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The Metropolis Observed
by Ron Nyren Twelve years ago, cabinetmaker Michael Blackford moved into a San Francisco apartment across the street from the Daphne funeral home, an unassuming Modernist gem in the shadow of the massive U.S. Mint next door. Designed by noted Los Angeles--based architect A. Quincy Jones, the 1953 mortuary's tall pine trees and careful landscaping make the site an oasis in the dense residential Mint Hill neighborhood. Blackford figured its name derived from the beautiful mountain nymph pursued by Apollo. Not until last year did he learn that the mortuary was named after its original owner, Nicholas Daphne. But the building is now threatened by its own pursuer: Last June, a developer entered an agreement to buy the property, intending to raze it sometime in 1999. Blackford was stunned when he heard about the plan. "I only have one window in my apartment," he says, "and it looks out on the Daphne." Unlike randy Apollo, however, BRIDGE Housing Corporation, one of the nation's largest nonprofit housing developers, has the best intentions for its target. BRIDGE plans to build 93 three- and four-story residential units for low-income families, including 12 for people with AIDS. A variety of federal and city sources, among them the Mayor's Office of Housing, provided funds to purchase the property. "There's a dire need for affordable housing in San Francisco," says BRIDGE president Carol Galante. "The Daphne site is currently a dead zone in a transitional area between retail and housing. Our project will be an asset to the neighborhood." "I'm fully in favor of low-income housing," Blackford says. "If the Mint were up for demolition, I wouldn't have fought it, but the Daphne--it's like clubbing baby seals." Blackford has been rallying support from architectural and preservation groups, including the Foundation for San Francisco Architectural Heritage and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In October he formed the Coalition to Save the Daphne, determinedly recruiting neighbors and the Northern California Chapter of DOCOMOMO, an international organization that promotes the preservation of Modern architecture.The coalition isn't suggesting that the housing project be stopped. Since the Daphne takes up only half of the one-acre site, Blackford argues that there's plenty of room for BRIDGE to build apartments on the undeveloped southern portion. He recommends that, rather than demolish the mortuary, BRIDGE could reuse it as a community or day-care center. (BRIDGE's plans call for these uses anyway.) Jones designed the Daphne with flexibility in mind, and the combination of offices and assembly spaces of various sizes could easily serve other functions. But Galante objects, "I don't think that type of building has reuse potential," and points out that Blackford's proposal would halve the number of units. Blackford counters that BRIDGE could obtain a zoning variance to stack more units vertically. Again, Galante disagrees: "I feel that neither the city nor the neighborhood would support that." However, the site's southern portion faces a municipal railway line and a Safeway instead of residences, and according to Pat Rodimer, acting president of the Mint Hill Neighborhood Association, "If BRIDGE wanted a variance, we'd love to hear about it. I personally think it's a sellable idea." Originally, Blackford found local groups less than interested in preservation. Rodimer says, "We just wanted to reduce the density of the project. With 93 units, three to five people per unit, that's a lot of bodies to plop down." However, their efforts to negotiate with BRIDGE have not been yielding results, so neighborhood groups are considering joining forces with the preservation drive as their only hope. BRIDGE says it did its own research before acquiring the property and does not believe the mortuary has historical significance, despite its inclusion in the Department of City Planning's Architecture Quality Survey in 1976. "I find it amazing that the building ever got approved in the first place," says Galante. "It's not even in character with the rest of the neighborhood," which, except for the mint, consists largely of Victorian and early twentieth-century residential buildings. Because Jones's brand of quiet Modernist architecture forgoes grand statements, educating the public about the building's worth has been difficult. "This is a very hard sell," says Jeremy Kotas, an architect on the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board. Chandler McCoy, president of the Northern California Chapter of DOCOMOMO, agrees. "It's a challenge to get people to see historical significance in Modernist works because there's not enough distance between us and that age. We can't convince people to like buildings they don't like," he recognizes. "But we can educate them about Modernism's role as the most important architectural movement of the twentieth century." Though based in Southern California, Jones favored a brand of the International Style that reflected the architecture of Bay Area practitioners such as William Wurster, John Dinwiddie, and Gardner Daily. Like them, he wanted to integrate indoors and outdoors by using natural materials such as unstained wood and brick surfaces; incorporating plate-glass walls, sliding doors, courtyards, and atriums; and bringing plants and landscaping close to the building. His best-known work includes housing developments in the style of Joseph Eichler and experimental, prefabricated Case Study houses. By the time of his death in 1979, he had received some 70 awards, among them a 1950 Honor Award from the AIA and the 1969 AIA Firm of the Year Award. In keeping with Modernist aims, the Daphne is designed around the user's experience. A narrow, two-story rectilinear structure serves as the main organizing element, with single-story wings branching off, and a separate chapel. Circulation is cleverly arranged to keep visitor traffic from crossing paths with hearse traffic, while an underground garage tucks away employee parking. In response to the client's request for a "feeling of repose, without melancholy," Jones ensured that every public area offers natural light and garden views. For preservationists, however, the project is about more than just one building. According to Kotas, "The Daphne represents a whole host of buildings that will be coming up for preservation soon." Of course, this means preservation groups must do a bit of rethinking, as traditionally their job has involved saving nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings. "It's ironic," notes Chris Ver Planck, preservation coordinator at San Francisco Architectural Heritage. "A lot of the buildings that we're now trying to save superseded buildings we tried to save back in the Fifties." As of this writing, the property is in escrow. BRIDGE is preparing to submit its official development plans to the city's Planning Department for review, which will lead to more public input, with a final decision expected in late spring. Meanwhile, the Coalition to Save the Daphne is racing to complete applications to the San Francisco Landmarks Board and to the National Register of Historic Places. The building isn't quite old enough to qualify for landmark status, missing the 50-year mark by four years. But on rare occasions the board has made exceptions for particularly significant buildings--the 1959 Crown Zellerbach Building was landmarked in 1987, and Frank Lloyd Wright's 1948 V.C. Morris Gift Shop was designated in 1975. "In the end, the mayor's word is usually what counts," says Ver Planck, who calls himself "optimistically pessimistic" about the preservation effort's success. "It's too early to predict. A lot depends on the neighborhood groups and how vocal they can be." In Greek myth, Daphne cried out to Mother Earth to be saved and was transformed into a laurel tree just before Apollo reached her. The Daphne funeral home's supporters hope to make enough noise to pull off a similar miracle. |
by Dan Koeppel
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by Pilar Guzman "Eames Demetrios describes his ambitious Powers of Ten Interactive CD-ROM, a co-production of the Eames Office and Pyramid Media, as an "interactive essay on scale." Though the new medium adaptation is based on the famous short film by his grandparents Charles and Ray Eames, Demetrios is no Natalie Cole laying posthumous vocals on plagiarized tracks. For starters, interacting with scale at your own pace is a more immersive and ultimately more educational experience than watching a movie about it. At least that's what Demetrios, who runs the Eames Office (www.eamesoffice.com), reasoned four years ago when he started thinking about expanding on the lessons of the original film by adding other voices, images, and explanations. Out in select stores this March, the CD-ROM is also available on the Web at www.powersoften.com. The original 1977 film (re-released on video a couple of years ago) takes the viewer through the powers of 10. Using a one-square-meter frame of a picnic scene--a tight shot of a sleeping man--as the point of departure, the camera pulls back 10 times further every 10 seconds. At 101 you see a 10-square-meter shot of the man surrounded by picnic spread and park; by 103 or 1,000 meters, you see the whole park and its environs, and so on, until the Earth is no longer discernible from the outer reaches of our galaxy. The camera then returns to the original still, and the journey advances in negative superscripts to the cellular and atomic levels of the sleeping man's hand. While the CD-ROM borrows the film's basic premise (and footage), Demetrios has added a collection of original interviews and photographs and embedded mini-anthologies, taking full advantage of the medium's deep storage space and high resolution. Information is divided into six categories: Space, Time, People, the Eames Approach, Tools, and Patterns. To navigate, the user has to click on a magnitude and a category. At the intersection of each power of 10 and each category (or "strand") is a virtual exhibition space--a "station" that illustrates that particular order of magnitude. Demetrios has curated these spaces with intriguingly eclectic installations, from a videotaped interview with Laurie Anderson describing her experiments with raw sound to demonstrations of light travel. But for all their variety, best to be charmed by the stations' random and far-reaching nature than to consider them exact representations. As entertaining and compelling as almost all of Demetrios's choices are, they're not always intuitive or even applicable. (The short film on the making of the Eames Lounge sure is clever, but you have to wonder how it represents 10-11.) Perhaps the Eames Approach is just a less natural category than the CD-ROM's most successful, Space and Time. Take 1020. In Space, or meters, that's 10,000 light years away, just where we see the surface of the disk of the Milky Way. In Time, it's three trillion years. These make sense. Tools, however, takes both the literal (pairing a microscope with its technical, real-world power) and the figurative (the tool of faith) too far. As a tool in itself, the Powers of Ten Interactive CD-ROM allows the user to tap into a seemingly inexhaustible matrix of illustrations in scale. A more insightful if less cohesive riff on the original, it's certainly something that would make one's grandparents proud. |
by Amy Goldwasser "The Unabomber's cabin is my favorite," says industrial designer Constantin Boym about his 2.5-inch-high, bonded nickel model of Ted Kaczynski's former home. "It has this appealing, archetypal quality of being a nice little house--then this sinister, subversive quality of being a mean little house." New York--based Boym Design Studio's Buildings of Disaster are miniatures of six famous sites, including the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the Texas School Book Depository, and the Watergate (Boym's bestseller, due to a second boost in notoriety), where tragic, historically significant events took place. "Some of these buildings may have been prized architectural landmarks, others, nondescript anonymous structures. But disaster changes everything," reads the "Souvenirs for the End of the Century" catalogue. Souvenirs? Disasters? Small sites of doom don't scream memento in the way that only a "Footloose: the Musical" baseball jacket can. "The subject matter of this project is a little bit controversial and strange," Boym says. "But the reality is that we are so saturated with images of terrible events that we don't relate to them emotionally anymore. My original intent was that 3-D representations of disaster would be somewhat shocking." Trying to introduce as much artistic as shock value to his wee objects, Boym set out to answer the question of how souvenirs can be improved by design. "There is this big, marginalized area of products that are present at every airport, every corner of every city," he says. "Yet it seems that designers never talk about them, never want to attach their names to any souvenir." So he has attached his name to these unmentionables, creating a mail-order catalogue of permanent keepsakes (prices range from $55 to $230) for the millennium. "Tourism is becoming the world's largest industry," says Boym. "Arguably, you could say that the souvenir will be the number-one product in the next decade." Boym plans to produce catalogues two (November 1999) and three (November 2000) to expand on the lines before he stops production on December 31, 2000. Between now and then, he is counting on what he calls the "fuzzy function," the human need to collect. "People who denounce souvenirs still have them in their homes," Boym says. "They will pick up the most weird, outlandish, tacky souvenirs to show their friends how horrible these things are, but really, everyone kind of loves them." "Souvenirs for the End of the Century" catalogues are available from Boym Design Studio, (212) 807-8210. Unless -- or because -- disaster should strike. |
by Tanya Jensen Why? Because there's really only so much the kids can learn from a trip to Eurodisney, Parc d'aventures scientifiques (PAS) will be there to teach the children well come April 2000. Loosely described as "Epcot Center meets the Museum of Science & Industry," the park is being designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. Base Design of Brussels, a firm that specializes in art direction, marketing, graphic design, and branding for clients including the EEC and Fairchild Publications, is on total image duty for PAS--from developing international signage to choosing the color of paper cups and admission tickets. "The park will bring beauty and vitality to one of Western Europe's most impoverished areas," says Geoff Cook, Base's managing director. It's being developed in the doleful Borinage region, approximately seven miles from both the Paris-Brussels highway and the French border--an area more known for hosting failing industries than science-minded schoolchildren. Jean-Marc Providence, co-director of the park, recognizes the challenge of rejuvenating such a dreary borderland. "It cannot be simply some sort of flying saucer which lands in the region," he says. "This project is only possible when imagination has been opened." Also opening will be observation stations, a history loft, a 60-meter-high panoramic lift, exhibition hangars, trail gardens, and the slag heap that remains from the region's coal-mining days so that little ones can explore its hidden ecosystem. Jean Nouvel's plans for the park leave the nineteenth-century coal processing plant essentially intact (images above, and in pink, purple, and red in the rendering at right), while adding exhibition spaces and a 200-meter-long moving sidewalk entryway. |
by Anne Guiney Eight glass jars of white paint are set neatly on a steel shelf, each one etched with a name (left to right): Clemente White, Decorator White, High Hide White, Linen White, McShine White, Photo White, Riva White, Rubin navigation_elements/white.The piece, MoMA Whites (1990), by artists Mel Ziegler and the late Kate Ericson, displays the variety of paints selected by curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to prepare the walls for exhibitions. In the course of researching a project based on the contributions of behind-the-scenes workers, Ericson and Ziegler learned from the painting staff that not only was there no single, standard white, but that individual curators often take the liberty of blending commercially available tints in order to get just the right navigation_elements/white. Then the new mixture gets nicknamed after its creator. McShine White, for example, was made by Kynaston McShine, a senior curator in the Painting and Sculpture department.MoMA Whites is on view at MoMA in "The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect," from March 11 to June 1. The show is curated by McShine, who at press time had not yet decided on a color for the walls. |
by Kira L. Gould Architect and educator Joseph Esherick was 83 when he died in December and had completed his most influential designs some years before. But society's increasing hunger for an architecture of image makes the loss of this humanist architect most significant today. What mattered to Esherick--in his most recent project, an elementary school that opened just before he died, and in his four decades of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley--was architecture with a profound emphasis on the people who work, play, and live within it. Richard Young, a Toronto architect and former president of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, knew Esherick in the 1960s. "I went to Berkeley as a rationalist," Young recalls. "Joe helped me understand all the cultural and human qualities we bring to the task." Growing up in Depression-era Philadelphia, Esherick apprenticed with his uncle, the sculptor and craftsman Wharton Esherick, who taught him to think about objects in simple, functionally elegant terms. (Wharton approached each design problem by first asking, "How would a farmer do it?") After studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Esherick moved to the West Coast, where he founded his own firm in 1946 and became one of the best known architects of the San Francisco Bay Region school. He explained his impetus as a "genuine effort to make life easier and more pleasant for people without letting them know it's happening." Esherick's renowned projects include the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the adaptation of a San Francisco canning factory into The Cannery shopping center, and landmark demonstration homes at Sea Ranch. In 1989, he won the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal, its highest honor. But when he was compelled to describe what about his career made him proud, Esherick would gently remark that none of his residential clients had divorced and that many were still his friends. The non-ego architect with a penchant for service was a natural choice in 1993 as pro bono advisor to the Bay Area Women's and Children's Center (BAWCC), a San Francisco group that was planning a community school. The BAWCC had found that there were more than 1,000 children living in the Tenderloin, one of the city's only remaining areas with below-market rents. Since the neighborhood lacked a school, kids were bused to 47 sites around San Francisco. A bond provided $12 million for a new model facility, and Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis Architecture (EHDD) won the commission. For years, Esherick participated in dozens of community meetings to determine what the school and the center should be. He relished such protracted debate, even in the late stages of his career. "To him, there would be no other way to design a building," says EHDD architect Jennifer Devlin, who worked with Esherick on the Tenderloin project. "He would never allow us to assume that we knew what they needed." Meanwhile, the BAWCC and the community decided that the school would include a preschool and K--5 program for 400 children; medical, dental, and counseling clinics; adult education classrooms; a parent resource center; a kitchen; rooftop playgrounds; and a shared garden. Esherick helped choose the site, at the highly visible corner of Van Ness Avenue (Highway 101) and Turk Street. The Tenderloin Elementary School is now in session at the fire-engine red and golden yellow structure, which serves as a vivid gateway to the neighborhood. It's a bit more conspicuous than most of Esherick's previous work. In fact, this school seems to defy his reminder to clients and colleagues that "the ideal kind of building is one you don't see." As New York architect Frederic Schwartz, a former student of Esherick's, points out, "His architecture was about becoming part of the landscape, whatever the landscape was." Though the school is obviously and physically an exception to the urban-gray landscape of Van Ness Avenue, its contradictory energy somehow works: shouting, in primary colors, about school and children and families. Perhaps Esherick found the most appropriate audience for his architecture--young minds are rarely impressed by authorship or theory, preferring an easier, more pleasant life without knowing it's happening. |
by Tara Mack "This is not what we do every day," says architect James Engel, while four homeless men in front of him crouch over bits of colored plastic, cutting and taping them to thick, translucent slabs. Later that afternoon, those panels will be mounted on the walls in front of fluorescent tubes to give a rainbow glow to an otherwise dreary room. Engel, who is accustomed to designing clothing boutiques and yoga studios, is spending the day redecorating the basement of the Riverpoint homeless shelter, a pair of terraced, three-story Victorian houses that accommodate 24 people in west London. In November, his two-year-old architectural design company, Spaced Out, won a competition in which young London firms were invited to apply their craft to the interiors of homeless shelters, replacing drab and spartan with innovative and stylish. Tom Biddlecomb, director of CRASH, a homeless charity founded by the construction industry and sponsor of the contest, said he hoped that a more welcoming shelter might help boost the self-esteem of its residents. The rules of the competition were tough. Plans had to be cheap, durable, easy to assemble and disassemble, and adaptable to a variety of different spaces--10 or so--around London. Construction had to take no more than 14 days. And, of course, the shelters had to be attractive and comfortable. The basement of the Riverpoint shelter was particularly ripe for a face-lift: Unadorned, jaundiced walls framed a ring of worn and stained sofas. The bay window had a view of the dirt in the front yard and the brick wall beyond it. Then there was the lighting--sickly yellow beaming from industrial fixtures. Patrick and Stephen Houlihan, brothers from Ireland and residents of Riverpoint, kneel in one corner of the room, snipping squares of plastic into jagged shapes. "Nobody wants to come into a place that looks bad," says Stephen, 25. "You want to feel at home here." Stephen has done his best to make his own improvements to the shelter; he painted the walls of a communal room. And when Spaced Out arrived with its new lighting plans, he enthusiastically volunteered to help. The contest was suggested to CRASH in January 1998 by Naomi Cleaver, managing director of Echo Design Agency, a firm that matches designers with clients. "I wanted to promote the idea that good design is not an elitist pursuit," she says. "Everything built is an opportunity to build something great." Cleaver had read about CRASH and contacted Biddlecomb. Between December and March, CRASH builds temporary shelters around London for government-funded homeless charities free or at low cost. The buildings are donated and range from warehouses to office blocks. Biddlecomb wanted to ensure that the competing designers, who usually work on chic apartments, restaurants, and clubs, applied the principles of high-end design to the realities of urban poverty. Furniture in the shelter reception areas had to be either bolted to the floor or heavy enough that it couldn't be picked up and used as a weapon. The wet room, where drinking is allowed, gets dirty easily and therefore had to be washable. The corridors had to be straight so that there would be no hiding places. Six contest entries were exhibited in a drafty, concrete warehouse behind King's Cross train station, an area with a reputation for drugs and prostitution. (Cleaver liked the gritty feel of the space, even though she could see her breath and the roof leaked during the judging.) Designs varied widely. One company, Jam, proposed building a cluster of foam pods roughly the size of a two-man tent. The pods had plastic bubbles at the top that served as windows. Another suggested painting rooms different colors to imply certain moods. In Spaced Out's plan, bedrooms were divided by the translucent, colored panels to create the illusion of light in windowless spaces. In a British newspaper, one homeless person called the design "creative and futuristic." Spaced Out got its first lesson in flexibility shortly after winning the competition. Designers had expected the shelters would be large, open spaces that they would divide into smaller rooms. But Riverpoint, the first facility to get involved in the project, already had small rooms. So Engel and his colleagues decided to cut up the panels and change them from walls to lighting covers. Cleaver hopes that her company will continue to work with CRASH in the future, and CRASH is already planning a contest next year for college students. "The competition got people thinking and opened up the debate," says Cleaver. "Not just the debate about homelessness, but about what design really is and what it's for." |
by Ellen Barry
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