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The first 'note' of San Francisco

One of my all-time, ongoing, favorite moments of travel is the puff of Pacific air that - upon arriving in San Francisco - finds its way between the plane and the jetway: the first breath of the west.

But after years of mentioning this I now confess that I stole it from Henry James. Minus the jetway:

The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive--the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile--since the previous afternoon, thanks to this happier device--such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. 

I missed it today. I wasn't paying attention. link

Sexy Solar

Here's one way to "develop" greenfields (thanks, Ursula, for the e-mail and link). Have you ever seen solar panels look so good??

Finally done with school

It was very much the Berkeley-architecture-school thing to ask students to evaluate the "sustainable" elements of new housing developments, many of them built on semi-rural sites outside of city centers, in order to learn how to better design them. Sure, I learned a lot about adorning high-density buildings with solar panels, low-E glass, and permeable streetscaping, but I always felt like I was learning more about how to accessorize places to look "green" rather than how to make principled decisions about making them. What is so sustainable, I still wonder, about converting farmland to housing? 

I spent an entire year designing a neighborhood plan for a greenfield site in Tianjin, China. My team came up with a plan for mixed-use development, high-density housing, ample park (but not parking)space, a lightrail system--all the standard good stuff of sustainable design. It was an exhausting, enthralling year.

Nonetheless my teammates and I could never rid ourselves of the image of what we had proposed to replace:

Made it!

Whoo hoo, here at last.

These beans, being from Marin, are Hand harvested and sorted by college graduates.

As ajb points out, I have a backlog of travelogue (the above from this month's west coast trip), and will work to catch up; first, a cover letter. In the meantime, a fascinating landscape related banner:

Much to say about place and space. v

Another book called "Home"

"Home: The Blueprint of Our Lives," introduction by John Edwards, would sound horribly schmaltzy, if designer Michael Bierut hadn't made such beautiful hay out of it-- humanizing the suburbs by, totally counter-intuitively, talking about how modern they are. Like this:

In an expression of wishful thinking not atypical of northern Ohio, every street in our neighborhood was named after a town in Florida: Tamarack, Tamiami, Sarasota. The houses came in two models: ranch and split level. We lived in a split level. The house to our left was a ranch. The house to our right was another split level. It was identical to ours. The house across the street was a split level too, but with the floor plans reversed. Going in that house was always a disorienting, Bizarro World experience. Differentiating each house was its dominant architectural feature: the decorative element on the garage door. We had a star; our neighbors had moons, windows, abstract shapes. Picking this element must have been a moment of truth for the new homeowners, an opportunity to make a "statement," but I don't remember anyone ever ascribing any significance to these insignia. Like the whole neighborhood, they just seemed to appear overnight.

Everyone on our street lived in what would later be called a snout house, that garage-centric building type so reviled today that certain municipalities have outlawed them. My mom didn't care much about urban planning principles; she liked being able to get the groceries from her car to the kitchen without braving the Cleveland winter. It just seemed modern, like the way our dinette area was three steps up from our wood-panelled den, the television fully watchable over the decorative wrought-iron railing. (During breakfast at least: it was off at dinnertime.)

Very scary shopping places

Resurrected from May 2004 (AJB's subject line!)

http://www.shopdesertridge.com/

and

http://www.kierlandcommons.com/

Home Ground

Its heft surprised me. I thought Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, was going to be a little guidebook, not a massive textbook of place terms. Which is a good thing. The other surprise is that it actually seems useful, for those of us in the business of describing places. Like this one, in Brooklyn, "Prospect Heights":

"Heights is a general term for an elevated landform that provides a vantage point from which to view the surrounding countryside...In a suburban context, heights carry a kind of middle-class pretension or snobbery, as if higher ground, real or nominal, makes a better neighborhood."

Or, "desire path":

A close look at any city park or green will typically reveal footpaths that break away from paved walks, trails that countless pedestrians have worn into the grass. Such a trail is a desire path: the route people have chosen to take across an open place, marking a human pattern upon a landscape.

A few more are here. I heard about the book after listening to Barry Lopez interviewed on Forum.

A cultural-landscape-ish event next week here in Montréal... he is a colleague of mine...

"Geography, Culture and Architecture"

Tuesday, 14 November 2006
Radoslav Zuk
www.mcgill.ca/architecture/faculty/zuk/

The talk follows the vernissage of his exhibition at the School, Reinterpreting Tradition: Ukrainian Churches and Museum Projects (6-24 Nov 2006)--Exhibition drawn from the architectural work of emeritus professor Radoslav Zuk. Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00.

I don't think the talk will really be on the churches.

Location: Macdonald-Harrington Building, 815 Sherbrooke Street West

Flaneur of the Air

This was inevitable: Mike Davis heads to Dubai, the archetypal city of the decade. Or, as he puts it, "the new global icon of imagineered urbanism," and "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly." It takes a searing turn, not surprisingly. But I was struck by the similarity of his opening to my friend Greg Lindsay's excellent piece on Aerotropolises.

There seems to be only one way to describe Dubai -- as a sort of flaneur of the air.

Hello, I'm here now

That's all; must get to the office.