Urban ambles is playing around with different layouts for the blog, so please pardon the periodic construction dust, you may see the blog changing appearance repeatedly over the next couple of days. The management is planning a roll-out of a new website next week that is directly linked to the blog, and is wanting a ‘cohesive graphic message’ .

In the meantime, please enjoy an excerpt from our recent eastern trip. This marvelous trip will be recapped in the next couple of posts. This is central park on a perfect fall day.

The great urban design writer Ada Louise Huxtable lament of years past- “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard” inspired this post, that and the fact Market Street has been in the news quite a bit lately. Seems not a week goes by and we don’t hear about some new traffic plan for Market Street : cars, but only so-far, no cars at all, no cars or buses, tandem bikes only, only clowns on unicycles, etc. The latest was a proposition, that failed, which would have allowed  an area of heightened illuminated signs in the mid-Market area. I voted for this. At any rate, some ramblings on Market Street

The Past

Market Street is the most famous street we have, the grand boulevard, connecting downtown’s focal point at the Ferry Building, with the city’s almost highest point- Twin Peaks. Discussions about improving Market Street have gone on for over 100 years. In 1905, the great Chicago Architect Daniel Burnham was enlisted to develop a new urban plan for the city. Amidst his city-wide planning, he imagined a grand boulevard along Market , culminating with an acropolis-like enclave of buildings and statuary, complete with cascading waterfalls down its slopes. The plan was approved 6 months before the Earthquake, but the city fathers ditched the plan for expediency sake after the quake- rebuilding instead largely what was there before.

Burnham's Twin Peaks Acropolis

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But why write about  historic Market Street when we can experience first hand. Two incredible videos, one from yes 1905, and a second from 1941.

The Grand Tour (Recession Version!) continues with a visit to Berkeley. When we last left the Grand Tour , we were making our way from Oakland, through Berkeley, to Albany and its strange “Bulb”. But Berkeley deserves its own post. My saunter focused on the beautiful campus and the hills above it,  a schizophrenic 6-mile walk, to and and from the Berkeley BART station. Here’s the route.

More than 6 months ago (yikes), the Grand Tour visited Stanford, the archrival, certainly athletically, and I think esthetically,  to Berkeley. If Stanford is ochre-hued  meditteranean mission, a literate world set into the wilds as directed by Junipero Serra, Berkeley is one part Sophocles, one part Prussian Bohemia- an informally grayish  classical ensemble set along a creek amongst the redwoods. As someone who attended a college whose campus most closely resembled a shopping mall,( in fact, had an Orange Julius suddenly appeared adjacent to the Engineering Lecture Hall, no one would have blinked. ) this is an especially extraordinary setting.

I have many favorite places in San Francisco, but one stands above all the rest,  the San Francisco Art Institute on Russian Hill. The Art Institute, founded in 1871,  is one of the oldest  and more prestigious art schools in the country. Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Bruce Nauman, and Clyfford Still have taught there, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Errol Morris, and yes, Courtney Love,  studied there.

The Art Institute  moved to its current site in 1926. The original building was designed by the San Francisco firm Bakewell and Brown, the same firm that designed San Francisco’s City Hall, among other buildings. Its a masterful study in mediterranean romanticism, the tower, the courtyard, the breezy arcades, all delightfully overgrown with all manner of planting. In 1969 a modernist  addition was completed, designed by Paffard Keatinge Clay. A raw, even brutal concrete counterpoint to the original building, its highlight is  a stepped lecture hall set in a plaza, on top of which sits an outdoor ampitheater. The plaza surrounding the hall is an abstract composition in its own right, and offers stupendous views of the city and bay below. The spatial sequence one experiences in this building is extraordinary, first through the classical entry portal, then into the lush courtyard, a glance up at the tower, a detour  into the Diego Rivera Hall to see his great mural, then, after being  squeezed into a hallway between the old and new buildings, one is released in the addition’s plaza, and an extraordinary and little known vista point overlooking the bay. And like all good mediterranean complexes , the parting view of the building, the tower on the hill, embellishes the experience in our memory. Lucky enough to live around the corner from the building for a few years, my favorite image in my memory is that tower, seen at night, in the fog, a romantic  beacon beckoning to the cacophony of ship’s horns below. Below, we walk through the building.

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Oh, to find your calling in life. Its something we all aspire to, struggle for, sometimes achieve. I had the privilege a couple nights ago of previewing a documentary on the life of a man who found that treasure.  The documentary, entitled “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman”, directed by Eric Bricker, explores the life of Mr. Shulman, the legendary photographer of  Southern Califonia modernity. It premieres next month, and its a joyous testimony to a man who clearly found his calling. Mr. Shulman passed away in July, he was approaching 99 years of age, and was still active in photography right up to his death. Based in Los Angeles, Shulman introduced many to iconic Southern Califonia modernism, as authored by the likes of Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra , Pierre Koenig, Albert Frey, and John Lautner. This is perhaps his most well know photo, a magnificent home designed by Koenig, high over Los Angeles.

The tenderloin wear’s its heart on its sleeve, or perhaps more apt, its tattooed forearms. To wit, some signs form the ‘loin.

Haven't had the prime rib...........

Typical 'loin joint- lots of squinting denizens coming out to smoke

dcbzz

Glorious sign- no shortage of liquor in the ‘loin.

Color and pornography.

"Tenderloin National Forest"- National Park Service inspired.

Nothing to add

Inspiration and/or admonishment-weekly on Turk street

The Grand Tour (Recession version!) continues as we make our way along the East Bay. Picking up where we left off in Alameda, this leg takes us through parts of 5 East bay cities, Oakland , Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, and El Cerrito.. I got there and back on BART, starting at the 19th BART Station, finishing at El Cerrito. Here’s the longish 11 mile route:

Barb-B-Q and Religion

We begin our tour in Oakland, hiking  one block over to pay a visit to the marvelous new Christ The Light Cathedral at Lake Merritt.  This is an exquisite building, designed by Skidmore ,Owings, & Merrill, in my humble opinion, one of the best pieces of recent  religious architecture (It deserves its own post). The design particularly works wonderfully at the scale of urban design, commanding its corner with its truncated elliptical shape. The interior is a wood slatted shell within the outer glazed shell, which gives rise to a soothing level of natural light. The building comes to the ground gracefully, unlike so many modern religious buildings whose towering sculptural tops land on squat little rectangular bases. My only quibble with this building is more a question, how could the diocese afford it?

At any rate, this part of Oakland is rebounding. In addition to the cathedral, there is a sparkling new Whole Foods and the newly refurbished Fox Theater nearby. There is also the new Uptown Broadway development, and while the buildings are nothing to shout about, the ensemble has pointed to a new, more promising future for the area.

Just beyond Uptown, we travel down San Pablo, on our way to Emeryville, and the neighborhood declines quickly. Wedged between Uptown and Emeryville, this stretch is littered with boarded up shops, tattered apartments, and the periodic fast food joint, often on a second or third life, in this case, as a bar-b-q joint.

I just completed this entry for an architectural competition. The challenge was to design a 400 square foot pre-fab home that could accommodate 2 adults. Now, 400 square feet is the size of some living rooms, let alone space large enough for living, eating, sleeping, and study. My idea was to provide a 330sf unit that would have a small living area at one end, a bedroom at the other end, with a bath/kitchen core in the center. Along the side of this main unit is a  rolling 8 x 9 room , that can be repositioned based on the needs of the occupant. The base unit would be equipped with roll-up doors, and the unit could be rolled into place and “plugged in” at the new location.

I imagined  flex | FLAT evolving with a hypothetical occupant- a poet, who eventually partners, and then ‘parents’- and the house flexes with these changes; in turn, an expanded work area (the poet years), an expanded living area (the entertaining of the partner years), and finally a second bedroom (the parent years).The second part of proposal was to consider various urban infill scenarios for the unit, which are shown below. Here are a couple of images, and you can view an expanded version on my website.

The "parents" option, complete with kiddie pool

The "poet" option

Oh- San Francisco summers. We curse you,  then remember our sticky eastern summers of yore, and excuse you. Then a cold blast closes the back door and we curse you again. I love the fog, one of my companions here this summer at 7 Leroy . So I bring you, excerpts of the daily struggle between the fog and the sun.

Do not fear loyal reader -The Grand Tour (Recession Version!)  continues, after a brief hiatus. To recap, we have made our way south from the Golden Gate Bridge,to the south bay, and back up to the through East Bay. Part 9 takes us to our second island on the tour: Treasure Island. Here’s the route:

As most know, Treasure Island is a man made island, linked by a causeway to the the “natural” Yerba Buena Island, through which millions of us have passed through on  arriving in San Francisco .The impetus for its creation was the hosting of the 1939-40 World’s Fair.

Being held as it was at the end of the 30’s; the World’s Fair  perhaps unintentionally marked the wind down of the glorious deco/moderne period in American architecture, a period of highly-stylilized and geometrically chiseled building facades and sculptural figurines. There is currently a show at the Presidio Officer’s Club that has some outstanding photos, guidebooks, and maps commemorating the 70th anniversary of the fair. Here’s a few remarkable excerpts.

The World's Fair- buildings to lower right still exist

The promenade to Pacifica-goddess of the fair

Pavilion buildings with moderne sentries

The plan at the time of the island’s inception was  to host the Fair, and then turn the island into the main bay area airport. But the navy offered  a land swap to the city, for some of their land on the penisula, (the future SFO). Treasure Island thus became a naval base, and stayed that way until it, along with the Presidio, were decomissioned in 1996. The island is part of the city of San Francisco, and while the Navy has not yet officially handed over the island, it functions as part of the city. It is home to about 1,500 residents housed in former naval housing, along with the Treasure Island Job Corp, and a film studio. There are very few services on the island, and public transit is limited to one Muni bus line- the trusty 108- that connects it to the city.