Happy Holidays

New York: Observe and Escape

Every time I visit New York, I see the city with fresh eyes. It changes that fast. But now my eyes are especially tempered by my West Coast perspective, as a resident of San Francisco.

San Francisco's population is diverse and international. Then you look at New York.

San Franciscans seem fashionable and well dressed, with snug fitting tailored clothing. Then you look at New Yorkers.

San Francisco has hipster progressives. New York City has fashionable capitalists.

San Francisco has fantastic architecture and an urbanism in distinct neighborhoods, with lessons to learn on every block. And then you look back at New York.

San Francisco is a city of books, of bookstores and book buyers and book readers. But New York still has Barnes and Nobles, lots of 'em.
San Francisco has a few districts where the architecture is especially corporate, more about square footage and FARs than neighborliness. Then you look at midtown and downtown Manhattan where architecture for business has been perfected.

San Francisco has galleries and condos extending into the fringes of the habitable city, in the Mission, SOMA, and the Bayview. New York has the West 25th Street galleries, the West 27th Street galleries, and more condos and rental residences (apartments) hugging the rehabilitated High Line than you can imagine.

The ice rinks have just been reinstalled in San Francisco's Union Square and Manhattan's Bryant Park.

Brooklyn is different. It's more like a larger version of Boston than Manhattan. And it’s fantastic. It has Boston's brownstones, Sacramento's amazing tree lined streets, and Providence's scale and mix of commercial and residential architecture, hills and landmarks.

My weekend in New York was dense, filled with colleagues and friends, art and urbanism, and a mad escape from JFK on the last flight to leave town before Sandy. What was to be a fun fall weekend in New York turned into a surreal mix of anticipation, anxiety and trauma. I was in New York to witness 9/11, in London on 7/7, in Biloxi as part of a design team following Katrina/Rita, and in Boston for the Blizzards of 2010. I was elated at "wheels up" on Sunday (10/28) despite the 2 hour delay. And my thoughts were and are with friends and colleagues who call New York home, as the waters recede and the metropolis is reilluminated.

Walking PDX ORE

I (we) spent a holiday weekend walking downtown Portland, Oregon. Most of the urban core area can be navigated on foot, with some help from the occasional buses and street cars. The central area is made up of blocks that are 200' x 200' with 60' wide street rights-of-way. Portland is not the Capital - that's Salem - but it is Oregon's largest city, with 585,000 people - about the same as Seattle. Still, it has solid local institutions, like the Portland Art Museum (now showing an excellent collection of Ellsworth Kelly prints) recently expanded into the Masons Hall next door, the Oregon History Museum (now showing a retrospective on architect Pietro Belluschi) and a handful of public and private colleges, like PCC, PSU, OHSU, U of P, and Lewis & Clark. 

Portland Art Museum

I walked much of the Pearl district, which was hosting their annual Labor Day arts and crafts fair. There's a great local arts scene especially in Chinatown and the Pearl District. My favorite spot in the city is undoubtedly Powell's Books, a huge and popular bookstore something like the Strand in NYC but way bigger. I was in a little piece of heaven.

The streetcar connects to a new district called the South Waterfront (http://www.southwaterfront.com/), a mini Vancouver, or to my eyes very much like San Francisco's King Street and Mission Bay areas. It was all new, mostly residential, glassy and middle class. In the South Waterfront we inquired about rental rates at one of the recently completed buildings. They were similar to many parts of San Francisco at $1799 for a 1BR and $2699 for a 2BR, monthly. Happily, we were assured that the building was "pet-friendly". Pet rent was an additional $40 per month for one and $70 for two, plus the initial $250 deposit. Parking was an additional $99 for one space or $150 for a tandem pair. The building was a rental not a condo, so there were no HOA fees. But it was designed as a condo, so it’s got a full set of amenities, should the inflated for-sale real estate market return.

South Waterfront District

Portland is a strange city. It refers to itself by its airport handle - PDX - with affection. It has a memorable series of bridges spanning the Willamette River. I loved the small size and scale of the city - with its tiny blocks you can walk through 4 districts in 20 minutes. Temperate weather (my favorite), pleasant and livable, but not too stimulating. Very white and very undiverse. The only less diverse American city is Salt Lake City! It has an eerie similarity to other unspectacular urban places of the American West, like Denver, San Jose, and Sacramento.

Nevertheless, Fall in the Northwest is beautiful, not quite stunningly arresting like fall in New England, but still endearing. On the rural route back to the city from Mt. Angel Abbey, we had yummy Burger Baskets at the Big Burger Drive-In (across the arterial from a McDonald’s), down the road from where we picked up fresh berries on the honor system from a farm stand. The food is wonderful and local, if not all nutritious.

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Busiest Weekend Ever

 

 

This weekend San Francisco had a perfect storm of public social activity. The San Francisco Giants and the Forty-Niners. Columbus Day parade. Castro Street Fair. America's Cup series racing. Fleet week with air show. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. There were over a dozen big public events in town. Plus all if the normal things that bring people to this city: temperate weather, nice tree-lined streets to walk along, coherent urbanism, interesting architecture, and dramatic hills topped with neighborhood parks. And the cultural stuff, like art museums, theatre and performing arts, mural-covered alleys, Coit Tower, Union Square.

 

From the Presidio to China Basin, the city's necklace of waterfront parks and promenades became an appropriated front yard for all of the activity. It's estimated that this city of 800,000 hosted an additional 1,000,000 visitors. They're calling it the busiest weekend in San Francisco history!

Reading For Fun, From Hersey To Hornby To Haring

I read very few books in junior high and high school. I didn't supplement this poor habit by reading magazines or newspapers either, except the comics, sports section, and occasional secondhand Sports Illustrated lent from my best friend Steve Baril, who had a subscription. I watched lots of television.

I got by with skimming and Master Plots, and still managed to be an A student in a small town public school system. Pleasure reading was not on my radar. The first book I ever read and enjoyed was A Bell For Adano, a book hand-selected for me from a list of required tomes in eleventh grade by the wise teacher Mr. D'Andrea. He presumed it would appeal to my Italian roots, and he was right. Of course it was also an acknowledged classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize for its author, John Hersey, in 1945. Thanks to Amazon, I was able to reread it last year.

 

This opened a window: reading could be pleasurable if it was something you were interested in. I read a series of sports books, including Bo Knows Bo by Bo Jackson and Drive by Larry Bird. And in the last few years more books on New England sports, Now I can Die In Peace, Moving the Chains, and Wicked Good Year. I recommend them all. Sports reading might not qualify as literature, but it's a start. And the gap is bridged with Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, about his relationship with London football squad Arsenal, the team that was my local while living in Islington 7 years ago.

 

 

My pleasure reading, or voluntary reading, didn't really resume until after college, when I found that reading helped me stay calm while riding the New York City subways during the rush hour commutes. I've been an avid book buyer and a moderate reader ever since.

I just finished reading Keith Haring's Journals, which took me over a year. I've finished a bunch of other books in the meantime. I was really savoring his meteoric life. Haring was one of the most prolific artists ever. He created a hybrid drawing-painting style that was marginalized by the serious museums by embraced but galleries, collectors, non-profits, hospitals, and pretty much anyone who needed a mural or has a good cause. It'd be fascinating to imagine how his work might have progressed had he not died of AIDS at age 31.

 

More Lichtenstein than Warhol, Haring bridged the gap between high and low art, between museum culture and street culture. But I think it was his embrace of commercial dissemination - his pop shops, t-shits, and general willingness to lend his art to massive commercial reproduction, that led to his work becoming part of the popular consciousness, and its related dispersal into the minds of suburban kids like me. His Journals opened an intimate window into his tumultuous decade of creativity, collaboration, production, hectic travel, sex, popular success, and relationship strife.

I've seen lots of his work over the years - mostly reproductions - but the one that stands out the most is the "Murale di Keith Haring," a building-sized mural he did in Pisa that I saw in 1994. Happily for me, the mural's creation is described in his Journals.

 

Mt. Angel Abbey Library: Modernism and Place in the Pacific Northwest

An ideal place to visit and ponder the work of Alvar Aalto is Helsinki, and the whole of Finland is even better. Italy works too.

But if you live in America, and you're waiting the 6-8 weeks for your passport to be renewed, you have two options. One is the Baker House Dormitory at MIT. The other can be found at an other-worldly hilltop abbey set in the farmland of rural Oregon, about an hour south of Portland.

The Mount Angel Abbey is a small Benedictine acropolis in the farm plain, part monastic, part collegiate. The Abbey's wide green lawn is anchored by the church at the east end. The corners of the green are held by buildings that house classrooms and living quarters for the seminarians and retreaters. The south side of the green is screened by majestic hundred year old trees.

The small library sits on the north side of the green. Its presents a modest single story of cream and beige brick and wood-screened windows south to the Abbey green, while stepping down the hill to the north to 3 stories in height. Passing through a small porch and low lobby, you're drawn in by the light and progressively down through the many levels of the library's light filled reading room. The curving lower mezzanine is mirrored above by a wonderful skylight. The elements of this spatial composition are white surfaces, radiating bookshelves, and wood furniture, all bathed in a sensuous north light that you have to see to believe.

 

The library is not an awe-inspiring building. It is not glitzy or iconic. It delivers no wow-factor. It is, however, a very thoughtfully situated and composed building, filled with books and daylight and quietness. North facing windows and skylights deliver enough indirect light that interior lighting is not needed in the daytime, although the interior light fixtures are designed by Aalto and wonderful in their own right.

This library exemplifies the the warm, curvy, natural and light- inflected modernism that has forged a quiet but stubborn resistance to the brutalism, neo-modernism, and international style projects of the last 50 years. It is anchored to its site, a place-specific work of a mature master architect. A succinct manifesto in space, light, and appropriate restraint.

 

(Note: you can scroll through the slideshow below, on this website; or click below to see them bigger at Shutterfly.)

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Remembering the Day of Infamy

Since my semester abroad in Florence, I've preferred urban Europe to the tropics, so when I learned that I'd be spending a week in Hawaii, I was excited to see the cities and towns of this remote and diverse island chain. My must-see list soon became populated by historic sites and architectural landmarks in and around the capital city of Honolulu, like Iolani Palace, the State House, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (known locally as the Punchbowl), the Bishop Museum and the Honolulu Academy of Art. Plus the world-famous Waikiki, a bit of Miami Beach on the Pacific.

However, the only place that was a must must must see - and if you visit Oahu it should be at the top of your list too - was the USS Arizona Memorial, part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Memorial. The reimagined Pacific National Memorial has recently reopened as a generous harbor-side park with small buildings and extensively scripted grounds. Its easy to be put off by the gift shops and vendors, but the memorial site commands attention. It is Hawaii's most popular attraction, with 1.6 million annual visitors.

The Arizona Memorial is itself 50 years old this year. It was designed by Honolulu architect Alfred Preis who ironically had been detained at Sand Island at the start of the war as an enemy of the country because of his Austrian birth. Proof that our national immigration policies are, and have long been, a work in progress.

Below are two collages, or "memory theatres", that I made to help me remember the day of my visit, the place, the event, the war.

The Date of Infamy was December 7, 1941.

If you can, visit the Memorial with a Veteran, preferably your dad. As I was lucky enough and honored to do.

 

Three Hawaiian Eras

The Hawaiian island chain has experienced a tumultuous two centuries, probably equal in change to that of California. From informal tribes to a unified island nation to occupied military industrial outpost to international beach holiday mecca. Since the later 1800s, era upon era has convulsed and transformed and reorganized and ruptured this land. And many of these eras are still visible, overlaid in a fascinating historical palimpsest on the ilsand of Oahu, the most populous island of Hawaii, home to cosmopolitan Waikiki and the capital city, Honolulu.

Three buildings illustrate three of the many eras of evolving Hawaiian history. The first, and oldest, is Iolani Palace, in downtown Honolulu. It is America's only royal palace, and it was home to Hawaii's royal family for just over a decade before American interests took over the island in a permanent occupation. The palace is like an Anglo-tropical palazzo, part plantation house, part government office. Completed in 1882, today it's mostly empty of furnishings but the interiors are exquisite. The 2-story palace has an interesting plan, with a central stair hall and stacked porches on all 4 sides which are not continuous but rather terminate in corner towers.

 

 

The second building is Shangri-La, the seaside house that Doris Duke spent a few years building an a lifetime furnishing. Doris Duke was heir to energy and tobacco fortunes - Duke University is named for her father. Doris Duke fell in love with Islamic art on a round-the-world honeymoon, which was routed through Hawaii. Built in 1937, the house has gorgeous views of the Pacific and Diamond Head (crater). Its rooms and furnishings and interior architecture are stunning. Immaculate craftsmanship, details at once sensuous and cerebral. The division between indoors and outdoors dissolves in the salty air. A thoughtful sequence takes you from the parking court, through a sentinaled portal, down through a stair hall, then a tall courtyard, and into a fabulous living room which overlooks the Pacific and formal terraced gardens. Throughout, plain white walls are juxtaposed with intricate wood ceilings, ornate plasterwork, and richly colored tilework.

The third building is the Byodo-in Temple, located in the Valley of the Temples Memorial Park. It's a replica of the 950 year-old Byodo-in Temple in Uji, Japan. The setting is dramatic, about a mile in from the ocean and at the foot of fiercely jagged mountains. The grounds are populated with black swans, happy birds and giant koi. It was established in 1968 to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the first Japanese immigrants to Hawaii. Yes there's a three ton bell and a three meter tall gold lacquered Buddha. But I think the temple is best viewed from across the pond - far enough away to not be bothered by the awkward architectural interpretation delivered by late-60's modernism.

 

These three buildings illustrate, in microcosm, how forms and ideas spread across oceans and civilizations long before the internet or globalization. They mark how people travel across wide distances and foreign lands, and how they attempt to remember where they've been, and what they've seen, and how they want to be seen and be remembered. How else would an antebellum mansion, a Persian court, and a Buddhist temple come to call this mid-pacific island home?

Paintings by an Architect

Giorgio Vasari wrote that drawing is the father of the three arts, architecture, sculpture, and painting, in his "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," also known as "The Lives of the Artists." For 500 years painting was thought to be a sister art of architecture, complimentary and relevant, with common concerns: line, shape, color, form, space, depth, texture, narrative, representation. And the training of painters and architects had some common ground. Today, halfway through the second century of specialization and the academies, very few architects paint anymore. Many architects sketch and draw, and some make watercolors while travelling, often very beautiful, but few make traditional paintings as part of their artistic practice. There are some. Le Corbusier. Julian de la Fuente. Michael Graves. Anthony Ames.

This slide show includes most of the paintings I have done over the course of 15 years. The paintings are compositions, facades, urban walls. Some are genre paintings - landscapes, still lifes, maps. Some are "poster portraits" - compositions of elements that represent friends or colleagues. These paintings are influenced by, and pay homage to, painting-makers that inspire me, including Gerald Murphy, Robert Slutzky, Roy Lichtenstein, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaus, Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, and Richard Diebenkorn.

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The Olympic Games From Berlin To London

I've never been to the Olympics - maybe some day - but I have been to former Olympic grounds. In Atlanta, and in Berlin. I’ve been to Germany twice.

The first time was in the fall of 1994. I was studying abroad in Florence. During the mid-semester week break, I journeyed to Stuttgart to see Sir James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie, an art museum designed by the British architect that had been highly praised and carefully studied by my architecture school faculty. My sketches, below, are not gorgeous. But I tried to see the building, and remember it - with plans, sections, perspectives, and axonometrics.

Neue Staatsgalerie designed by James Stirling. Sketches, 1994.

The second time was in the summer of 2000. I had received a travel fellowship grant for a month of study and wandering. It was nearly a decade after German reunification. I visited Berlin and then Hamburg and Hanover, while the world exposition was underway. Hannover’s Sprengel Museum had a vast retrospective on Kurt Schwitters, the greatest collage artist ever. I was in heaven.

Before my second year of grad school, I was not yet interested in cities or urban design, not really. Sure I adored Florence and I refused to commute to work by car, but I was no Jane Jacobs.  When I traveled, I made a beeline from Corbu building to Mies building to Stirling building, sometimes traveling for days to see a single building, passing through beautiful historic cities with blinders en route to a modern masterpiece.

In Berlin I traveled by train and bicycle, all over the city. There was construction everywhere, new embassies, new apartment blocks, new government buildings. The Reichstag’s new glass dome was open to visitors like me. Sketch, collage, photograph, nonstop. I took the rail out to the former Olympic grounds primarily because there was a Unite by Le Corbusier built there - one of only 4 identified in the Le Corbusier Guide as being authored by him.

At the grounds I came face to face with the power or Nazi architecture. While it can be easy to find the architectural remnants of authoritarian regimes - like fascist architecture in Italy, and colonial architecture in India - Nazi architecture is less abundant. Most of it was bombed and destroyed and wiped from the earth. The Olympic grounds are that rare ensemble that has survived. Theses grounds hosted the famous 1936 Summer Olympics, with a backdrop of European political turmoil and dramatic performances by American Jesse Owens, winning 4 gold medals. When I visited, the 100,000 seat stadium was being rehabilitated for football matches in the coming years. The massive clock tower was joined by 4 other slender towers at the long axis of the stadium. The site planning was designed to be vast and scaleless and imposing.

Seven years ago I was living in London when they assembled their Olympic host city bid. The good news of winning was greeted with a morning of terrorist bombings, right in my neighborhood.

London now hosts its third Olympics, 76 years after Hitler and Jesse Owens. Europe is in economic turmoil, and authoritarian regimes and their architectures prosper the world over.

However: the internet and cheap oil are producing the most informed, educated, and well-traveled generations ever. Gen X, Gen Y and the Millennials will eventually power the world. I’ve worked with and studied with colleagues from dozens of countries, including the host nations for the Berlin, Beijing, London, and Rio games. If we're lucky, we'll get things sorted out in time, for the next time London or Berlin hosts the games.

I Used To Have A Travel Journal

The years fly by. It has been nearly a decade since I first had a blog, which I thought was better called a travel journal. I'm not a lifelong diarist, but I did keep a detailed travel journal during a semester of college spent abroad in Florence, Italy, and briefly thereafter. I wanted to remember that experience beyond the evidence in my sketchbooks.

I was about to move to London, and enlisted my longtime mate Mitch Goldstein in setting up a website for me that had a blog component. The website had a great homepage, but little usability other than the blog and an email account. My old website was www.christopherpizzi.com, which I have since abandoned. The blog could have helped me keep in touch with family and friends, but it didn't. It was really a travel journal loosely linked to my frequent weekend travels and related Ofoto postings - which were where the real updates surfaced, via brief narrative introductions to the photo albums.

That old blog was lost, along with its contents, due to my digital ambivalence and Mitch's metamorphosis from closeted visual savant to design world wunderkind. And all the Ofoto postings were eventually deleted by Kodak. Though maybe it all lives on in one of Google's server farms in exurban Oregon.

I wanted to call this blog TravelSketch - connecting traveling with sketching as a way to enhance and retain memory - but that was already taken. I settled on using my name as the blog address, for directness and clarity, while inserting TravelSketch after my name in the title.

I was in London for over two years. I worked at a small but renowned architecture firm in Bloomsbury, travelled frequently, took thousands of pictures, and designed often. But I did very little proper sketching, like this composition of sketches from a sunny Saturday afternoon at Pitzhanger Manor, the weekend home of architect Sir John Soane.

For many years I've been looking, albeit casually, for the right online place to share thoughts - writings, drawings, pictures. I think this may be the right place.