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Bridge Surfing
Another week, another bout of inclement weather in Northern California. Despite the persistent rain, San Francisco fortunately has hardy residents who are always willing to make lemonade out of lemons. .
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In The Howling Wind
A New York City snow/rain storm, late last year, with our gracious host Bernie Dechant (a fine photographer, no less) offered some fantastic photographic opportunities, despite the howling wind. As it turns out, going out in Manhattan on this particular occasion was a lot cheaper than my typical night out in San Francisco. Naturally, I ...
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Earth House
Further expanding on a recent post describing the house made out of sandbags, some additional images for your viewing pleasure. .
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Puff Piece
Noah Purifoy relocated to Joshua Tree from Los Angeles to pursue his art, drawn by the openness that the desert afforded him. His work is wildly eclectic, predominantly an exercise in assemblage of found and salvaged materials. The scale and quantity of the art is substantial, and allowed for many hours of photographic exploration under the desert ...
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Stacks And Stacks
Like many other cities around the world, San Francisco’s port area is undergoing radical change, in both zoning and new construction. I have yet to see any reference to plans of how to use these large silos, but there is a precedent for radical and interesting interventions for end-of-life use of industrial architecture. San Francisco ...
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Summer Time, Somewhere
Shot in Carmel, California over the Christmas break – here’s to summer, when it eventually arrives. I suppose one of the reasons Clint Eastwood calls Carmel home is because of the “winter” here. .
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Mental Physics, Redux
Another wall, same building. .
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The Fuel Economy
Few things allude more to the fuel economy than the motel (or motor hotel). Quintessentially American, the lowly motel typology has long been celebrated as a symbol of the wide open expanses of this vast country. Ed Ruscha’s fantastic depictions of gas stations is one of the best examples of the elevation of the theme ...
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Fog
Vintage San Francisco fog is pretty hard to beat for moody and mysterious photos. The massive Embarcadero Center complex (left image), located right against the bay in downtown San Francisco, is always even more of a presence on foggy nights.
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De Young Museum
The De Young Museum, a wonderful example of contemporary modern architecture, located in the heart of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
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Disney Concert Hall
One of the aspects of architecture that was pounded into me year after year during my formative years was the perpetually misunderstood notion of scale. Scale has many aspects to it, one of the most important being the relationship and proportion of adjacent volumes to each other. Over the years my sense of scale and ...
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Frei Otto’s Olympic Stadium
Sometime last decade I went to Munich to visit the Olympic Stadium, design by Frei Otto. The magnificence of the roof structure is complemented by a sea of chairs, in which the shade of green is varied ever so slightly from one to the other. The effect is both mesmerizing and soothing, and must have ...
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Powerful
Geothermal power near the Salton Sea in Southern California.
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Gare de Oriente
Photographs of a Santiago Calatrava designed train station in Lisbon, Portugal.
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Mental Physics
A night at the Harmony Motel in Joshua Tree, made famous by Irish rock band U2, which stayed here during the production of the Joshua Tree album, coupled with a visit to the Mentalphysics Institute, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, made for an interesting day.
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Palm Springs
A visit to Palm Springs to see the Richard Neutra designed Kaufmann House led to some disappointment, due to lack of access. Fortunately there was plenty else to see.