CAMP Notes

From camptoday.org

More and more articles keep appearing about the new design for the Contemporary Art Museum at the Presidio (CAMP) in San Francisco, intended to house Gap founder Donald Fisher’s art collection. Yet most of them are not linking the underlying issues: hubris and the commonweal. Viz: the very wealthy feel entitled to do what they want where they want, but how does the citizenry acknowledge their generosity without being force-fed self-aggrandizement? Can the ego needs of the superrich be satisfied in line with the common good? And specifically, is the Presidio the right place for private or modern development?

Let’s start with hubris. After the public outcry over the first CAMP design by architects Gluckman/Mayner, there was the “CAMP: Reconsidered” exhibition and forum at Mark Horton’s 3A Gallery, in which ten local architecture firms each proposed alternate strategies for the museum design. Out of all that came at least one big idea: move underground. Judging from the new design, as released last week by the hometown team, WRNS Studio, the building is partially subterranean, which is very good news. But the above ground bit hasn’t moved off the historic parade ground (currently a parking lot), which was a surprise, and the design is timid, which isn’t a surprise given the blood sport of development in San Francisco.

The Presidio Historic Association was not pleased, and devoted its March newsletter to the issue (www.presidioassociation.org). The association is lumping the new museum in with other proposed developments at the Presidio and calling foul. Architect George Calys, in his design blog for the San Francisco Examiner, suggested that the Presidio Historic Association might file suit. While the museum would honor Don Fisher, it is not a for-profit entertainment center or hotel. But what is the hubbub really about?

From camptoday.org


From camptoday.org

It was difficult to determine what the design is from the four images released on CAMP’s website (www.camptoday.org). They seem intentionally vague. Even an informed viewer can’t figure out what the materials might be or how they would read. It was rumored that more images of the model were going to be posted on the website last week, but instead they are visible to dignitaries invited to the architect’s office. This week it was announced that there will be a public meeting at the local chapter of the AIA on April 1 (an odd choice). Trying to control the information flow too carefully may not be in the best interest of CAMP.

In Golden Gate Park, Renzo Piano lifted the park up into the air to create the new Academy of Sciences. At CAMP, the big move is to fold the green roof to reveal the contemporary treasures contained within. This is where the architects have been tentative and should consider a bolder stand. Emphasize the big move. Right now, viewed from the air, it will look like the parade ground continues. In the spirit of modernism, let’s call it what it is: pleats in the parade ground.

From camptoday.org

Perhaps the architects should consider collaborating with a conceptual artist like James Turrell, Michael Heizer, or Robert Irwin to celebrate the pleats. The gentle roof is a response to the public outcry over the initial design. The earlier solution may not have been the right one, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want something dramatic. A bold design and the opportunity to have a say might just mollify us design types. Nothing will mollify the folks who hate Fisher and/or the idea of a museum in the Presidio, so let’s do something memorable.

There seem to be two really fervent anti-CAMP camps, which of course overlap. One camp feels that the Presidio is threatened by the proposed development. Another camp hates Don Fisher. The editorial in a recent San Francisco Bay Guardian links them rather succinctly (www.sfbg.com), and says that automobiles will overrun the Presidio if CAMP is built there. I am no expert in traffic counts, but every time I go over to the Presidio, it’s almost empty. I love the post office and bank there because they have no lines! I think the place could handle a little more traffic, not to mention diversity. I have to agree with the Bay Guardian that there is a problem with asking the Presidio to be financially self-sufficient, a Reagan/Thatcher-era idea that won’t succeed. Let’s use this moment of respite from the folks who would privatize our national parks and undo that mess. While that issue is related, however, it is distinct from the CAMP proposal.

From camptoday.org


From camptoday.org

Let’s face it, the underlying issue here is really Don Fisher. He is a very successful Republican capitalist in a city that likes its rich folks to be Democrats and modest. It doesn’t help that he made his fortune on garments manufactured in Asian sweatshops or that he advocated for more parking in downtown San Francisco. Nor that his attitude has been that of an entitled white male Republican. He might take a page from a fellow zillionaire’s playbook and sponsor a music festival and look humble. But a rich guy in his 80s ain’t going to change his stripes. And if he passes away before this is settled, the collection could very well be broken up.

Let’s not forget the commonweal. My bet is that Fisher won’t compromise much more than he has and will take his collection somewhere else if this project doesn’t move forward. The anti-Fisher group may want that outcome, but the city and the region would lose an important art collection. If it belonged to somebody less controversial, we would be having a different kind of argument.

An art collection this good is a great gift. But unfortunately, this is where hubris comes in again. The art cognoscenti and some school kids (featured in a rather odd video that has been removed from CAMP’s website) have seen parts of the collection, but by and large, the public hasn’t. It is more than a little strange that there wasn’t a little more planning in this regard. Most wealthy philanthropists want to build some excitement around their donation, and to that end they mount exhibitions drawn from their collections. But as others have pointed out, Fisher seems to have adopted a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. In a strange twist, almost every mention of Don or Doris Fisher has been removed from the CAMP website.

A number of people have commented about the Board of Supervisors’ recent public endorsement of the museum idea. That endorsement might help should Fisher have to revert to a back-up position, like returning downtown and/or to SFMOMA. The problem here is that most of the available sites in town are in Supervisor Chris Daly’s district. (He voted against the motion.) It’s a little hard to imagine Don Fisher and Chris Daly negotiating about a cup of coffee, much less a museum. However, at the end of the day, if things get stickier out at the Presidio, Fisher may have to align with SFMOMA. The museum might be willing to compromise on Fisher’s level of involvement if it looked like he was otherwise going to let the collection be dispersed. (Check out his interview with San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker at www.sfgate.com or on CAMP’s website.) You see, Fisher (or his heirs) could just sell the whole damn thing, as Pierre Bergé did with Yves Saint Laurent’s collection, and use the funds to start a new country.

From a strict urban design point of view, it probably is better to keep museums in the museum district. But the Presidio’s collection of bland landmarks could be improved by a dramatic piece of modernist architecture. It is narrow minded to think that we can only have historic or historicist buildings in the Presidio. And to speak of the military base as “sacred ground” is just bizarre. Sometimes a well-crafted contemporary intervention makes us see something historic more clearly, like Piano’s new Morgan Library addition in New York, or Scarpa’s additions to the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona. Remember that the Pompidou renewed the Marais and made it visible in a new way. If anything, the Presidio will be ruined by more faux historic buildings that make the place feel like Disneyland. This round, let’s hope for an engaged public process, especially with the design community, and let the architects keep designing something bolder for the 21^st century and beyond. As much as I don’t want to admit it, punishing Don Fisher for being a rich capitalist by nixing his museum in the Presidio, or making its design too vanilla, probably isn’t in the region’s best long-term interests. But pushing for an artistic expression to house his collection in the Presidio is.

Too Little To Save?

The Strange Journey of Jacqueline Johnson’s Neutra Cottage in Los Altos

You can’t go home again. Sawing up and moving a historic house for eventual public use without taxpayer support is bound to be a little problematic. In the case of the Jacqueline Johnson house, one of three small cottages designed together by Richard Neutra, the surgery was a success, but it seems that the patient may have died.

Sure enough, there is a small renovated structure in the form of the original Neutra house, standing proudly on a busy street next to an existing community center. But it is not located in a place resembling its original placement in an orchard and very little of its original fabric was retained. One significant preservation issue in modernist structures is that the materials were often experimental and they fail or, in some cases, age beyond repair. But here the renovation substantially changed the original layout and purpose of the rooms and did not replicate the original building orientation. The little 750 square foot one bedroom cottage is now a small conference center with a new kitchen and bathroom available for community use. There is little clue as to the original use of each interior space despite a public video. I didn’t see any old fashioned floor plan, site plan, or historic photos when I attended the rededication in October. Perhaps that will be remedied with time.

Neutra house under reconstruction. Photo: Miltiades Mandros

Carport with two un-Neutra like posts. Photo: Miltiades Mandros

Indeed, this is a house that was literally torn apart by the fight for its preservation. Architectural designer Miltiades Mandros found the one bedroom house and a small studio behind a bamboo hedge in Los Altos when conducting research on Neutra houses in Northern California in 1999. The little cottage originally had a twin on the same site but it was destroyed and the lot subdivided many years ago. The original three structures were culturally significant because they represented an unusual commission in the Neutra oeuvre, a small very modest communal arrangement for a group of writer friends associated with Stanford University. One of them, the poet Jacqueline Johnson, went on to marry the well known painter, Gordon Onslow Ford. (Together they later commissioned noted Bay Area architect Warren Callister to design their home in Inverness.) It was Johnson’s modest bungalow that somehow survived.

The house’s recent owner, John Gusto, asked Mandros to design an addition to the Johnson cottage, which the city’s historical commission did not approve. Unable to expand the house, Gusto decided to sell the property. He and Mandros tried to find buyers who might save the modest house and relocate it. Eventually, a deal was worked out whereby Gusto donated the house to the Los Altos Foundation who would move the structure to land owned by the city. Los Altos Historic Commission member Justin Drewes championed the idea of the city donating the land for the project.

What happened next gets a little murky. The city was not willing to pay for the restoration of the modernist cottage beyond providing the vacant parcel of land. The fight for the little Neutra might have ended when the city said they had no money, but a few vocal citizens, including someone named King Lear, rallied to save the house. Without any government funding the local citizenry had to raise all of the money to relocate and renovate the house. At some point a decision was made to alter the house so that it could function as a community center. Restoration became adaptive reuse.

Citizens enjoying the patio. Photo: Miltiades Mandros

There is little substantive information on the Neutra House Project website about the restoration process. According to Mandros, who has followed the project for many years, there is some original siding remaining but little else. According to Lear, one of the community leaders and advocates of the renovation, some corrections are being made based on recent reviews from Dion Neutra, Richard Neutra’s architect son, as well as the Neutra scholar Barbara Lamprecht.

Apparently, there is no architect of record for the project and no historian or conservator was hired. That is not to say that the grass roots efforts were not well intended. Small suburban communities, even affluent ones like Los Altos, are just beginning to recognize the cultural value of mid-century cultural resources, but often they are not willing or able to secure government funds to preserve those resources. One advantage of government subsidy is oversight and hopefully, a process that follows the Secretary of Interior Standards for Historic Preservation.

The house before it was moved. Photo: Miltiades Mandros.

The cottage being relocated. Photos: John Gusto.

But the result here is not preservation, nor does it tell us much about the early thinking of Richard Neutra. What we have is a reproduction of an exterior of a portion of a modest compound that Neutra designed in 1935. The profound lessons for other relatively young suburban townships are not found in the reconstruction of the exterior of this house, but in the strange process of trying to save this landmark. To preserve modernist landmarks communities need a paid architect, historian, and conservator. To hire those professionals a town needs the financial support of the city fathers and mothers. Maybe this new era brings more possibility about government support; maybe we can preserve more than the simple outlines of a modernist treasure.

Marvin Rand Interview in LA Architect

Marvin Rand passed away last week. I remember interviewing him in a restaurant in 1990 for LA Architect. He was cranky, competitive, and endearing. Here is the interview as it ran in the April 1990 issue of LA Architect.


Marvin Rand

Hollywood Bowl photo by Marvin Rand

When did you start taking pictures?

I entered Los Angeles City College to study photography at the age of 17, during WWII. Then at the age of 18 I was drafted. I took the basic training, they gave me five months of intensive training, both aerial and ground, and then they shipped me out. I spent 14 months in Guam as a photographer.

I came back in 1945, and they allowed me to go directly back into Los Angeles City College in mid semester. I stayed there until 1948. It was a wonderful experience to have Hal Jordan, a mature, really expert photographer teaching photography to six of us. Then Jordan said you better go to Art Center for polish. So I went there and graduated in 1950. There were wonderful instructors at Art Center; Alvin Lustig was my immediate mentor.

Were you always involved in architectural photography?

I came out of Art Center as an advertising photographer. After graduating, we decided to form a group from Art Center to get input from the people who were well known in photography, graphic design, architecture, and writing. Esther McCoy, Charles Eames, and Saul Bass all came and spoke; we had the cream of the city in the group, which went on for about two years. The Eames helped us, Saul Bass helped us, Esther was my direct mentor.

What format do you work in, and do you prefer black and white or color?

I usually work in 4x5. I do some assignments in 35mm, but not frequently. I prefer a larger camera. All assignments are shot in color and black and white.

I think color is here to stay. Black and white will always be secondary now. The interesting thing is that black and white is archival, and if done properly it will last well over 100 years. From the moment you process color film it starts to deteriorate. I do all my historical work in black and white.

Do architects accompany you on photo shoots?

I work side by side with the architect on occasion. Craig Ellwood used to go out with me all the time. I would give Craig a 35mm camera and I would work the big camera. When we got the film back we could put it on the table and study it. In a funny way it reinforced some of the thinking I had about architecture and the International Style. It helped me quite a bit to get feedback from a client.

Do you perceive yourself as photographing for history?

The architectural photographer should never be set up as a critic. Our role is to enhance and state the content of the building in an aesthetic way. The architectural historian should evaluate whether or not a building is important. I’m the photographer who sees it and has to sensitively photograph it so that architecture has a great deal of content and meaning.

A Conversation with Raphael Sperry Part 1

The end of 2008 brought the long-anticipated collapse of the economy. With the global recession threatening to devolve into a depression, its potential impact on the architecture industry has led some architects prone to black humor to joke that they would “even design prisons.” This isn’t so funny to Raphael Sperry and his colleagues at Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), who have been busy organizing a campaign to create awareness about the moral issues surrounding prison design.

Many architects are attracted by the profession’s aesthetic possibilities rather than by its moral component, and yet the basic mandate to provide structures for humanity encompasses both. All have to consider their level of involvement in creating punitive housing.

Sperry is asking questions about fundamental prison design. When he spoke at a panel discussion on prison design at the AIA Convention in Los Angeles in 2006, the AIA censored his images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Of course this only helped him and his cause.

Sperry is an architect with a broad vision about violence and militarism, but also a clear strategy about what to do in the here and now. He spoke with a calm zeal when we sat down for lunch at Delancey Street to talk about his recent activities.

Q: Where does your activism around prisons come from?

Raphael Sperry: The prison campaign came out of the other antiwar activism I was involved in during the run-up to the war in Iraq. I took part in the street demonstrations, playing with friends in a marching band, which was, for me, a good way to be on the street and visible and audible and feel like I had a particular role to play.

Despite the largest demonstrations that the world had ever seen, we didn't succeed in convincing a majority of the American voting public that the war was wrong. I felt that more work was necessary to shift public attitudes so that the next war, or the next violent solution to a different kind of problem, would not be so appealing again.

Q: Let’s talk about the relationship between the war and prisons.

Sperry: Despite the frequent evocations that America's a peace-loving country, we're actually a pretty militaristic country. Our military is the largest in the world, and it's engaged all over the place. We spend as much on weapons as the rest of the world combined. In some ways, Vietnam was the template for the current generation of American warfare. In the debate over the Iraq war, instead of feeling like Vietnam was a lesson that war is not a good way to solve problems, and that should it be avoided, many Americans thought the lesson was that we needed a new war that we could “win” in order to show that America is still number one.

There are a lot of Americans who are willing to tolerate war. The military -industrial complex clearly controls its slice of the budget, and nobody fights with it.

Q: But there is a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on this?

Sperry: With the Republicans, it seems like that's part of their ideology. Whereas the Democrats, who may be ideologically opposed to it, feel like they have to jettison that to gain popular support.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, when people are scared, they'd rather vote for somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right. I was tired of having government that was willfully wrong on the issues of war and peace kill other people in my name with my money. I wanted to try to do something, to the degree that I could, try to change this underlying acceptance of war and violence as a way to solve problems. Going out on street corners, handing out leaflets against the war, was not getting anybody to change their minds.

Sperry banging the drum against the war

Q: At least you had fun playing music.

Sperry: I did, I had a lot of fun. It was also my first experience with the jail system.

Q: Because you got arrested?

Sperry: Yes, I got arrested.

Around the same time, I was invited to join the board of ADPSR, which of course has a long track record of being a peace organization around antinuclear issues. I wanted to try to do some outreach to architects.

Q: Why architects?

Sperry: There’s no way that I could influence the opinion of 300 million people, but maybe I could influence fellow architects. If you want people to rethink their acceptance of violence in international policy and warfare, it helps to have something in common with the person you want to talk to. Rather than handing them a handbill on a street corner, you can have a conversation at an AIA meeting or a convention, or through the professional media. It’s a way to establish common ground so people will listen to you. Our culture is so media-saturated that it's important to protect yourself from listening to too many messages, because otherwise none of us could be productive at anything.

Q: We're getting less productive.

Sperry: Yes, it's true. But it seemed like this was an important conversation for people to have. And at the same time, through the group of musicians I was playing with who were radical community organizers of different types, I had heard about the critique of the prison system as the prison -industrial complex. That stuck in my mind, because I want to talk to architects on the one hand, and the prison system is a network of buildings.

Photos of the Delano II prison in California, courtesy of Calif Dept of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Q: Tell me more about this critique.

Sperry: There are a lot of social issues that have been taken in the wrong direction because of the American military – because of how expensive it is, and also because of how it makes our society more violence-prone. Arguably, that's why we don't have a good healthcare system, arguably it's why other social issues in the United States – like social security, income security for elderly people, education, working conditions, and so forth – are so degraded compared to those in other wealthy countries. Unlike prison, with a lot of those issues, it is harder to say, “it's just about the buildings,” and with my intended audience of architects I wanted to talk about buildings, because we’re responsible for the built environment of our society. The idea of a “prison -industrial complex” is like the military one in that it’s an interconnected series of public and private institutions that use public money but function with little to no real public oversight because of the imagined threat to security that would result if their business dealings were made public.

Q: What is the connection of the military -industrial complex and the prison -industrial complex?

Sperry: Both of them rely on a simplistic division of the world into good people and bad people, good guys and bad guys, and they rely on a very clear rule that it's okay to use unrestrained violence against the bad guys. As soon as you know who the bad guys are, in the case of Iraq, you go out there and kick the shit out of their country. It doesn't matter how many innocent people die, because American violence is on the right side, against the bad guys. And since we're the good guys, whatever we do is okay. And not only that, it's important to punish the bad guys. That was the way that people understood the Iraq war. That's why capturing Saddam Hussein and executing him was such a big deal. If you really thought bringing democracy and liberation to 25 million people was important, the fate of one man couldn't possibly really be that important. But if it's a moral story about watching the bad guys be punished by the good guys and get their comeuppance so the good guys win in the end, then it kind of made sense to invade that whole country.

Pelican Bay State Prison

Q: And prisons are the domestic counterpart to this narrative?

Sperry: Yes. The domestic narrative is that the country's full of bad guys who are criminals, and if we put them behind bars, then the good guys would be safe. And it's okay to use violence against the bad guys. The American prison system, it turns out, has been widely criticized around the world by human rights advocates for the way it operates. Sometimes those are issues of a few bad apples, like the stories about Corcoran State Prison in California, where prison guards arranged gladiator-style fights between prisoners and shot at people with impunity. But it's much worse than that – we have systematic problems that make our whole approach to incarceration (and to criminal justice more generally) unethical in major ways. For example, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have pointed out that long-term solitary isolation is by its very nature a violation of human rights, as defined by most developed countries. Yet the United States has very clear policies in most of the states and the federal system allowing the use of long-term solitary isolation. They have entire buildings and entire wings of many buildings dedicated to isolation, so they're ready, willing, and able to perpetrate human rights abuses as a matter of policy.

I think a lot of people have the idea that once somebody's a convicted criminal, whatever you do to them is okay. Because they're bad guys, the important thing is to punish them.

I wanted to reinforce what I think is a better, more adult, mature, peaceful, and progressive way of responding to crime. There are a lot of promising alternatives to incarceration that actually work and that focus on healing the injuries caused by crimes, restoring damaged communities, and dealing with the roots of crime, whereas our current system has tried to do those things for over thirty years and hasn’t produced any benefits for public safety. Its very size – over 2.3 million people – makes it the largest prison system in the world (and the largest per capita), and involves over 5,000 buildings, most of them built in the last thirty years. And for what? Our crime rates are no better than they were thirty years ago, and the communities where most perpetrators come from (and where most crimes occur) are still doing as poorly as they were before. People of all types are still afraid of crime – having more prisons almost seems to make the problems around crime bigger. It’s not like some day we will lock up the last bad guy out there and then everyone will be safe – it doesn’t work like that.

I think that people who embrace the international version of “bad guys need to get punished with violence” are going to embrace the domestic version. If we work on the prison issue and get people to change their minds about what it means to be a good guy or a bad guy, and understand that the world is more complicated, that violence doesn’t have to be used to respond to these social problems, then eventually this kind of thinking could also play out in the international arena. If violence is no longer our first recourse against criminals at home, then I think we will also be much less likely to use war against opposing nations abroad.

Future blog entries will include Sperry’s strategies and experiences trying to influence his fellow architects.

Designers of the Year

On January 30, architects John Peterson and John Cary were named “Designers of the Year” by Contract magazine. They are the first design professionals to receive this honor for their work as advocates within a nonprofit rather than as members of a design firm.

Their reach extends further than most designers. Public Architecture (www.publicarchitecture.org) feels that design can help change communities and in turn change itself. See the video that this interview was conducted for.

The conversation took place on Election Day, before we knew that Barack Obama was to be our next president. Public Architecture’s commitment to service resonates with the country’s new era. We thought you might enjoy the longer conversation in which they explain the organization’s founding, projects, and philosophy.

Q: Every year, the Designer of the Year is asked what the word “design” means to them personally.

John Peterson: In the broad range of possible activities on the planet, design is a marriage between art and technology and the creation of things. There is some balance between the technical and the artistic.

John Cary: I think design is what really makes things, be they objects or experiences or spaces, unique and distinct from the next. At Public Architecture, we are bringing design to people and places that wouldn’t otherwise benefit from it. Right now, design suffers from a kind of class issue. It costs money to get things or places that are truly well designed. And that’s one of the barriers we’re trying to break down.

Q: Does that mean the democratization of design is in America’s future?

JC: I think what Public Architecture and groups like us are trying to do is truly democratize design in a way that still maintains all the lofty goals and expectations of the design professions that we were all attracted to in the first place, but brings it to a much broader audience.

Q: Where did your interest in socially conscious design come from? Did faith have much influence on you?

JC: I came into this line of work somewhat unexpectedly. I went to undergraduate and graduate school expecting to be an architect. But somewhere along the way, I got interested in the politics of the profession. And my exposure to that revealed to me the limits of who the design profession really serves at any large scale.

As I began to think about this more over the past few years, it has occurred to me that I’m the son of a 30-year nonprofit executive director. And while I was raised in a quite religious family, my interest in social justice and those kinds of issues is totally distinct from religion and faith. But if you compare me to the way that John Peterson came into this, there is a very strong thread from my early days of architecture school all the way through.

JP: We did come at this from a couple of different platforms. I really was committed to design work, in many ways, for itself, and very interested in pursuing design work independent of its political consequences, which I have come to believe was an adolescent idea. Look, architecture is very political, whether you accept it or not.

I really came out of a tradition that was primarily focused on design and was independent of the social ramifications of the work. That has really colored the nature of Public Architecture. We have not positioned ourselves to somehow be separated from the progressive design community. We’ve always seen ourselves from day one as bridging the worlds of progressive design and a socially progressive group of designers.

Q: Do you see this work as an alternative career within architecture?

JP: I don’t see this as an alternative career for me. We are a nonprofit organization instead of a for-profit organization. In many ways we are doing many of the same things you do in a traditional design firm.

This is just an extension of the work that I found most engaging. My work changed its nature based on my growing interest in looking beyond aesthetics. The trajectory of my own architectural design thought included things like social responsibility, social justice, socioeconomic issues, and political issues.

At the same time, I understood that I was not a unique designer in this regard. If I was having those feelings, other designers were also probably having those feelings, and there was an opportunity to really capture the will and imagination of the design community as a whole through this sort of change in interest.

JC: That question has haunted me from the very moment that I started my career, and yet, for me, it wasn’t an alternative to anything – it was the career that I felt I was prepared for, that I was interested in, that I was passionate about.

The “Designer of the Year” designation is important in that we are being recognized for everything we’re doing, whether it’s program management, development, project delivery – because it all involves design and it is designed.

JP: John’s generation is going to change how we look at a design career, and his generation is not going to put up with the narrow view that earlier generations did.

Q: I think you are being recognized, at least in part, because you are trying to help communities in a concrete way, but also change the way architecture sees itself and eventually the way design might be perceived in society. So how can architecture and design inspire the general public day to day?

JC: Very early on in the development of the organization, we got a really profound taste of how design can inspire the public and what that means for us as an organization.

This was through the design and construction of, and ultimately the broadcast of a National Geographic Channel documentary about, our ScrapHouse project. This was a project that we designed and constructed over the course of just six weeks as a temporary demonstration home. It was a house built, essentially, of garbage, in front of San Francisco City Hall.

During the period that it was under construction as well as the four days that it was open to the public, we welcomed over 10,000 people from all walks of life to experience a different kind of architecture, which took risks. Yet it made people feel good, even though they were experiencing something new and unique.

Q: Let’s talk a little more specifically about Public Architecture. What was the evolution of the organization?

JP: It began with my private practice. We were fortunate to have a number of good residential commissions. But I think there was a level of pent-up energy around participating in design projects that had a larger impact on the community. To accelerate our opportunities to work in that kind of environment, we took on a project locally that we conceived of ourselves, and just thought, “Let’s take on a project and pursue it within the office as a way of exercising our interests,” without any understanding of where that might go.

Q: Which project was this?

JP: An open space project for the South of Market neighborhood here in San Francisco. In the simplest of terms, it was at our doorstep. South of Market is a light industrial area of the city moving to mixed use. And like other cities in this country, these areas lack some of the urban amenities that other parts of the city enjoy, especially recreational open space.

We posed a simple question: if we added this to this urban fabric, what would that solution look like? Our proposed solution ended up capturing the attention of many people within the city, including several city agencies that encouraged us to pursue the project, which is ongoing as we speak.

This led to the larger question: why aren’t architects in this role more frequently, where we’re actually going out in our communities, using our skills and expertise to identify problems in our communities, and then proposing solutions to those problems that may be overlooked by other forces?

Q: So often something important begins with looking at what is right in front of you. You just have to take the first step. So when did the 1% Solution come into being, and why 1%, as opposed to 5% or 10%?

JC: One percent is more symbolic than anything. It’s a small number by itself. However, if you put together lots of 1% offerings or donations from firms, it adds up significantly. If every architecture professional in the country were to pledge this 1% of their time, it would effectively be creating a 2,500-person firm – the equivalent of an HOK, for example – working full-time for the public good. That equates to about five million hours annually, and we think that there’s a lot you can do with that.

Q: What has the response been?

JC: Very positive. The pent-up interest that John experienced in his own firm is everywhere. We’ve now recruited nearly 500 architecture and design firms, ranging from sole practitioners to some of the largest firms in the country. Together, they have pledged on the order of about 200,000 hours to date. If you put even a conservative value of $100 per hour on those, that’s about $20 million right there that the profession is offering to the public on a pro bono basis annually.

JP: The figures that John is talking about are only for the architecture profession. We are in the process of expanding the community of participants within the 1% Solution to other design professionals and to manufacturers.

Logo for 1% program

Q: What are some of the other projects that Public Architecture is pursuing right now?

JC: Our mandate is that we pursue projects on a proactive basis – we initiate projects. This includes our Day Labor Station design initiative, which is one of our most significant and also one of our most politically charged projects. We also continue to advance our Accessory Dwelling Unit – granny flat or in-law unit – initiative.

More recently, with the support of a grant from the U.S. Green Building Council, we have united our various projects – like ScrapHouse, like the community center that we’re involved with up in Seattle – around this idea of material reuse. The idea is to show, through example, how scrap and salvage material can be integrated into new construction at a much greater scale than it is right now. We see that type of project as a campaign that people can contribute to and become a part of. While we are involved with specific projects, we are working to get people involved in their projects.

Rendering of Day Laborer station

Seattle Community Center

The ScrapHouse in San Francisco's Civic Center

Q: Why don’t you expand on that and talk about some of the other big goals for Public Architecture?

JP: The big goal for the work that Public Architecture is doing is to institutionalize the kind of public service activities that John is talking about. They should be part of an annual effort, part of the business model, part of a routine understanding of practice, just as it is in the legal profession.

Q: Back when you started Public Architecture in 2002, that made sense, but what about now when we are looking at the worst economic downturn since the depression of the 1930s?

JC: The current economy will continue to impact us. The first and probably the most important way is that we’ve seen an increase in the number of firms that are pledging their time, and we see that as a very encouraging thing, because they’re hopefully turning to pro bono work to help weather the down times. Rather than fall back on design competitions or some other outlet, they realize they can fill the available staff time with a project that ultimately might mean a great deal to them.

JP: It may be counterintuitive to think that in a slow economy one would give one’s time away, but we believe deeply that this is exactly the time when one should be taking pro bono work very seriously. As John’s already pointed out, it’s an opportunity to find meaningful work for staff in a turbulent, changing environment, but it’s also an opportunity to distinguish yourself as an organization and to find new avenues to express the good work that you’re doing.

This is the time for firms to be thinking about how they can wisely give of their time to their communities. And when I say “wisely,” it’s to be selective, to set high expectations, both for the outcomes of the organizations or efforts that they serve and for the outcomes that happen within their own firms.

Q: You mean understand how to exploit the benefits of volunteering?

JC: Let’s look at lawyers for a moment. They are generally thought of as better businesspeople than we are. While their fees are probably three times ours, they have a real culture of pro bono that starts in school and goes all the way through one’s career. And it’s not without great benefit to the profession and to these law firms. These firms distinguish themselves to potential employees and to potential clients based on their pro bono work. Otherwise, a lot of those law firms, in the same way a lot of our architecture and design firms do, start looking alike. This is a way that they’ve come to distinguish themselves.

State bars have unique programs that mobilize attorneys in times of crisis, in times of disaster, and in times of political uncertainty – in any number of settings – and what those state bars have also done is use these programs as leverage with their legislatures. When they go to seek changes to their practice acts or whatever it may be, they are able to point to real numbers and talk about the contributions that attorneys are making.

There are plenty more jokes about attorneys than there are about designers, but there is also an understanding that when you need legal representation, you can get it in this country. There is nothing comparable supporting the right to design – supporting the right even to shelter – and so we see all that as related. The ultimate ambition is that design becomes recognized as a right as opposed to the privilege that it is today.

JP: We say right up front that pro bono needs to be a balanced activity. As philanthropic as a firm wants to be, they need to balance that with a return to their organization, so that they’re able to fully utilize the effort that they can give. This needs to be a smart business choice. It needs to be both selfish and selfless.

Q: Simultaneously?

JP: Yes. I think that’s hard for folks to grasp at first.

Q: Can you give us an example of that?

JP: Let’s say that a design firm has done a lot of work to advance the efforts of a nonprofit organization in their community. Can they use that in a marketing environment where they can actually get exposure, help to separate themselves from other design firms, which might lead to paying jobs? Of course. Internally, their service can also lead to a better corporate culture. It can help attract better employees and retain those employees.

We believe that firms need to look at the investment they’re making and think about the return on that investment for a simple reason: their investment will increase when they understand the return that they can get from it. But they have to be diligent about it; they have to be proactive about it. They can’t be lazy about the way that they take in their pro bono work, which is primarily how the design profession has been.

Q: So this is a major sort of shift in thinking?

JC: That’s right. We’re talking about raising expectations across the board. Raising expectations within the firm about the design quality, about the way that the project’s managed and executed and delivered. Also raising the expectations on the part of the clients. An equal component of the 1% Solution is to inform and really get clients excited about these projects and to have them be as demanding as a typical client.

JP: We want to maintain the good-heartedness of the design profession but get design professionals to appreciate the value of taking a business look at their pro bono efforts. You see, if it becomes integral, I think design itself will be more valued.

JC: Our goal is not to make the profession a livelier place to work; our goal is to have an impact on our communities. We’re using the tool of design, and that’s really at the very core of our work.

JP: We need to be building efforts that go way beyond Public Architecture. We’re a catalyst, not the end mechanism, for change. We’re just a catalyst to wake the sleeping giant of the design community towards changing our communities for the better.

Small actions, organized or unified, really create the change in the world. It is powerful for people to realize this – to accept that 20 hours a year just within architecture can equal the strength of the largest firm in the country, and that, as employees, they are agents of change. They are agents within potentially the most powerful, impactful firm that this country can produce.

And I think if you can get your head around that, if you can accept that, I just think the ability of design can be expressed in a way that we have not seen before.

A Couple of Celebrations and Laments

A Couple of Celebrations and Laments.

I have been out of touch since the first two entries - in January I will be writing a bit more to make up!

One thing about staying in the Bay Area most of my life is that when I notice subtle changes, I can exaggerate them into a cause for celebration! Often an improvement in the built environment also reminds me of a loss, a lament. Sometimes this happens within the same project.


Not long ago I was walking down Powell Street and noticed that the green terra cotta building at the corner of O’Farrell Street has been restored and occupied. For years it was empty or unloved. The terra cotta parapet had been removed, giving the whole building a, unfortunate, scalped appearance.

The top layer has now been restored and so have the window casements. While it is true I have no interest in shopping at the new Skechers, I am happy to see this Art Moderne jewel from 1933 brought back to life. Gensler did a great job converting the former Cable Car Clothiers into contemporary retail. (But give me the old bowties any day!)


At the same time, I am reminded that Omar Khayyam’s Restaurant, which was in the basement of 200 Powell, has been lost forever. It was the first fancy restaurant our family visited once we knew how to behave in public. The owner George Mardikian served middle eastern food long before it was fashionable. He would bring out the special flatbread and actually break it with his guests and chat. Breaking bread was a symbol of hospitality, which he took seriously. The bread was thin yet bubbly. With a dab of rose petal jelly on top, it was an exotic treat for suburban middle class kids. I had never tasted something so exquisite. Then the dolmas would come, and we would have to ask for more in short order, because all three of us kids would devour them. I remember less about the entrees but more about the baklava for dessert, which we could peel gently with our fingers. And then finger bowls! We thought we were rich indeed.

It was also one of the most beautiful restaurants of a certain age. You entered on O’Farrell and descended to a lower level that never felt like a basement. On the landing there was a photo of Rudy Vallee, although I can no longer remember the connection. On the left at the bottom of the stairs was the Rubaiyat lounge with velvet banquettes, low Persian lamps, and a gleaming chrome cash register. We never waited there because our table was always ready when we arrived. I remember deep scarlet velvet upholstery like the seats at the La Scala Opera House. Paintings of images from the Rubaiyat adorned the walls, and the lighting was never harsh. For several years, you could buy their rose petal jam, but no more. (There are other purveyors online however.) I love remembering the colors, deep scarlet, rose red, and pink linens. It is an important early design memory.

On the other side of downtown, one of my favorite modern mixed-use complexes has been getting a much needed makeover. They have been updating, or should I say backdating, their lobbies.

The Golden Gateway, a redevelopment project from 1965, has removed its silly overstuffed sofas and renovated its lobbies to be more in keeping with the original design. Melander Architects and Orlando Diaz-Azcuy have brought it back into contemporary glory. I love the Barcelona chairs, but the spaces could use a bit more punch. In the building facing Battery Street, the original mosaic on the mezzanine balcony helps, but some of the art is too monochromatic for my taste. However, architect Kurt Melander tells me that they will be bringing some of the original abstract paintings back, which is great news.

The complex, which originally involved some of the best local architects of that day, like Anshen+Allen, Wurster Bernardi & Emmons, Joseph Esherick, and DeMars & Reay, was criticized for raising so much activity on the podium above the street. And yet much of the retail at the street level has survived. One detail worth nothing is the handsome new light fixtures along the arcade. There are a few blank walls (handsomely detailed though) that once faced the on- and off-ramps of the now demolished Embarcadero freeway. But the gardens above the street are wonderfully scaled, intimate and mysterious, and still open to the public. Often I go out of my way to walk up and through the courtyards. They have staying power.


A few of the townhouses have new exterior lanterns that look like they were stolen from a Long John Silver’s restaurant. I hope they are temporary.

My main lament is over the changing of the buildings’ names and the new signage. One of my pet peeves is the overuse of branding. It’s one thing to spend a lot of time thinking about how to convey the personality of a tennis shoe or a soft drink, but so often branding architecture seems to lead to corporate nothingness. The original folks at the Golden Gateway (now the Gateway) came up with some very good graphics and names for the apartment buildings.



Since they were creating something so modern in the mid-60s at what was once the water’s edge, indeed in the water perhaps, they referred to San Francisco’s maritime history to add a bit of legitimacy and maybe mystery. When the complex was finished in 1965, I suspect a fair number of folks knew something about the characters the buildings were named after, but I suppose with the passage of time, they have been forgotten?


The building now known as Vista West (how dull is that?) used to be the Richard Henry Dana. As any student of California knows, Richard Henry Dana was the author of Two Years Before the Mast,based on the diary of his journey aboard a ship that sailed from California to Boston. The square tower immediately to the east, now known as Vista North, was Buckelew House. It was named after Benjamin Rush Buckelew, the publisher of an early newspaper, the Californian. Further east, renamed Vista South, was Macondray House. Macondray is probably best known as the lane that was renamed Barbary Lane in the Tales of the City series. But Frederick William Macondray was a Boston sea captain who ventured west with the Gold Rush and became a prominent early businessman in San Francisco. The other slender slab, Vista East, was named after William Heath Davis, another early businessman and ship owner. I would rather say I live in the Richard Henry Dana or the William Heath Davis than the Vista whatever.

To be fair, the new website (thegateway.com) is a vast improvement over the old site. But sometimes design doesn’t need to be updated, just maintained. Think how much money the owners of the Golden Gateway would have saved if they had kept the original lobby design and names?

Reflections on Visiting a Hillside of Crosses

All kinds of people from church-goers to gangsta-rappers wear crosses. It’s a powerful and almost universal aesthetic device that pre-dates Christianity by many thousands of years; what began as a tool for veneration of the nature god is now a piece of trendy bling.

Its ubiquity does not diminish its fascination. In the foyer to our apartment I have a simple rustic wood cross, a memento of my visits to Santa Fe, that I bought there because it reminded me of some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. Several years ago I went to an Ad Reinhardt show in Los Angeles and saw all kinds of crosses in what seemed, at first glance, to be monochromatic paintings. These were crosses as aesthetic devices, not religious symbols.

Riding east on the BART train towards the Lafayette station a hill comes into view that at first glance looks to be covered in tall white flowers; they might perhaps be lilies, or, if one’s eyesight is growing unreliable, melting snow, but within a few seconds it becomes clear enough that they are white crosses, insubstantial memorials to the dead. Yet the slope is too steep to be a cemetery, the crosses are too close together to be grave markers and are too flimsy to be permanent.

A simple black number on the hillside, like those on amateur athletic fields, is updated regularly; today the count is 4770, the number of soldiers killed in Iraq. The memorial has been controversial since it was begun a few years ago by a man named Jeff Heaton and some local peace activists.

A few days ago I returned to the site and walked around to get a closer look. There are no stickers advertising anybody or anything. A few crosses have been adopted to represent specific individuals with names, photos, jackets, beads, and flowers. While most of the crosses are white, some are multicolored, and a few are covered in mosaics or plastic flowers. Some have Islamic and Jewish symbols as well as Christian. I am reminded of the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC, not in terms of the material or permanence, but rather in the core idea: that the people who gave their lives in an unjust war must be recognized. This war has inflicted pain on all of us. No member of my immediate family has gone to Iraq, but the raging debate over the Republican administration ended some good friendships.

Walking up the hill behind the crosses in the late afternoon I can see a vista that captures the essence of living here. The beautiful golden hills and oak trees in the autumn afternoon feel unchanged from my childhood, although now the transit system provides a link all the way to the airport in San Francisco. Looking down the hill again I wonder again what do the crosses here really mean? Are they an aesthetic device within a common language or do they relate to an evolving understanding of what a core Christian symbol might mean in this modern age?

From any angle the crosses fill much of the hillside, but there is room for more. The Bush administration does not let the media show any of the soldiers killed in action nor any coffins coming home. Indeed, unless we know a combatant personally we have no way of understanding the damage to our soldiers until we see the occasional veteran interviewed on television. And those are the ones who survived. In this way, the crosses may be the simplest possible reminder of each American life lost.

But again, what about the symbolism of the crosses? When I was young my family went to churches of many denominations all over the East Bay. In the end we didn’t really settle on one particular church, although my parents made a relatively easy choice and sent an annual donation to the church a block away – now known as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. It was a beautiful building by Wurster Bernardi and Emmons, but there wasn’t a cross in sight. Perhaps God wasn’t so much in the cross as all around.

Crosses have beautiful proportions. Ad Reinhardt painted crosses in almost all of his mature work, but he always said that he never intentionally painted anything, including crosses. He was like the artist Donald Judd – it’s just what’s in front of you. With Reinhardt, it takes a while for the eyes to adjust and see the different layers. Go slow and they come into view.

I have often wondered why Georgia O’Keeffe painted crosses so many times. Living an often solitary existence in New Mexico her work is contemplative, but not necessarily Christian. Her Black Cross, New Mexico from 1929 uses the cross to divide the canvas but not evenly. She wrote, “For me, painting the crosses was a way of painting the country.”

In this stretch of an Arcadian suburb I am moved by the grass roots spontaneity of this simple memorial that reminds commuters that individuals, over four thousand individuals and their circles of friends and family, have been devastated by this nightmare. Maybe the cross was the easiest symbol at hand. Might there be a more permanent symbol of this war and these eight years of hubris and arrogance? The crosses on the hill don’t offer up any easy answers. But contemplating them for a few minutes in the afternoon light, like looking at Reinhardt or O’Keeffe, and wrestling with the angels and demons that make up the life of this country, may point me in the right direction.