City College San Francisco

When I sketch on site, I usually like to mix scribbly cartoons and diagrams with perspective views and details. Something like the “analytique” method codified at the Ecole de Beaux Artes in 19c Paris. From the thumbnail to the detail, as they said at Syracuse Architecture. Here’s a page from a visit this Spring to City College of San Francisco, at their Ocean Avenue campus. It’s giant portico is capped with “The Truth Shall Make you Free”.

Shopping in Vienna with Hans and Loos

These retail storefronts in Vienna designed by Hans Hollein (1934-2014) still look great after decades, and have sometimes outlived the original stores. They juxtapose marble and metal, flatness and depth, and use vitrines to view the precious items for sale inside, adding curiosity and intrigue to the shopping experience. Two nearby shopfronts designed by Adolf Loos are still intact, the Knize (1910) and Manz (1912) stores, over a century later. How different from most contemporary retail frontage a la Kawneer.

Stuff I've Been Reading: Maps of Perceptions

Stuff I've Been Reading: Maps of Perceptions

After Nick Hornby

 

Nick Hornby writes a column in The Believer magazine called Stuff I've Been Reading. His column is loosely about the books he's been reading, measured loosely against the books he's bought. He spoke here in San Francisco in February. He's one of my writing heroes. I love his essays in The Believer, and I really love Fever Pitch, where he simply raised fanfare memoir to literature status.

 

Borrowing Mr. Hornby's concept, here's my Stuff I've Been Reading. At least here's two books I've been reading, both by Andrea Ponsi: San Francisco - A Map of Perceptions, and its companion from a few years back, Florence - A Map of Perceptions. Andrea Ponsi is also one of my heroes - one of my drawing heroes.

 

His book San Francisco - A Map of Perceptions was just published in January of 2015. The book is filled with his watercolor drawings and sketches of the city and its famous and not so famous sites. The sketches are poetic and suggestive and evocative and creative. Ack! They are gorgeous and simple and almost sublime. The sketches are paired with writing in the form of stream-of-conscious narrative, which is less successful than the watercolor sketches but has all the same qualities. Suggestive, evocative, intuitive, inviting.

 

Florence - A Map of Perceptions is the predecessor book to this San Francisco version. Like the book on San Francisco, it pairs lovely watercolor sketches with musings about the city and perceived life within it. Ponsi constructs his maps with sketches and writings that act as placeholders for memories. And he knows that any take on San Francisco or Florence will be unique. His "perceptions" are just that - those of a visual poet with a keen eye and a skilled paintbrush-holding hand. He does not make THE authoritative drawings of the city. Rather, he draws and sketches his own perceptions, which are skewed, overlapping, projecting, tangential, translucent.

 

I'm filing these on the "Books I wish I had written" shelf.

Broad Contemporary @ LACMA

Broad Contemporary Art Museum designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, 2008, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Doorway and handrail details at second floor entry.

Reading About Why Architects Still Draw

Why Architects Still a Draw by Paulo Belardi is a neat little book that is crafted as two essays or lectures of a course. The first is "Thinking By Hand: A Lecture On Inventive Drawing". In this essay the author relates drawing to thinking, which is, I think, astute and paramount. The second is "No Day Without  A Line: A Lecture On Informed Drawing". In this essay the author generally wants to establish a theoretical underpinning for survey drawing.

 

This book is modeled on Italo Calvino's writing. It is a narrative told with other narratives. Literature, movies, poems, places, people, events. These are all configured to support an essay with an opaque narrative arc. This is both the delight and the dilemma of the book. Many examples are tangents that don't reinforce the thesis at hand and leave the reader wondering, why the excursus? If you like this elliptical style of writing, you will enjoy the book.

 

This book about drawings has no drawings inside it, nor illustrations, nor photos. I found this to be a drawback, as they could have enriched the book and help achieve its goals. The books preface notes that related illustrations can be found on a website - which is helpful but still seemingly remote. If you choose to buy a physical book, shouldn't you get the images too?

Belardi returns to Calvino and specifically mentions the essay "Quickness" from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a wonderful book at the center of my bookshelf. Ultimately, these two essay lectures by Belardi could benefit from Calvino's quickness, if not from the editorial services of Hemingway. Although there are illustrative voids in the prose, its is still an excellent lecture, and guides the ready on a journey of contemplating the complexity and potential of drawing.

The trickiest part of the book is that it is difficult to extract what the author is actually advocating, i.e. how can one make the types of drawings that he's envisioning. And is hand drawing advocated? Or on-site drawing and measuring? Or on-site sketching? It seems like an Analytique type of drawing might be the answer. The author states that an informed survey drawing includes 5 dimensions:

• X_width/exploration;
• Y_height/stratification;
• Z_depth/interpretation;
• Time; and
• Culture.

To do this properly, thoroughly, and without the benefit of examples, it seems like the only satisfactory type of survey would be a comprehensive, Ph.D style study of a building, resulting in a drawn book.

 

One might suppose that something in the essay is lost in translation, but I don't think so. I suspect the translation by Zachary Nowak to be nuanced and true. I just find the writing to be so circuitous, talking around the central point and potential force of the book - drawing - as if the author is afraid to outspokenly praise drawing as he clearly wants to.

 

In the end, drawing itself remains undefined.

Pecha Kucha SF

As the Spring semester of college kicks off, the undergraduate faculty of Academy of Art University gathered at San Francisco's Tides Theatre for their first Pecha Kucha SF event. I was one of eight volunteers, and below are my 20 slides, delivered in 20 seconds each. Most of the images were collated from web research and presentations from my former offices and workmates, so with these slides, I was more of a funnel that the source. And so goes the loose exploration of ideas that is Pecha Kucha. Cheers.

Architectural Elements - Stairs

I've always admired the stairs designed by the former Polshek Partnership, now Ennead Architects (http://ennead.com/). They manage to have a sweet tectonic expression while still meeting all of the nuances of the building codes and accessibility guidelines. I've been to a small handful of Polshek buildings, and they all have cool stairs, including the Yerba Buena Center Novellus Theater in San Francisco, the Columbia Law School addition in New York City, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.

 

Pictured here are the stairs from the Yerba Buena Center Novellus Theater, in grays and yellows and reds; and the newer, curving stair from the William H. Neukom Building, a new academic building for Stanford's law school which opened in 2011.