do over: Russia's.

Best single example of blatant hypocrisy: Congress refusing to outlaw its members' insider trading.

Best religious epiphany: The public denunciation by the Irish PM of continued Vatican foot-dragging over turning predatory priests over to the police in Ireland. Runner-up: Theocracy in Iran, the best example of why to separate religion from the state (in case Rick Perry wasn't registering on that front).

Best projects to abandon: Apple's glass ring; Saltworks; California high-speed rail.

Best proof of karma: So many choices this year. Let's hope Berlusconi sticks.

Best candidates for apotheosis: Steve Jobs and Christopher Hitchens. (Both were deeply flawed, but then so are most of the gods.)

Best rich guys not taking it with them: Warren Hellman and Don Fisher.

Best mag: The Jean Nouvel issue of Abitare.

Best running gag: The Republican candidates. (That's "gag" in two senses.)

Best reason to support Obama: The Republican candidates.

Best art exhibit: Kurt Schwitters at Berkeley Art Museum. Runner-up: Francesca Woodman at SFMOMA. (Both obsessive; both unlucky, but in different ways.)

Best cultural organization: Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Artists (SECA) at SFMOMA. Runners-up: Art + Design Forum at SFMOMA; BAM/PFA; Cal Performances (but I miss Robert Cole).

Best moment at SPUR: David Lewis vs. Peter Calthorpe re: Saltworks. (Hate that project.)

Best beach: Stinson. (My Ostia Lido.)

Best cathedral: York.

Best career move: Cathy Ho heads up the US section of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Runner-up, M&A division: Bob Ivy heads up the AIA.

Best proof of sheer ability (and probable exploitation): Julie Kim is replaced at SPUR by three people.

Best living poet: John Burnside. Runner-up: Frederick Seidel.

Best dead poet: Byron ("Don Juan").

Best blog: "Design Faith," my fave, is one of four that I read closely. Each is written by one person.

Best lit review: London Review of Books. Runner-up: BookForum.

Best serious journal: New Left Review.

Best writer on architecture: Catherine Slessor. Many contenders, but she's the best writer.

Best deserving of a national honor received: Mara Hvistendahl, whose book on China's boy bias made top 10 lists of several national publications, including the WSJ.

Best deserving of a local honor received: David Baker. Does what he does really well. Runner-up: Yukiko Bowman.

Best local lecture by a designer: Jeanne Gang at Wurster Hall. More like her, please. Runners-up: Katherine Gustafson and Craig Dykers.

Best live event reporting: Eva Hagberg on Occupy Berkeley (on Facebook). Runner-up (with photos): Sabrina Brennan on Occupy Oakland, Port of Oakland, and Half Moon Bay.

Best coffee: Indoor: Blue Bottle; outdoor: Curbside Coffee - both SF. Beans: Espresso Forte, Peet's; machine: Pavoni (despite everything).

Best cab ride: Oslo (caught the ferry); runner-up: London ("Your president has made an unholy mess of this city").

Christmas 2011

2011-12-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

A look back at some highlights of an interesting year.

In January, I stopped off in Manhattan, where I spent time with friends. Christine Van Lenten and I spent a day at museums. On separate evenings, I had dinner with Jan Lakin and Helen Dimoff. It was great to see all three. Motivated by the cold and a hotel on the west side of the park, I finally cracked the Manhattan buses. In DC, I had dinner with my son Ross, his friends Tamara and Alden, and my nephew Charles. It started snowing that evening, but I dodged the more consequential snowfall that paralyzed NYC.

In May, I went to Europe. My first stop was Bergen, where I watched the Norwegian national day parade on 17 May and spent time with my cousin Turid, her sister Marthe-Katrina, and Turid's sons, daughters-in-law, and numerous grandchildren. Introduced by Turid's son Henning, an alumnus, I visited Bergen's architecture school, meeting its director. I also went to the house of Edvard Grieg and to Galerie Oz, the arts-and-crafts gallery that Turid and Marthe-Katrina own and run. Then, at Turid's suggestion, I took the train to Oslo, barely making it to Nesodden in time to meet my cousins Bente and Helge at the ferry. They drove me home - to a house I first visited in 1953, which they have wonderfully restored - in Bente's swanky new Audi convertible. That night I had dinner with my cousin Margaretha, her friend Knut-Ole, and her sons Espen and Jan-Hendrik. The next day, I saw Elsie, the family matriarch; Bente's daughter Maria and her granddaughter Philippa (the daughter of Maria's sister Henriette, who was away); and my cousins Gunn and Sigurd, having lunch on their sailboat. I had dinner with Bente and Helge. The next morning, I took the ferry back to Oslo and spent an amazing day with Margaretha's brother, Kjell-Olav, his wife Kirsten, their daughters Maria and Sarah, and their landscape architect friend and neighbor, Jostein Bjørbekk, who kindly took me on a planner's tour of downtown Oslo, including stops at the new Opera House and Oslo's architecture museum. Lunch was at Oslo's iconic ski jump and dinner was at Kirsten and Kjell-Olav's house. The guests included Margaretha's younger kids, Marthe and Marius, and Nina, the soon-to-be wife of Marius. On Monday, Maria very kindly drove me to the train station after I missed the airport bus, so I didn't miss my midday plane to England.

I spent 24 hours in Birmingham, visiting my son John. (He went on to get his masters at Birmingham City University in September and is now working in London.) England's second-largest city, Birmingham is an impressive place, much influenced by the Victorian era. This is true, as well, of Leeds, my next destination, where I spent two days with my friends Joan and Vivian Wyatt. They took me into town and then to York, a medieval cathedral town - birthplace of W.H. Auden, I just read. Then I took the train to London, meeting up with three generations of the Wigfall family, converging on Saatchi & Saatchi for an art event in which Clare Wigfall participated. The next day, I had lunch with my friend Andrew Rabeneck (who visited us in the fall in Berkeley), then met the Wigfalls at the Barbican to see Sheridan's "School for Scandal." What better way to end a trip!

Meanwhile, Kathy went with friends to Bulgaria and Romania in late May and early June. She had a really good time. Closer to home, she's become a fan of opera, mostly through the rebroadcasting of Met productions at a local movie theater.

In mid-August, I visited my family in Eugene: my sister Alice, her husband John, my niece Rachael, her husband Ben, and their kids, Jane and Hugh. We went to the Scandinavian Festival, where I met Rachael and Ben's friends the Hagens and their kids. Ben, Jane, and I went fishing on the McKenzie River. At my family's archive at the University of Oregon, I read a small sampling of the correspondence of my parents and grandparents. For a writer, having a family archive is just about heaven!

The real family news this year was all from Norway. My cousin Marius married Nina, who we met a few years ago when they spent a very crowded few days at our house between Christmas and New Year's. (Proof that there's always room for family and friends chez nous.). Then my cousins Una and Espen had a baby boy, Theodor. These joyful events helped take the edge off the sadness of the tragic Oslo bombing and island massacre.

On our end, in Berkeley, I served on the board of the 2430 Arts Alliance, which benefits University Press Books and the Musical Offering. At the house of Sue and Richard Bender, I saw Yu Serizawa, visiting from Tokyo. We made a lunch together with ingredients Yu brought from the Ferry Building, which was really fun. On Easter, I saw my LA friend Linda Hart and her daughter Rian. On the family front, our son Michael, his wife Bojana, and our grandson Conor moved from SF to the next block. Conor now goes to Black Pine Circle School in Berkeley. Our daughter Liz is living across the street. I really enjoy her presence, which gives rise to interesting conversations and excursions. She's working in SF on art books: Picasso and Gris. Her grandmother Betty is ailing, but rallied to attend Thanksgiving dinner. We expect to see her at Christmas, when Ross will be back. (He and Tamara visited in the summer, then Ross took a new job with the Alliance to Save Energy in DC.) Kathy's sister Laurie, her husband Chuck, and their kids Liam and Roz will be here, along with her sister Lyn, Lyn's husband Michael, and their son Charles. Will their son Tom and his wife Emily make it? I hope so. We saw them in the late summer in Berkeley. A few weeks ago, Tom was plowed into by a drunk driver while walking on the sidewalk in Austin, Texas. Luckily, he's on the mend. Have to watch those sidewalks!

It was fun to see Cathy Ho and her growing family in San Francisco at the gorgeous penthouse of our mutual friend Rob Forbes. That led to a dinner with Jay Powell, Peony Quan, and Canan Tolon at Flora in Oakland. (It was good to have Cathy's sister Betty as my colleague again.) My BART-riding friend Thu Phan gave me a insider's tour of Thom Mayne's SF Federal Building. At Yosh Asato and David Baker's Storefront Lab open house, I met Amy Trachtenberg and her husband, and ran into David Hurley, Kenny Caldwell, and Paul Crabtree. I enjoyed seeing Kenny's art pieces - and running into Amanda Walter - at the SF Art Institute earlier this year. I'm looking forward to hearing Paul's "Ghost Train," a crowd-sourced musical commission. On the work front, my group - led by Mark Coleman - won a Graphis Gold Award for the Gensler 2009 Annual Report. A new design blog, TraceSF, that Yosh and I have worked on with Yuki Bowman and Brad Leibin, will launch soon. I met young artists, including Kari Marboe and Jennie Smith, at Berkeley Art Museum's UCB MFA presentation at Richmond Field Station, and two art patrons, Rimma Boshernitsan and Cynthia Kagay, at events sponsored by SECA at SFMOMA, which they help run. (At some point, just before it turned cold, I squeezed in a short trip to Stinson Beach.) I was glad to meet SFMOMA curator Joseph Becker, who lectured on Dieter Rams; "Mexican Suitcase" designer Martin Venesky (with whom I'm discussing digitizing the Design Book Review archive); and family-law specialist and early-music fan Stefan Spielman. I was impressed by Randolph Langenbach and Chris Andrews' research work on indigenous housing in urban Haiti. I was glad to see that Julie Kim has a worthy successor at SPUR Urbanist in Allison Arieff. I appreciated John King's soiree at House of Shields, where I ran into all of the usual suspects but one.

On my last trip east, in early December, I saw Ross and Tamara again in DC. A business meeting in Charlotte ended early, so I saw the remarkable work of Romare Bearden and Sheila Hicks at the Mint Museum. I was supposed to visit my friend May Ho Hebert and her family in Miami (and glimpse Art Basel), but it didn't work. I'll get there yet!

So this, in a nutshell, is my Christmas news. If you're mentioned above, thank you for your part in making 2011 a good year. It was so good to see you or to have you visit. Facebook is useful to keep ties going, but nothing beats a real conversation! If you're not mentioned, don't think you aren't in my thoughts! I hope to see you in 2012!

Jolly Snowden, 1918-1989

2011-11-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

Crumpton Leonard "Jolly" Snowden

My son, Ross Parman, posted this photo of his grandfather, Jolly Snowden, a resident of Arch Street in the 1980s. Described accurately at his funeral as a larger-than-life figure, Jolly was the namesake of his parents, sharing their first and last names. His father, Crumpton Snowden, was the scion of a Revolutionary War land grant family, gentry, in Andalusia, Alabama. His mother, Effie May Leonard, was the daughter of dirt farmers in the same community. She turned the family around. Like the minor aristocracy in France, the Snowdens were in steep decline by the time Crum was born, although he reportedly retained an aristocrat's disdain for ordinary work. Selling the farm, he moved the family to rural Miami, where Jolly and his 14 siblings were raised. George, the oldest of the Snowden cohort, was independent enough by the time he was 10 that a bank in Andalusia made him the cosigner for his daddy's loan. (George went on to run a country store outside Miami that made him a small fortune.) These were self-made men: Jolly and his brother Charles were both All-Americans for the Miami Hurricanes, playing football to get an education. Their high-school paper routes provided the family with cash. Charles became a Florida state senator and judge, while Jolly built Ryder Trucks into a national force, first in Florida and New York, and then in California. In the early 1940s, he worked for Pan Am in the Congo. In those days, the Brazil-to-Congo route via Ascension Island was the fastest route by plane across the Atlantic. In 1941, Jolly was made an officer in the Army and put in charge of the liquor, which was constantly slipping on to the Black Market. "If you sent me to the Congo, I bet I could still find some of the Scotch I hid," he once told me. It was there that he met his wife, Betty O'Rourke, who was broadcasting in French to expat Belgians and French in Africa. She still lives on Arch Street in the building that she and Jolly bought for their daughters, Kathy and Laurie Snowden, when they couldn't find an apartment while attending UC Berkeley. Jolly had cancer in the late 1960s, for which he was treated with radiation. It bought him 20 years. A heart attack in the hospital in 1988 stopped his heart, but his doctors revived him, condemning him to six months on a respirator, a terrible ordeal. They thought they could save him, but his immune system was shot. A cautionary tale.

My Afternoon with the MFAs

2011-11-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

The scene at Richmond Field Station.

On Saturday, 12 November 2011, I went over to UC Berkeley's Richmond Field Station at the invitation of the Berkeley Art Museum to see and hear presentations by MFA students in the Art Department, some of whom have studio space there. I'd never been to RFS, which is a ramshackle, sandbox kind of place that attracts engineering students as well as artists. The buildings are of all different types and sizes, probably ex-WW II military. They have a weathered, rough-and-ready look.

Presumably this is Building 118.

The students showed a mix of work. Many of them work in several media, but there are also sculptors and photographers. What follows is a quick visual run-through of what I saw. (I'm sorry that I can't also document what I heard.)

Amy Rathbone uses an entire room as her art space.

Her hanging sculpture uses pieces of asphalt or bitumen.

Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck works in video.

He uses clips from a family's home movies from the 1950s.

Jennie Smith was next.

Her paintings address myths like the turtle carrying the world.

Brett Walker is a photographer.

He sometimes stars in his own photos.

Kari Marboe works with text and images, drawing on Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse.

In this work, she collaborated with a sculptor.

Kari Orvik works in photography, including tintypes, and video.

These are a series of tintypes, including portraits.


Tintypes have to be developed immediately. She has a darkroom in car.

Frank Marquez-Leonard is a sculptor.

This is the work he showed us.

A lot of the studios had beautiful light.

Some of them had interesting work by other artists, like this.

And like this.

After hearing the presentations, we gathered in yet another building at RFS for refreshments. One of the artists, Jennie Smith, gave me prints (from Kinko's, not the artist's kind) of two works that I'd admired during her presentation. I'm not sure how to describe them.

Prints of two drawings (?) by Jennie Smith.

I was invited to this event because I joined Berkeley Art Museum as a patron. BAM/PFA is an amazing benefit of living in 94708 (and elsewhere in the Bay Area), well worth joining and supporting. Meeting the MFAs, seeing their work, and hearing the ideas behind it was energizing. There will be an exhibit of their final projects at BAM in May 2012. Look for it!

Pizzaiolo

2011-07-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

Charlie Hallowell, the chef-owner of Pizzaiolo.

On Saturday, I met the architect Christopher Andrews at Pizziaolo, a cafe-restaurant in Oakland's Temescal district. I hadn't spent a lot of time there of late, but I worked nearby in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The area is now totally different - a very vibrant scene.

Chris helped design the garden behind the Pizziaolo, including the chicken coop, which a few years after he built it is now hidden beneath the leaves.

Chris Andrews showing me his chicken coop.

Along with chickens, there's an apiary - a fancy word for beehive. The presence of chickens gives a bucolic flavor to the shared outdoor area behind Pizzaiolo.

Chickens at Pizzaiolo.

The apiary at Pizzaiolo.

Chris and I sat in the art-filled backroom, which wasn't as crowded as the main space. There's a small-town feel to the restaurant, which must reflect the owner. A look at their website puts a lot of emphasis on local ingredients. Hallowell came from Chez Panisse, so Pizzaiolo is in the Alice Waters tradition, but without the French overtones.

Art, bike, and man.

Cow's head painting, not sure by who.

Here are some scenes from the patio, which will give a sense of the ambiance. It reminded me of towns in Italy and Spain, not so much designed as produced by artisans whose aesthetic sense is applied directly, drawing on tradition and memory. Speaking of his chicken coop, Chris spoke of his delight in building it - something that architects don't often get to do.

Detail of the brick terrace, garden, and chicken coop.

Looking west from the terrace.

The bocce ball court.

Outdoor storage for the other restaurant.

The summer's film schedule.

Wood for the Pizzaiolo ovens.

On my way down Telegraph, Chris phoned me and gave me a helpful hint about Pizziaolo, which I'll pass along: you can park in the Walgreen's lot across the street. That was the deal that Oakland cut with the drug chain, and it will save you time and dimes (or dollars, to put it in 2011 terms) to park there.

Helios update

2011-07-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

Cal's new Helios Building, designed by SmithGroup.

I took BART this morning from downtown Berkeley. On my way, I took this photo of the Helios Building. It shows work on the north facade, using an interesting hybrid of a construction elevator and a window-washing platform to get the crews up in the air. Here's a closer view:

Scenes from the FS Bus

2011-07-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

The wetlands park near the Bay Bridge in Emeryville.

My car died last Friday. While waiting for it to be repaired, I started riding the FS bus, which stops at Shattuck and Vine, a mere four blocks from my house. It's a surprisingly fast ride that ends up at the temporary Transbay Terminal, two blocks from my office (in the 1925 George Kelham-designed Hills Brothers Coffee Building). The over-the-bridge route is interesting. I've always liked the wetlands park that borders the freeway in Emeryville. It's full of white herons. The mudflats to the north used to be an informal sculpture park, too, but that tradition has fallen away.

The mast of the new east span of the Bay Bridge.

Another sight is the new east span of the Bay Bridge. The mast of this single-tower suspension bridge is fast rising, and details of its construction are now visible. The east span itself is taking form, although for some reason it still has a gap in it.

The gap in the Bay Bridge's new east span.

As the photo above shows, the span has two separate lanes. (I took it from the lower deck of the existing east span.) I wondered how they will connect to the two-level tunnel through Yerba Buena Island: more elegantly, presumably, than the current S-curve that gets the existing roadway out of the way of the new construction.

San Francisco viewed from the FS bus.

My friend and neighbor Katherine Rinne noted on Facebook that part of the appeal of the FS is the skyline view as you approach the city. I agree. (She's an independent scholar and the author of The Waters of Rome, a prize-winning monograph published by Yale.)

I usually park at the North Berkeley BART Station and take the train into the city. It's easier to read on the train, but there's something to be said for the FS. I may start varying the rhythm of my commute, at least during the summer. The bus is quieter than BART, too. As the BART cars age, they've gotten really noisy, especially in the bay tunnel.

Earthquake preparedness

2011-07-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

My neighbors Ness and Arash Farahmand at the neighborhood get-together.

The terrible events in eastern Japan in March prompted my neighborhood to get more serious about the likelihood of an earthquake closer to home. On 12 June, people gathered in one of our backyards for a party hosted by Debra Barnes and Kathleen Dolan. There was a mercifully short rundown of our to-do list, the immediate aim of which is to secure a city-donated cache of tools and supplies. All of us in 94708 live in the shadow of the Hayward fault, which runs north-south along Euclid Avenue. There hasn't been a major earthquake on the fault since the 1860s, which means we're overdue. A sharp tremor a while back gave me a sense of how this might go: it was as if a giant were shaking the house. A couple minutes of that would definitely make a mess! That experience prompted us to rebuild our foundation. We joke about laying in some gin against the possibility of "a big one," but in reality, it's worth taking seriously. The rule of thumb is three days' worth of supplies, but I would bet it will be a week or two, in reality. I don't think the powers that be are very well prepared, either.

Helios goes up

2011-07-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

The new Helios building, viewed from the north.

The Helios building, replacing the demolished State Health Lab building, is topping out. The colorful facade is temporary, if the rendering on the University's sign is to be believed. In reality, it will look a lot like the Warren Hall replacement by the same architect, SmithGroup. The scale of it isn't too bad - it forms street walls along Oxford and Hearst and is relatively compact in relation to the site. The height seems reasonable from the north. I assume the intent is to redevelop the entire site over time, but I haven't seen the plan, if any, for that eventuality. The design is less interesting than SmithGroup's Sutardja Dal Hall to the east. This is pretty standard university lab fare, as is Warren.

Birmingham, England

2011-06-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

Victoria Square, Birmingham, UK.

In May, I went to Birmingham, an example of the remarkable impact the long boom of the Victorian era had on English commercial cities. Birmingham is the next largest city after London. It's a city, not a metropolis, with many universities and a real cultural life.

One of the canals that runs through central Birmingham.

I read somewhere recently that Birmingham is considered one of England's uglier cities. I didn't find it so. Of course, it has some dreadful postwar buildings, but the city center has much to recommend it, including an art museum with a good collection of art and artifacts and a photography gallery that artfully reuses an existing Victorian building. The heart of the city is compact and walkable, with a good mix of uses and amenities.

Birmingham's Ikon Gallery.

During my travels, I thought about what lessons, if any, Berkeley could learn from the cities I visited. (They also included Bergen and Oslo, Norway and Leeds, York, and London, England.) In the case of Birmingham, the lesson might be to take the public realm more seriously - invest in it; to make the most of older buildings of distinction; and to ensure that new additions to the city are worthy to live among (not dominate) the best of the existing fabric. Birmingham does this inconsistently, but when it works, so does the city. Here are a few examples:

A walkway joining old and new buildings. There's a restaurant with a terrace on the left where I had dinner.

A typical row of shops, with bollards, landscaping, and a good scale.

A good art museum right in the center of town.

Recycling redux

2011-04-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

A neighbor questioned my post about the city's criminalization of informal collection of curbside recycling, saying that the program is harmed when it has to buy what's informally collected instead of getting it "for free." Would the overall cost of collecting recycling be less if it was left to the informal sector entirely? I realize that's a step that for a variety of reasons would be really hard for a formal, city-connected organization to take. It would take an act of social imagination, in other words. What I object to is the criminalization of the informal sector implied by the city's "ownership" of recycling when it's placed on the street. My neighbor said that this is not enforced, but it could be, which strikes me as an ethical failure. The photo above is a reminder that informality is the way of the (perpetually unbalanced) world. I also heard a relevant quote: "The typically modern practice is the effort to exterminate ambivalence." (Jeremy Till, citing or quoting Zygmunt Bauman).

White near-equinox

2011-03-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

This photo, from Berkeleyside, shows Solano Ave. on Friday night. I was at a dinner party in the Oakland hills. When I returned to my house on Arch Street, I found the front and back yards and both decks covered with "snow" that felt and sounded like crushed ice. Although hail, in reality, it triggered a lot of merrymaking in the neighborhood. Something similar happened here in the early 1970s, when I lived above Euclid on Hearst.

The 2430 Arts Alliance

2011-03-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

2430 Bancroft Way

Last night, I attended "a symposium to launch the 2430 Arts Alliance." This foundation exists to support Musical Offering and University Press Books, the two endangered enterprises housed on the ground floor of the building, and provide a bridge between them and the community by sponsoring musical and literary events, both in the building and on the campus. Registered as a charitable foundation, the 2430 Arts Alliance is definitely a worthy cause for anyone who values continued access to the classical music CDs and noteworthy books - new and used - on offer inside. UPB separately runs a "Friends of UPB" group that can be joined for the modest fee of $35/year (or a ridiculously low $350 for life membership). Joining gets you an accumulating credit for books purchased. Why patronize them when Amazon is a click away? First and foremost, there are the pleasures of the place itself, shared with the Musical Offering Cafe and the knowledgeable staff on both sides. Second, one can peruse at leisure. Third, one can avoid the inducements to buy that are a hallmark of Amazon, and thus sidestep the disappointments of whim. Fourth, imagine a world without these two cultural landmarks. A grim world, indeed!

Austin, Texas

2011-03-02T19:53:00.000-08:00

Fate (of the work-related variety) brings me to Austin. The street scene above (not my photo) typifies the area around the downtown hotel where I'm staying. Rumored to be the Berkeley of Texas, Austin is certainly steeped in a live-music scene. At dinner, I met a former colleague who moved here and set up shop. He told me it's easier to do so than in the Bay Area. The city is warmer (76 degrees when I arrived) than the Berkeley I left behind. A river runs through it (the Colorado, the Texas one that empties out in the Gulf). The skyline is messed up by some egregious tall buildings, garishly lit up at night (not unlike this hotel, aiming for trendy but landing on cheesy; nice room, though). Speaking of music, drumbeats reach my ears. Some rocker neighbor? A bit of that at home, too.

Inanities

2011-02-18T22:26:00.000-08:00

Of all the follies the city has perpetrated lately, none is as antithetical to its liberal heritage as the imposition of the new recycling carts, with their admonition that whatever you put in them is the city's property once the cart is on the street. Thus in a stroke the city criminalizes a functioning piece of the informal economy, pushing people at the margins further into poverty. And then the city wonders aloud why there's street crime and homeless people. The real motive for this is the desire of city employees and their Council servants to stamp out any informal activity that threatens their own monopoly. This, by the way, is your tax dollars at work. (The photo, from Berkeleyside, shows Mayor Bates guarding the city's property.)

Joined the club

2011-01-30T20:08:00.000-08:00

This morning, I joined the growing throng of 94708ers who've experienced the smash and grab. This isn't my VW Golf, but mine looks like it. For his or her pains, the artist who did this work got my FasTrak transponder, since disabled. I learned that you can file a police report online - a more efficient process than filing a claim with Allstate, I found. My oldest son, who lives in SF, told me that he installed a video camera to survey the street in front his building. Might be a plan. BPD Officer Byron White has been warning 94708 for some time about the likelihood of this. My glove compartment was closed, not open and empty. My mistake.

NYC

2011-01-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the rock-bottom hotel prices, I flew to NYC this afternoon. I booked into the Lucerne, which is a lot sunnier in this photo than in reality. NYC was 32 degrees and falling when I arrived, but the much-reported blizzard has been reduced to water (turning to ice) on the sidewalks. (There's a lot more snow left in Queens, I noted.) I took public transit from JFK: AirTrain to Jamaica Station, LIRR to Penn Station, and the #1 to W. 79th. It's reasonably fast and a third the price of a cab. I learned from Berkeleyside that I missed a power outage and earthquake tremors earlier today. (Glad the latter weren't serious.) I left the house at five a.m. to catch Virgin America's seven a.m. flight. That's a good airline, not least because they dim the lights.

Berkeley Drivers

2010-12-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

People here shop like they drive, I noted, while braving the Christmas Eve crush at Andronico's on Shattuck. If I drive to the North Berkeley BART station on weekday mornings anytime past 7:30, I invariably encounter people either not signaling at all or signaling just as the light changes, so there's no possibility of maneuvering around them. Another bad habit is to remain waiting in place in a crowded intersection (like Cedar and Sacramento) rather than moving forward, so the cars behind have no chance to make the light. Slowing down while approaching a green light only to speed through as it changes is also prevalent, along with maintaining a consistent 15-mph pace, usually after pulling out right in front of another car.

A Carpet with a Past

2010-12-23T20:17:00.000-08:00

Today, I took delivery of this carpet from Oakland architect Christopher Robin Andrews, a former student of Christopher Alexander at U.C. Berkeley (a collector of classical carpets and the famed author of the Pattern Language and Nature of Order series). Andrews became interested in the 17th-century Turkish carpets preserved in Saxon (German Protestant) churches in Romania, hung on the walls to provide decoration after the Catholic frescoes were whitewashed over. Working in Photoshop with high-definition photos of the originals, he painstakingly sets out the design in a manner that allows its faithful reproduction by a modern carpet weaver. He then orders them bespoke from Turkey. The carpet is beautiful - the blue is especially striking. Andrews has a website with this and other designs, many of them much bigger than this one. (Update: the website is down as of 5 February 2011.) Prospective buyers in the vicinity of North Oakland can see the carpets, but he tells me that he now has a national following via the web. Little wonder - this is admirable work!

Baby Bullet

2010-12-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, I took the Baby Bullet from the CalTrain station in SF to the Diridon station in downtown San Jose. It took about an hour. Millbrae, an interminable trip on BART, took about 10 minutes. There are only five stops, so this is the way to go if San Jose is the destination. I read the London Review of Books, which you can't do while battling traffic.

Stremska's Fables

2010-12-04T14:38:00.000-08:00

Biliana Stremska: "Paradise," 2007

This morning, I went to Sweet Adeline, a Paris-style cafe on Adeline south of Alcatraz, to meet the artist and designer Biliana Stremska. I first encountered her work at the ACCI Gallery on Shattuck south of Cedar. At that time, she painted from life, but her latest series, Fables, draws metaphorically on two strands - stories from the Bible and nonviolent communication. The latter, she told me, is based on empathy. Many of these paintings depict how men, women, and children wall each other off or, conversely, reach out or open up to each other. The Bible stories, like one from Isaiah shown below, are also influenced by the Quaker painter Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom series - hence a child's hand unharmed in a vipers' nest. The persimmons in the painting above reflect their Bulgarian name, "apples of paradise." Really hearing each other is paradise, her painting tells us. Stremska has made a small book on the series, available from blurb.com (as her website explains).

Biliana Stremska, "Snakes/Isaiah 11:8," 2007

Trader Joe's

2010-11-07T18:28:00.000-08:00

The New Californian, viewed from the southeast.

A comment below mentions the building at the southeast corner of MLK and University known informally as Trader Joe's*. Looking for a photo, I found a critique by Christopher Adams, who I believe used to be a planner with the University of California (if it's the same Chris Adams). He calls the building "a hippopotamus in a tutu," but I think it's much worse than that. (The photos in Adams' article don't fully capture the horror.) During the summer, I drove past it every morning on my way from the clinic. Perhaps it was the radiation, but the color of the building is especially off-putting. The juxtaposition of the monster at the corner and a sort of fake Swiss pseudo-addition to its north, apparently meant to reduce the gargantuan scale along MLK, counts as a true oddity. (This knock-off Swiss thing is also visible - even more risible - at the northeast corner of University and Sacramento. Is there a Swiss connection in Berkeley that I somehow missed?) The real crime of Trader Joe's is its bulk. I imagine it was justified as "urban," bringing it out the sidewalk. True enough - in 20 years, this will provide a modicum of grit: deteriorating plastic, as we used to call the sprayed-stucco wonders south of campus. Isn't this a city with design review?

* Formally known as the New Californian, designed by Kirk Peterson, who's done better. (So far, this is his worst.)

The New Californian's "Swiss" mock-addition

Measure R

2010-11-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

I was opposed to Measure R, given the political nature of redevelopment in downtown Berkeley and along the University Avenue corridor. Right now, there's little likelihood of anything happening - both the city and the developers are strapped. That picture will change in time, and Measure R sets up a density that may surprise those who voted for it. Moreover, the city has a history of going beyond what zoning permits - the Gaia Building is a prime example. Downtown Berkeley is a logical place for higher density. Better there, for example, than at the Ashby and North Berkeley stations - and, for that matter, along the Shattuck corridor north of University Avenue. Downtown is also a good location for joint development with the University, something that's already happening. While it's getting all the attention, Telegraph Avenue between Bancroft and Dwight Way is a disaster, neglected equally by the city and the University. What's the plan for that?

Downtown Plan

2010-10-22T22:29:00.000-07:00

The ballot includes an up-or-down vote on the city's retort to the community's reaction to its disregard for the Downtown Plan process. Months of work, and the result displeased the Mayor and most of the Council. The argument in favor cites the proximity to transit and the need for higher density in the region. The argument against cites the often-thwarted will of the people. The illustration to the right is the city-sponsored Oxford Housing and Brower Center project, designed by Solomon ETC, an architecture firm in San Francisco that I admire. I like it, but its development was expensive. Note that it's considerably lower than what's proposed for downtown's future redevelopment. That proposal is lower than the Mayor wanted initially, but not by much. The community's take on Downtown sought a more modest density. It wasn't like Measure P, which went too far in the other direction. Just to say it, there's a divide these days between cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and their communities. The officials want to develop at an "urban scale," which means a quantum leap in height. People react by trying to stop it, but there's a middle ground. I believe that's what the original Downtown Plan committee found - a density that acknowledges the existing fabric, but increases the height selectively. Nuance doesn't seem to carry much weight with the city, but it's the heart of urbanity.

Simon Karlinsky

2010-10-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I went to a symposium at Durant Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, organized in honor of the late Simon Karlinsky, whose translation and notes on the letters of Chekhov I read several years ago. I met his surviving partner Peter Carleton at a Friends of University Press Books event last May, and he told me about the symposium. I left shortly after a speaker told a joke in Russian and everybody else laughed, but the introductory tribute to Professor Karlinsky and a talk on Nabokov were both excellent. I wish I'd had the time to stay for all of it. Born in Harbin in 1938, Karlinsky was celebrated as the scholar of Russian literature who drew attention to its gay subtext and authors. His notes on Chekhov (the only book of his I've read, but there are many more) bring the man alive with evident sympathy. Chekhov wasn't gay, but he was definitely an outsider. Karlinsky makes clear the challenges he faced as a writer, dealing with critics who were often looking for something else - and with theatrical producers and directors who failed to understand his intent. The symposium was yet another reminder of the cultural riches in our backyard. Peter Carleton, the family of Simon Karlinsky, and the department in which he taught funded it. Musical Offering provided dinner, which I had to miss. I'm sure it was every bit as good as the rest.

Marvelous Museum

2010-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

A highlight of the Oakland Museum is Mark Dion's "Marvelous Museum," an exhibit that's dispersed across the art galleries, and that draws on artifacts that the museum had warehoused. There's also a curators' area that juxtaposes the artist's hypothesized office with those of two plausible predecessors. The oldest is based on Henry Snow, whose natural history museum was one of three combined to form the current museum. As our guide Marina McDougall explained, he was a big-game hunter who favored dioramas. The two-year old elephant calf pictured here once had a place in one. Ms. McDougall is a co-author of a book on the exhibit published by Chronicle Books and The Believer. As museum folks will tell you, what's stored is often as remarkable as the exhibits. Turning things inside out was brilliant.

Blum Hall

2010-10-08T20:32:00.000-07:00

Passing through a police cordon, I attended the opening of Richard C. Blum Hall, which houses the Blum Center, part of Berkeley's College of Engineering. Blum, a venture capitalist and husband of Senator Diane Feinstein (who also spoke), said he had the idea for it in Nepal, talking with Tibetan refugee children. The Blum Center uses technical innovation to solve problems like the need to make small amounts of water safe to drink. Despite the worthy cause, Blum attracted demonstrators from the campus workers' union, AFSCME. (He's a regent.) They backed off once he'd finished speaking, letting former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz give his talk unmolested. The building, designed by Gensler (where I work), looked good (and won praise from several of the speakers). I took this photo later, returning from a lecture by David Harvey, author of The Enigma of Capital and other books. Ananda Roy, much mentioned at the Blum Center opening, was present and mentioned at the lecture, too.

Oakland Museum

2010-10-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

94708 just toured the newly renovated Oakland Museum. The guide was the renovation architect, Mark Cavagnero, who explained that he's worked on the project (still ongoing) for 11 years. (A short article on the project with more photos and a link to his website is here.) His modest interventions have rescued this wonderful building, designed in the 1960s by Kevin Roche, so it finally works as he intended. Cavagnero has restored internal vistas from gallery to gallery and to the terrace gardens outside. He's also made several new galleries out of little-used courtyards. His additions use lighter materials to contrast with the concrete of the original building. They fit very well. I only toured the art galleries, but they're really good - well worth a visit. The building now makes sense. The revamped exhibit spaces free up the collections, exposing their breadth and quality. (There's also an exhibit-within-an-exhibit, "The Marvelous Museum," that's quite remarkable. More about that in a separate post.) The original building was iconic, but regulations and curator preferences walled off its best features. Cavagnero has restored them. Perhaps it takes another architect to understand what a predecessor was trying to do. Getting to the museum is easy, too - hop on the Fremont train, get off at Lake Merritt, walk a block down Oak Street (noting the Serbian orthodox church at the corner), and there it is. The entry is off Oak, not 10th, as I remembered. The koi pond is still there.

Mr. Fisher's Journey

2010-09-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

The papers reported the death of Eddie Fisher, a singer I remember from my New Jersey youth. His appeal may have been greater to my sister's cohort (born 1942) than mine (born 1947), but I definitely recall the hornet's nest he kicked when he took up with Liz Taylor. He ended up in Berkeley, like countless others from the east coast (including me). What is it about Berkeley that attracts them? The anonymity, maybe. Whatever one might say about the politics, this place is fairly cosmopolitan about private life. You have to go out of your way to draw unwanted attention, and mostly it's to point out just how hypocritical you are. (Fred Dodsworth's exposure of his older son's bureaucrat harasser is one example, and that rent-board guy who went to jail is another.) Others, who might be gossip-fodder elsewhere, walk these streets unmolested, only death drawing attention to their presence.

Elephant redux

2010-09-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

I walked by the former Elephant pharmacy on Saturday (18 September) and found a post with plans announcing that it will soon be a Walgreen's. This conforms to location theory, a general rule of which is that like uses clump together. I miss Elephant. Walgreen's is more like what used to be Long's (and Bill's before that, and long ago a Lucky's, whose sign was inexplicably declared a landmark), but is now CVS. The two chains are fairly bitter national rivals, so here we are, witnessing that fight on the ground. I'd hoped the owners might subdivide the space and find more interesting tenants. Undivided, Walgreen's is what works. Given the continuing saga of the mountain lion memorial, perhaps Elephant's parking lot will follow the Lucky's sign as part of local history (big-cat division).

Cull the deer!

2010-09-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

The big 94708 event this week was the bagging of a mountain lion that was spotted in the parking lot of the former Elephant Pharmacy on Shattuck near Cedar. Experts quoted in the Chronicle speculated the beast was addled, but my theory is that where there are abundant deer - and there are deer galore in the lower hills in the summer - mountain lions are bound to follow. It's like how seals attract sharks. Like bears in peopled habitats, this one may have been supplementing venison with garbage - a lion has to eat. But I'm sure deer were on the menu, and only sorry that it didn't make a little more headway on the predator front before being spotted. The BPD are understandably a bit defensive about killing it, but hey, we're predators, too. A hundred pounds of alarmed (if not addled) cat heading my way would be sufficient inducement to shoot. So, here's my point: if the City doesn't cull the summer deer population, expect more mountain lions. You read it here.

Two Cafes

2010-08-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

Northside - Euclid and Hearst - appears to be in flux. The cafe above opened a few months ago, newly renovated. It holds the corner, a prime location in terms of foot traffic. Up the street on the same side, tucked into a single storefront, is a cafe that spills out into the street. That's probably not possible at the corner, but - as the photo below shows - it makes a difference. When La Farine opened on Solano, there was a big fuss about the sidewalk seating. I never understood why. It's one reason that cafes give life to a town or a city. (In terms of Northside's viability as a retail corridor, it seems totally wrong of the University to let Peet's to put a cafe on the ground floor of Dal Hall.)

Fisher Collection

2010-08-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

94708 went to SFMOMA this evening to see the Fisher Collection, a trove of modern art put together by the founders of The Gap. The highlight for me was a remarkable "animated diorama" (I'm not sure how else to describe it) on the fourth floor. It's set up in one of two darkened, theater-like spaces along the east wall of the promenade as you walk out from the elevators. The artist is William Kentridge and the subject is Mozart's Magic Flute, which he riffs on in a memorable way. Worth the trip for that alone, but there's much else to see. (My writer friend Kenneth Caldwell reviewed the exhibit recently on his blog, Design Faith.)

1431 Arch

2010-08-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

This is one of the older houses in Berkeley. I used to imagine it was proof that the houses near it would survive the next big Hayward fault quake, but the last big one predates it. There's an apartment building on Berryman with a witch's hat. It's an usual motif for 19th-century houses here. Is it a pattern house? It looks too eclectic, like the original owner went to town, marrying a more conventional Victorian facade (right) with something more flamboyant (left). (Note the turret dormers and fretwork above the front porch.) The house is on a steep site, with a lot of stairs to reach the first floor. Nearby houses open to the side or set their front steps sideways so the path to the front door takes most of uphill rise; 1431 opts for a grander approach.

Garage Sale

2010-08-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Two blocks of Arch Street, 1400 and 1500, joined forces this Sunday to hold a marathon garage sale, dotting both sides of both blocks. The motive, beside shedding stuff, was to help neighbors meet neighbors. It worked - I met several new people. Doing it all at once seemed to attract more foot traffic, too. There's an archeological quality to garage sales, exposing layers of the past. They're also anthropologically interesting, as slices of material life come into view. The act of shedding reflects different impulses - from paring back to moving on. In the New Jersey town where I grew up, an annual church sale was the prompt. This two-block event had something of that spirit.

Haviland Hall

2010-07-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

One thing I like about the neoclassical buildings on campus, like Haviland Hall, is the attention paid to details like this medallion above the main entry. In addition to photography, 94708 is a prompt to reviving watercolors, which I haven't done since childhood. A highly speculative rendering of the same entry is shown below.

Elbow Lake

2010-07-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, 94708 ventured to Battle Lake, Minnesota (via Fargo) for a family reunion. The last day of the visit featured a stay on Elbow Lake, in a 1920-era summer house built by a J.P. Morgan heiress from St. Louis. Now a B&B called Xanadu Island, it's owned by a former architect, originally from Florida, who ran (and sold) a small but successful restaurant chain. He winters in Jackson Hole. Both the house and the lake are gorgeous, but the mosquitoes, which appear at night, are industrial strength. They ignored repellent and clothing. Good screens worked, though, thank goodness. More local posts will soon follow, but wanted to share this. Wish I had a recording of the cry of the loons, a waterbird that frequents the lake. Quite spooky!

Wesley House

2010-07-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of so-called genre buildings, but this one - designed by Kirk Peterson - is well done. Peterson is better known for the projects he did for Patrick Kennedy and the Kennedy offshoot that developed the monster with a Trader Joe's on its ground floor at the northwest corner of MLK. That project makes the Gaia Building look like a model of sensitivity. Unlike both of them, this one is in scale with surrounding buildings and harmonious in appearance. Kudos to the church next door that presumably sponsored it. (It's located across from Haas Pavilion at Bancroft and Dana.)

Arch St. Friary

2010-07-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

Another example of the presence of organized religion in North Berkeley is the recently renovated home of the Capuchin Franciscans on the west side of Arch Street north of Cedar. The friars, if that's what they're called, are noticeable for their long robes with rope ties. Are they affiliated with the Franciscan School of Theology on Euclid, nearer to campus? I'm not sure. Something wonderful, though, about having friars in your midst, like the Buddhist monks I sometimes see on BART, dressed in traditional clothing. Other than the sign, the Capuchin Franciscans' dwelling place looks like a two-story apartment building, which indeed it is.

Porosity, e.g.

2010-07-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Tolman Hall, which I believe was designed by the office of the late John Carl Warnecke, is not one of UCB's most distinguished buildings, but it is a model of how to provide porosity (that word again) at an important point of access between the campus and community: raising the building up on pilotis (as architects call free-standing columns that support the occupied building above - a favorite motif of the Swiss-French early modernist, Le Corbusier). I often walk under this portal when I cross the campus, as it faces Arch Street, my usual route. In another post, I'll show how the south wall of the main quad at the UCSF Research Campus at Mission Bay fails to provide any porosity at all - something I believe will be regretted later when a new hospital is in place across 16th Street to the south. It's an uncivil gesture to wall a campus off. Traditional academic quadrangles provided numerous ways in, with their buildings forming courtyards or walks that are part of what makes them memorable. The Haas School of Business, one of the last works of Charles Moore (with an L.A. offshoot that went on to design the new Temple Beth-El), maintains this impulse, one saving grace in a building that feels about 20 percent too large and about 20 percent too dumbed down from Moore's doubtlessly more interesting initial vision. (Moore is better known locally for the Sea Ranch Condominiums, designed with another incarnation, MLTW.)

Warren Obverse

2010-07-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

Here's the south half of Warren Hall viewed from the east. It's not quite as massive on this side, making use of the slope. It has what architects call a layered facade, meant to create some visual interest across a long expanse of unbroken mass. I didn't look closely enough to see if the ground floor has a two-sided entry. It probably does. That gives the building a bit of porosity, as architects also say - meaning that you can pass through the building rather than having to walk around it. Of course, that passage will probably be reserved for the occupants much of the time. There's another building nearby, which I'll show in a separate post, that handles this in a more public-spirited way. Given the antipathy toward science of some activists, the ability to walk under a building, let alone through it, may now be regarded as out of bounds.

Sweet Heart

2010-07-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

While walking across campus today, I saw this heart in the midst of the eucalyptus grove to the north of the path that runs along the south fork of Strawberry Creek (toward Center Street). It looks like someone's (or some team's) art project, but it's quite striking (and worth a look). Although I thought initially it was all Tibetan ghost-catcher flags, it includes photos and snippets of text. The best place to spot it is the path that runs along the west side of the microbiology building that's attached to the old (but now renovated) Life Science Building. Walking south on that path, you'll see it about halfway.

Palace of Culture

2010-07-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

Well worth a walk across campus, this building, roughly across from lower Sproul Plaza and Zellerbach Hall at 2430 Bancroft, west of the Telegraph intersection, houses two cultural landmarks, Musical Offering and University Press Books. The former includes that increasingly rare commodity, a classical music CD shop, and a cafe. The latter is a superb bookstore. Both are owned by two overlapping partnerships, representing the worlds of academe, literature, music (the making and the playing), and publishing. The cafe of late has turned out some great dishes. When I stopped in this afternoon, a string quartet was performing in the corner table (the leftmost window facing the street). Musical Offering's current newsletter has an interview with the new Cal Performances director that's well worth reading. One can become a "Friend of UPB" for an absurdly modest cost. This Palace of Culture deserves support, as few businesses are under greater threat now than independent bookstores, which are pressured by Amazon, e-books, and horrific terms of trade. Yet, unlike its digital competitors, one can peruse the books and make informed decisions. One can also hear talks by writers and even join in UPB's Slow Dinners, which invite guests to read their own work. Highly, highly recommended.

Warren Hall

2010-07-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

Warren Hall's replacement may have a different name - I didn't get close enough to the sign to see. I believe that the architect is SmithGroup, a mega-firm from Detroit that bought the local firm Stone, Marraccini & Patterson (later SMP - the spelling of the full name is from memory). In its new guise, it's continued to focus on hospitals and labs. The design quality of its work is better than it was. Back in the day, SMP was responsible for the USPS Building near the Oakland West BART Station, and other monsters. That era is mercifully over, although of course the buildings linger. The State Health Building's demise may be a sign of the times: they're also tearing down 1960s and 1970s relics in England. They have their defenders, but there's no getting around their ugliness. It's still too early to say if the Warren Hall replacement is a success. The old Warren Hall was a modest affair. This is much bigger, with a look that says "SCIENCE" (all those filters on the roof). As mentioned below, university lab buildings tend toward bland. Will this one? As an aside, I visited the SMP office on Bay St. in SF in 1971. It was in a former Safeway - rows of desks organized in two halves, with a traffic cop at the front. It reminded me of a slave galley. In those days, big firms were made up of acres of draftsmen. At SOM, where I worked briefly, there was a movement to unionize. I'm sure it was going on at SMP, too. It scared the hell out of the firms, and working conditions improved significantly shortly thereafter. The nascent union ("Organization of Architecture Employees") didn't make it, but it made a difference. (The new building is on the east side of Oxford between University and Berkeley Way.)

Opus Dei

2010-07-10T00:15:00.000-07:00

Presumably because of Holy Hill*, buildings with religious affiliation dot the area north of the Berkeley campus. This one (the parking lot included) is Opus Dei. I met one of its members and had dinner with him and others several years ago. They would like to expand to the south, taking over what was once a Texaco station, if memory serves - the scene of an extended environmental cleanup that some regarded as a waste of time and Texaco's money. (I have no opinion on this. I'm just reporting what I heard.) Despite the cleanup, the land lay fallow before Opus Dei bought it, even with a university across the street. It got some economic benefit from the construction boom at the northwest corner of the campus - and still does, judging from the pickup trucks.

*: Holy Hill includes the Graduate Theological Union and the Pacific School of Religion, which are centered around the Le Conte, Scenic and Ridge Road intersection. Opus Dei is near the northeast corner of Hearst and Oxford.

Bits & Pieces

2010-07-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

The old State Health Building is now just a pile of rubble, I discovered. On the south side of the block, there was a lot of activity clearing away the remnants. This view is from Oscar's (northwest corner of Hearst and Shattuck), looking southeast. University Hall is in the disance. Wonder when that will come down? Not in my lifetime, I'd wager, unless an earthquake tests that X-bracing to the breaking point. So Helios, a UCB-BP joint venture, will soon rise from the rubble. As previously mentioned, the rendering suggests it will resemble the Warren Hall replacement across the street. That's not unlike the UCSF Research Campus at Mission Bay in San Francisco. University science facilities tend to look alike - sort of suburban, to my eye. Wrapped around a lot of technical stuff, even the ones designed by top architects seem to get dumbed down ("value engineered" is the euphemism). The bloom is a little off the BP rose, too, but that's another story.

The Former Beth-El

2010-07-08T22:17:00.000-07:00

From this view, the former Temple Beth-El at Vine and Arch looks more Italianate than from the outside. This is the main entry from the garden, formerly the playground and occasional campground of Camp Kietov, where my kids absorbed the songbook before graduating to Camp Unalayee. The temple's renovation is pretty clever, stuffing a lot of program (it's now the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology) into the original envelope. To its credit, the school kept the large, west-facing windows and the overall feel of a building that owes a debt to the early modern architect Erich Mendelsohn, who lived and practiced in San Francisco during and after World War II. Best known for the expressionist Einstein Tower in Potsdam, he was also a sought-after designer of department stores until the Nazis arrived. Despite his fame, he struggled to get work here. Since Beth-El moved to Spruce Street, my sense of the Jewish liturgical year has slipped away. I miss the kids, but the temple's new site is a better place for them.

Bakery Mural

2010-07-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

Someone mentioned this mural, and then I saw it while out walking. It's on the south wall of the building that houses Virginia Bakery. The impulse to do murals is not one I've ever shared, but they have a long and sometimes distinguished history. This one appears apolitical, although it's probably too early to be sure. The Virginia Bakery is also an acquired taste - again, not mine, but it has a devoted following, from what I can tell. My kids were once devotees, steering me in its direction. I can't eat Big Macs now, either. (Update: the mural is coming along, but there's an ad seeking donations.)

Small Moves

2010-07-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

This used to be a dog and cat clinic. Designed by Berkeley architect-builder Fred Hyer, it's a good use of a really narrow site. My impression is that it's a remodel of that building, although a radical one, but I didn't look at it closely enough while it was underway to say for sure. I'm glad the designer opted to make a strong visual contrast from Cafe Gratitude to the south. I didn't notice until I looked at the photo that it riffs on the 1960s "box" apartment building behind it. A translucent scrim on the glazing that faces the street now gives it privacy, while it's open to the courtyard-like driveway. It's being used as an office by the owner, Scott Robinson of Robinson Real Estate.

Barry Elbasani, 1941-2010

2010-07-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

Barry Elbasani, FAIA, a founder of ELS, the Berkeley-based architecture firm that designed the Recreational Sports Facility at UC Berkeley and renovated a building on Berkeley Way below Oxford to house UC Press, died of brain cancer on 29 June. A North Berkeley resident, he was first hospitalized over the Christmas holidays. ELS employed a number of my friends. (One of them, Kenneth Caldwell, just published an interview he did with Elbasani in 2009.) The RSF has held up well, and the UC Press renovation is a model for how to do a lot with not much of a budget at all. Alan Oshima, a wonderful designer, did the color work on both buildings. The poster here is by David Goines, a wonderful designer himself. Goines, whose studio is on MLK, has long been in demand to capture and commemorate local prominence.(Update: attended Elbasani's memorial on Sunday, 18 July 2010, and learned much more about this remarkable man, best known locally for the Berkeley Repertory Theater, where the memorial was held.)

Peet's Update

2010-07-03T21:58:00.000-07:00

My neighbor, Sally Woodbridge, tells me that Mr. Peet's original store was on Polk Street in San Francisco - she used to buy coffee beans from him there in the 1950s. So the "Original Peet's" on Vine St. was not actually the first. Sally has her own interesting blog (sponsored by our mutual SF friend, Robin Chiang), continuing the work that she began as the West Coast correspondent of Progressive Architecture. A recent blog post describes the incredible landfill operation that she and I discussed earlier today, apropos the State Health Building's demolition. Sally is probably best known locally for the guides to Bay Area architecture that she's coauthored since the 1960s.

Oxford Tract

2010-07-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Farms in Berkeley? (Sorry, a little obvious.) The Oxford Tract is an agricultural testing ground. Judging from what's been planted in the past, performance in dry weather is the issue. There's a mix of crops this year, rather than the rows upon rows of corn I used to see. It's remarkable to me that the tract has survived, given the university's appetite for building sites. A few years ago, a three-story surge building was added at the south end, along Hearst. Separated by greenhouses and other plant biology buildings (if that's what they are), it isn't really noticeable until you near the Oxford/Hearst corner. On the north end, EBMUD put in a pumping station. To EBMUD's credit, the student garden on that end was mostly preserved. It provides a visual buffer and an amenity for the apartment houses that face it. The pumping station is more sensitively designed than the surge building in terms of fitting in. Although it's fenced off along the street, it's good to have this agricultural remnant as part of the local terrain. It feels vulnerable, even more so now that Helios is going up on the south side of Hearst. I hope it survives as it is.

War Zone

2010-06-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

Before Helios can come into existence, the old State Health Lab has to come down. The site looks like a bomb hit it, especially now when there's only a bay left (amid a sea of rubble). There's a lesson here about sustainability - the Lab was built for the ages, but not designed for them. Its inflexibility pretty much ruled out its reuse. This is often the case for concrete-frame buildings of the 1950s and '60s. What's replacing them isn't just higher-tech: one underlying assumption is that much will change; another is that it will all come down, too, at some point, and be easier to take apart and recycle or reuse. The old lab has clearly been a bear to demolish.

Blum Center

2010-06-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Blum Center restores and expands the shingle-style Naval Architecture Building, designed by John Galen Howard, UC Berkeley's first campus architect. The renovation puts a new ground floor, open to the south, under the building, connecting it to the addition, designed by Gensler (note: I work for the firm.) Scheduled to open in August, Blum Center brings together engineers, scientists, and others to develop new, affordable technologies to deal with chronic third-world problems. The complex will house these collaborative teams. It's an example of my alma mater's contributions to the planet. (Blum Center is uphill from the Journalism School, along Hearst above Euclid.)

Analog Books

2010-06-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

With the demise of Black Oak Books as a North Berkeley fixture, Analog Books on Euclid between Hearst and Ridge has become one of my alternatives. The big selling point of Analog is the selection. There's always a find (and often more than one), and enough turnover that it's fun to browse. The people at the cash register take an unobtrusive stance, but are pleasant and helpful. The music they play is consistently lively, and sometimes includes old 33 rpm classics. University Press Books and Moe's are two reasons to cross campus, but Analog is a good stopping point on another route. An endangered species, bookstores need everyone's support. Think globally, buy locally.

Organic Architecture

2010-06-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

I've watched this building on Virginia Street, uphill from Arch Street, evolve over time as a trumpetvine has steadily and now completely taken over the front facade. There are balconies above the garages, now hidden from sight. As I walked by, one of the residents came out and opened his garage door, which seems more like the entrance to a cave or tunnel.

French Hotel

2010-06-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

Sited on the west side of Shattuck between Cedar and Vine, the French Hotel* was renovated in the 1980s. Its cafe, often spilling onto the sidewalk, is reliably open on holidays, and that's typically when I go there. The hotel's south-facing balconies overlook the huge parking lot of Andronico's (a supermarket). For the parking lot of Kahn's Salk Institute in La Jolla, Dan Kiley used the kind of gravel you find in the paths of Parisian parks, with beautiful eucalyptus trees for shade. (I think it all went away with Anshen & Allen's addition.) It's too bad Andronico's couldn't do something similar. As it is, they pack the cars in, then fight a perpetual losing battle with "customers" who run off to do their errands elsewhere. I'm told that locals sometimes park visiting relatives at the French Hotel instead of putting them up at home. I've never been clear who else stays there, but it's definitely well-located. With Chez Panisse across the street, it's not the worst place you could pick to camp out.

*: The French Hotel is actually in 94709. This "error" will be repeated

2511 Hearst

2010-06-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

This was my point of entry into the district. I moved here in 1971, after staying with my cousins on 6th Street (they'd bought and restored a Victorian south of Channing, a lovely house). I rented a room with a tiny bathroom and no kitchen for $60 per month. I was working in the city at this point - long days, so I mostly ate out. Later, I moved to the apartment at the front (middle floor, left side). It had a bay view, a separate kitchen, and a bigger bathroom with an outlook to the north. The street noise was horrific - a lot of traffic on Hearst. I met my wife at the 3Cs Cafe, where she and her sister worked while they were at Cal. I also met Yoshi, who went on to start the eponymous jazz club with her first husband Kaz. (Their first restaurant was downstairs.) At Top Dog, one of the guys behind the counter started giving me free food when he learned that I'd studied with Norris Kelly Smith, author of a book on Frank Lloyd Wright that he admired. When I wrote to Professor Smith, whose survey of architectural history I'd taken at Washington University, he replied immediately, saying that I was the only student he knew who'd received a tangible benefit from his classes. When I lived there, 2511 Hearst was owned by the same guy, Richard Sikora, who developed Walnut Square (home of the original Peet's). I'd heard that he was a former economics professor at Berkeley who'd moved to Vancouver. The little mall where Top Dog still is was built around the same time by Dave Ruegg - in a similar style as the "boardwalk" areas behind the older building that Sikora renovated at Walnut Square.

Original Peet's

2010-06-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

The very first Peet's sits at the southwest corner of Walnut and Vine. Not long ago, it was finally remodeled - they installed a small museum behind the counter. (I still haven't seen it). They also added tables and chairs, inside and out, so you see the usual hangers-on, banging on their laptops with plugs in their ears. There used to be a Starbucks in the Dead Center at the southwest corner of Shattuck and Cedar (so named because it was formerly a funeral home). One reason it closed was the inordinate number of people sitting around nursing cold cups of coffee. The Peet's remodel is pretty good - much of the feel of the old place is intact. Peet's is a scene that starts early and stays late. I've never tried to parse who goes when. Like other public establishments in Berkeley, it has its street musician (a woman in overalls who plays the banjo and sings) and a tall man who now arrives on crutches. (See photo.) There used to be a slightly crazy but harmless man who stood across the street, but I haven't seen him lately. (A long time ago, there was a man who stood silently out front. I saw him later, back to normal. I think he might have been on a spiritual quest, but this is just a guess.) There's a chess-, radio-, and guitar-playing contingent who use the front steps of the Friends meeting house and a concrete indent along the west side of the Mormon church. (Both face Peet's.) The service at the original Peet's is more efficient than Peet's in San Francisco, perhaps as a reaction to the customers (to judge from the drinks line). Mr. Peet died a year or two ago. He taught the people who started Starbucks (although they must have skipped a few lessons), which suggests a generous spirit. RIP.

Arch Street

2010-06-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

I moved to this block in 1975, when my oldest son was a baby. My wife arrived in 1968, while she was a student at Berkeley. We lived on the uphill side of the street until 1984, when we moved to the other side. We raised four kids on this block, which is slowly regaining a younger population. My oldest son used to race down the sidewalk on his big wheel. Did they ban those things? He really got some speed going, I recall. It's a miracle he didn't crash and no one ran him over. In the summer, I can look out the back deck and feel that I'm in a sea of green. To the southwest, there's an undeveloped piece of land that's been home to deer off and on for years. The downhill neighbors have a pair of dogs, so the deer have kept their distance. They're incredibly brazen, and a huge nuisance if you have a garden. I keep expecting to see a mountain lion, but so far, no luck.

About 94708

2010-06-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

I've lived here almost 40 years, so I thought I should write about it. Extending north from the Berkeley campus, and east up into the hills, this is where Charles Keeler wrote about "simple houses" and Bernard Maybeck designed them. (Keeler's simple was like Joseph Esherick's ordinary two generations later.) In 1923, a fire burned a lot of those houses to the ground. The architect-artist Lars Lerup, a sometime resident, once described Berkeley to me as a suburb of New York City, and that's especially true for 94708, which may be the epicenter of this phenomenon. As one-time mayoral candidate Fred Weeks noted, the New York Times is the daily paper in these parts (now along with the FT and WSJ). It's both cosmopolitan and its own sometimes very small world. Welcome to it!