Wine Country Echo Boom

Grapes for making wine can be grown only in certain places. The right soil and the right micro-climate happily match in only selected places on the planet. In the America, New York State grows wine upstate around the Finger Lakes, and on Long Island. Washington State, Oregon, Michigan and Virginia all have vineyards. Even Rhode Island has some. But no state is viticulturally blessed more than California. The Golden State has vast wine growing regions along the coast from Mendocino in the north to San Diego in the south, and almost everywhere in between except for the lowlands of Los Angeles. The six counties north of San Francisco - Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Napa, Lake and Solano - are rich with vineyards and wineries.

The Wine Trail - as a geographic and economic route, offers an interesting way to look at the region and the current state of California with historic parallels. In the 18th century, the original route was El Camino Real, the King's Highway that connected the Spanish Missions. In the 19th century, the Gold Chain connected gold rush towns. In the 20th century the Interstate Highway system connected all of the major cities, making a 6-hour drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles possible. And in the 21st century, local Highways12, 29 and 128 form the Wine Trail, connecting wineries and vineyards with small towns nearby and the larger world beyond the captive microclimates in the grape-growing valleys. Beyond the towns of Sonoma and Napa, there's Healdsburg, St. Helena, Yountville, Calistoga, Windsor, and Geyserville, to name just a few.

An array of complementary facilities have grown around the vineyards, from tasting rooms and restaurants to markets, spas, hotels, galleries, and golf courses. And the gathering industries of weddings, conferences and retreats. The 2000's saw a building boom of these facilities, one that had been slowly growing for three decades. Wine-makers and their architects have sprinkled the wine valleys with buildings that recall Italian castles, French chateaux, Spanish monasteries, and avant-garde art museums. Of course most of the structures look more local, a little more authentic and little more at home in the northern California landscapes. Most look more like stone barns, or refined industrial buildings, or porticoed market halls. These buildings always help frame the outdoor spaces where wine culture is best absorbed - the plazas, courtyards, forecourts, verandas, loggias, colonnades, and breezeways. The recent South Napa quake notwithstanding, a new building boom is underway and readily visible along the wine trails.

Wine suggests the good life, and just being a part of it for a little while is pure pleasure. And for those of us who were introduced to wine during study abroad semesters in Europe, the ambiance of wine culture reignites our college-era curiosity and joy for life. As my house father in Florence told me nearly 20 years ago, il vino fa buon sangue, wine makes good blood.

Sausalito Art Festival

Elmo pinata at Juanita Juanita, Sonoma

Lincoln Avenue, the main street of Calistoga

Lincoln Avenue, the main street of Calistoga

House in Calistoga

Yountville

Yountville

Christopher and Sabra

Sonoma's Mission San Francisco Solano

A Temple in Willard

Façade Sketch of South Elevation

There have always been temples. And Werner Seligmann's Willard Administration Building is a minor revelation, nothing less than a sublimely situated temple exactly as Vincent Scully would imagine it.

Southeast Corner

On a roadtrip traversing update New York by thruway, I knew that central New York was dotted with most of the few built works by the late former dean of Syracuse's School of Architecture, Werner Seligmann (1930-1998). So, in pursuit of modulor proportions, we took Exit 41 on the New York State thruway, south between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake, the two largest of the Finger Lakes. Passing beautiful dairy farms, orchards and vineyards, and then the Seneca Army Base, and heading west from Ovid, you soon come upon the grounds of the former New York State Willard Psychiatric Center, formerly the Asylum for the Chronic Insane. Driving onto its grounds, the Administration Building quickly comes into view from below, crowning a green hill overlooking Seneca Lake. 

Northwest Corner

The Administration Building is a perched sentinel, a white temple of an office building overlooking the lake, like a Greek temple might be set on a hillside terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. It is two stories on its south entry side, and three stories on its north side, overlooking a gently sloping eleven acre lawn, bigger than Bryant Park. The building is a simple rectangular volume, perhaps 50' wide by 120' long, just two rooms deep separated by an access corridor. The upper two stories are clad in white metal panels. The basement level is sand-colored concrete.

South Façade at Entry

The south façade has a monumental 2-story square recess at the entry, and continuous horizontal windows, narrow to limit the effects of direct southern sunlight. The north faced is, conversely, open and almost continuously glazed. Windows are organized by two elements: first, a monumental 2-story square recessed porch mirroring the southern entry; and second, a glass curtain wall, a continuous glazed wall carefully set out from the building's rectangular shape in a projecting frame.

Northeast Corner

Today, just over 40 years after it was dedicated, it doesn't look very special, it's quiet and lonely.  The inside is a bit beige and needs some love. But the outside is looking pretty good, the panels have some oil-canning but seem to be holding up well, the windows and concrete have some patina.

South Façade Strip Windows

 

However, it's clear that this is a small building loaded with big ideas: how to site a building, how to  compose facades, how to design facades differently for north and south exposures, how to arrange the entry sequence from outside to inside. It has many of the same moves, in simpler form, as an early Richard Meier house or a very recent Richard Meier office building. This Willard building is a distillation of years of consideration of these principles. And you sense it was meant to be, ultimately, a tool for teaching, a precedent. This was a building Professor Seligmann could point to as the embodiment of the principles that he taught day to day, semester to semester, a building that was at first simple and diagrammatic but could sustain the levels of analysis that Wright and Le Corbusier could withstand but Mies could not.

North Facade

You can clearly see the hand of a skilled designer, approaching maturity - Seligmann was in his early 40's at the time - with the ability to distill a building program into a cohesive statement: the important proportional relationships, the regulating lines, the organization and hierarchy of facade components, the dynamism of major asymmetries and the delight of minor local symmetries, the careful expression of structure only where in doing so supported a higher design idea. The building is three stories when it could easily have been one. The parking lot is across the access road, allowing the building to be wrapped in a green setting. The sequence from the parking to the 2-story entry lobby - and floating concrete switchback stair - delivers an architectural promenade worthy of a mid-career Corbu. A little bit of drama coming into work in the morning, a pathway to lend pride and dignity and a sense of importance to the work to be conducted inside.

That a building of such nuance and design sophistication was delivered to remote Willard speaks to the reach that the New York State Administration, under Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Edward J. Logue, CEO of the Urban Development Corporation - had at the time, and the collective belief in modern architecture as a mechanism for delivering the good society.

I am eagerly awaiting Bruce Coleman's monograph on the work of Werner Seligmann, sure to be a best-seller in architectural circles upon its publication.

West Facade

South Façade

Entry Lobby

Miro in the Rain

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited family in in the Pacific Northwest. Here is my postcard.

One of the lucky natural features of the Seattle area is the incredible amount of shoreline afforded by Puget Sound, Elliot Bay, and an extensive network of lakes and waterways. The landscape gives the impression that you are never far from the water, and you are almost always not far from a view of the water. I love this aspect of the area - it reminds me of the cities, towns and villages along the coastline of my native Rhodes Island.

Aerial view of Winslow on Bainbridge Island, looking east over Puget Sound back towards downtown Seattle, WA. 

It was a mostly gray weekend that included some pockets of sun and plenty of full-on rain. Prior to the rain, we took a day trip to Bainbridge Island, just a 30 minute ferry ride from the downtown Seattle waterfront but a world away.  The ferry ride was great - a big ferry for carrying cars - with unmatched panoramic views of the city skyline. 

 

On Bainbridge Island, we visited two tiny towns with short, bustling high streets - Winslow and Poulsbo. Winslow was a craft utopia, and we followed shopping with a pub lunch overlooking the harbor. My craft-brewed local hard apple cider was made with New York State apples, rather than Washington's local crop. This was crisp and bitter anomaly in the food production chain that I was willing to overlook! The Poulsbo high street was left crafty and more Norse, with architecture and shops themed on the Scandinavian heritage of the island.

When in Seattle, we took shelter from the rain at the SAM - the Seattle Art Museum. I've been visiting Seattle for 15 years but this was my first visit there. The museum reopened a few years ago after an expansion redesign by Portland's Allied Works. The SAM occupies the bottom 4 floors of a 20 story glass tower in downtown Seattle. 

 

We went to see an exhibit that wax about to close: "Miro: The Experience Of Seeing". This exhibition was focused on his last 2 decades of work, a balance of paintings and sculptures mostly from the Queen's National Museum in Madrid.  Juan Miro (1893-1983) started as a realist painter then moved to Paris in 1921, and developed his more abstract style into the 1930s. Since then, he has ceased to innovate (which is perfectly fine). Miro's work is on the edge of conceptualism, but like Picasso he never abandoned the subject components of genre painting: the human figure, objects, animals, landscapes. Unfortunately I think he seemed to have gotten trapped into being Miro, into producing "Miro's". For five decades he produced abstracted pieces that confirm the artist's value is primarily in the formal idea and much less in a work requiring skill, diligence, or a significant investment of time. Nevertheless Miro claims a place among modern artists between Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder - and that's very good company indeed!

 

 

A high point of the SAM was seeing a painting by Kehinde Wiley (b.1977), a new acquisition interestingly hung in the European Renaissance / Mannerism / Baroque galleries, called "Anthony of Padua". 

Culture Club City

A new club opened in San Francisco, called The Battery. It's on my walk to work, and I see the valet team ready from the early morning until late at night. This city has lots of clubs; clubs for drinkers, dancers, smokers, swimmers, athletes, triathletes, watercolorists, culture vultures. Most clubs occupy a storefront, or have a floor in an office building, like the American Institute of Architects' San Francisco Chapter, or the Commonwealth Club. A century ago, prominent clubs erected their own buildings, and the Union Square / Lower Nob hill area has a concentration of them.

The Mechanic's Institute Library at the bottom of Post Street is a favorite - they host literary events and chess classes and have a nice reading room. The building is a nice stone commercial building, in a basic classical composition with a rusticated base, middle library floors with a colonnade, and a top with a good cornice. A few blocks up Post Street, beyond Union Square, is a former Elks Lodge, part of a 20 story stone mixed-use building.

Other clubs have buildings that follow the character of an Italian palazzo, in scale from domestic to grand.  On Sutter Street, there's the Francisca Club, a 3-story brick building on the domestic scale, almost Colonial in manner. Nearby is the former Women's Athletic Club (1917) - now the Metropolitan Club - a handsome brick facade with large arched windows signifying the main rooms and a two-story colonnade and protruding cornice as a capping. Next door is the more modest former YMCA building, now a college dormitory.

Like the Women's Athletic Club, many of these buildings hint at a great room. Usually a row of grand windows - often arched - tells you where it is...leaving its exact size and shape and decoration to the imagination, except at night when the interiors begin to be revealed.

Back down on Post Street, between Mason and Taylor Streets, there's a pair of clubs that make a great urban composition - the Olympic Club and the Bohemian Club. I used to think they were rival clubs but they're complimentary, the Olympic for sporting, the Bohemian for socializing. Whereas the Olympic Club is a confident if normative classical composition of beige brick and limestone, the Bohemian Club is much more unique. At some indeterminate point in the spectrum between Arts and Crafts and Art Deco, this 1933 palazzo has thick walls of red brick that are opened up with a silent order of window bays, dressed more with articulating layered brickwork that with minimal amounts of light stone. The corner site perfectly profiles the uppermost two-story colonnade of brick pilasters, marching at a rhythm unique from the great window bays below. The ornamental program includes sculpted square keystone blocks over the windows and main doorways, and the club's Owl is a recurring motif, most notably in the frieze topping the structure.

The recently opened Battery is housed in an old brick warehouse building, without particular distinction, in the historic waterfront district. Will the Battery's members of city elites tire of this old shell and opt for a new contemporary building expressing its time? For now, the structure is just a framework for their collegial exchange of cultural and culinary services. Only time will tell if the members prefer their dining room at street level, behind frosted glass, or raised to a piano nobile, with views of the Bay and the world beyond their valet team.

Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe at the deYoung Museum

There was a good crowd at the deYoung Museum on the first great and beautiful Saturday afternoon of the year. Skipping St. Patrick's Day weekend revelries, the crowd of more young women than normal casually congregated to take in a showing of work by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986, born the same year as Le Corbusier). The exhibit

Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George encompassed her work from her time spent around Lake George in upstate New York in the 1920's and 1930's at family estate of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer and gallerist. Lake George was the like the Lake District of northwest England, where lucky artists went to escape the economic world and capture nature in their work.

Her portraits were not of famous or wealthy people but of trees and barns and leaves, painting them with the intimacy and expressiveness normally saved for the human face. Most of the works were beautiful and lush, flowing shapes of powerfully mixed dark and light colors. The game of chiaroscuro deftly employed to describe nature's bounty. Georgia O'Keeffe is a legendary modernist painter but at the end of the day, she is a genre painter, like Picasso - her works are mostly landscapes and still lifes, with flowers and garden vegetables and dramatic views. What John James Audubon was to birds, and Giorgio Morandi to glass bottles, so O'Keeffe is to flowers. And to me that is great company, and an accomplished life.

More work from the exhibit, HERE.

Gold and Agriculture: California's Economic Engines

From the Bay Area to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, it's a short drive across the Central valley, and the economic history of Northern California is laid bare. Leaving San Francisco via I-80, you emerge past the Oakland Hills and into the Central Valley, a mixture of agricultural fields and suburban office parks, where land is cheap, buildings sparser and car miles driven accumulate.

The Central Valley has pleasant weather year round - great weather, really. It provides this farmland to the world with 2-3 growing cycles per year. Times have been rough lately, with the current three-year worst-in-a-century drought, labor shortages due to the immigration clampdown, and tough environmental laws. Any romantic connection you may be inclined to have, from reading too much Hemingway or Kerouac, should be suppressed immediately.

In the lowland of the Sacramento Delta, Tahoe traffic fills the roads between Thursday night and Monday morning. You can stop off in Davis, home of the UC Davis Aggies. Davis is a pleasant little town with shady retail offerings, gracious sidewalks, a slow pace, lots of bikers and a lovely central green with a small corner building housing the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame.

Beyond Davis, The highway leads northeast around Sacramento and into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the discovery of gold in the late 1840's shaped nearly a century of California history, building towns, driving immigration and making San Francisco the financial and cultural capital of western America, with iron high rise buildings and banks backed by every country along the Pacific rim.

A small group of gold rush era towns are known as the “gold chain”. Nevada City sits in this area, by Deer Creek. The City of Nevada City is a very small town with about 3,100 residents, down from 10,000 in 1870. The small downtown area, 2 blocks wide and 4 blocks long, slopes down hill, southeast, to Deer Creek. The buildings tend to be wood Victorians, some quite expressive, with some brick commercial buildings mixed in. The front porches of the houses transition to colonnades at the shops and century-old hotels. Vestiges of Nevada City's former prominence as a County Seat can easily be found - there's a Masonic Lodge, an Odd Fellows Hall, a couple of theaters, and more saloons than Dublin. Even an historic small Chinese quarter. Believe it or not, this town has 4 bookstores! Which is more than downtown San Francisco…  

 

Today, the town is a center for the local food / slow food movements, and a weekend getaway town for people from the Bay Area, Sacramento region, Reno, and other Central Valley locales. The real relic of the town’s legacy if the closed Empire Mine, just out of town, which is now reopened as a California State Historic Park.

To round out a weekend road trip we stopped in Chico, not really on the way but not too far either. Home of CSU Chico, it’s very similar to Davis and other small California towns with pleasant weather, a decent historic downtown centered on a plaza, and most importantly a college and all that comes with it. Not too many scholars were about town this holiday weekend, so it still had a mid-winter vibe, with a low sun, long shadows, youngish guys in shorts and a group of veterans congregating in the plaza.