Barry Elbasani

Barry Elbasani, FAIA
1941–2010


Michael Severin, Donn Logan, and Barry Elbasani after winning the competition that created their firm.

It has been a little over a month since Barry Elbasani of ELS Architecture and Urban Design passed away. I still think I will walk to the top of the stairs at 2040 Addison Street and he will say “What’s going on, sport?” or “The security here is terrible.” When I worked for him from 1990 to 1997, I spoke to him most days. After I went out on my own, we spoke far less frequently, but whenever we sat down, it was as if no time had passed. The intimacy was unbroken. He was intuitive in almost everything he did, from a diagram to a presentation. If he wasn’t sure, he delegated. Sometimes he got it wrong, but often he got it right. He was willing to be bold. It takes a certain fearlessness to start your own firm when you are still in your twenties and not yet a registered architect. I love the photos of this intense-looking young fellow with a mop of curly hair.




Barry was a grouchy optimist and realistic urbanist. He grew up in Brooklyn and on the streets of New York. He was still innocent in some ways, but you could never fool him. Through sheer talent (and a little advocacy), he got into Harvard. He never forgot that he wasn’t born to go to Harvard. His one year in Cambridge changed him forever. After leaving Boston, he moved to Los Angeles to work for Victor Gruen for a year, where he learned something about showmanship. He loved driving around Los Angeles in a convertible MG with a good salary and no commitments. But he moved to Berkeley, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He told me once, “Berkeley was like Cambridge, but with better weather.” He loved looking at buildings and had a special reverence for Kahn. But he was just as interested in the spaces that buildings frame. Although he came of age in the 1960s, he was not a firebrand radical. He knew too well the result of communist tyranny in Albania. He understood that cities need economic activity to thrive. He knew that an active public sector can help revitalize a downtown.


Barry and Jerry with their mother.




One of his skills was to bring the developer and the planner together to see what was in their mutual interest. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the growth of the Southwest exurbs brought the firm work that wasn’t explicitly urban in nature. Barry’s goal was to make it as urban as possible, and he predicted that the suburb or exurb would densify and that his buildings would become the new town centers. The suburbs would catch up to his bold diagram. He took the long view.

After the communist regime in Albania fell, Barry went over to visit his long-lost relatives. When he came back, he gave us a slide show that was as powerful as any I had ever seen. He laughed about the modest accommodations. By now he was middle aged and used to comfort when traveling. Looking back, he knew it was some kind of dumb luck that had him standing in his own firm in his own building, the owner of a beautiful house overlooking the Golden Gate a few minutes away. The slides were powerful because it was personal. This was the most important lesson I learned from Barry. Everything is personal. Business is personal. If it’s not, then it’s not fun. When a client got fired from his firm, Barry always called. The moment the person was no longer influential, Barry swept into action.


Barry with his family in Albania.

Along with his family, he made the decision to sponsor several Albanian cousins in the United States. I suspect he didn’t think too long about it, he just went with his gut. Two of them spoke at his memorial. That is when I wept. He could boast about anything to do with his work, but I never heard him brag about changing the lives of these distant relatives and giving them an opportunity that they never imagined. He might have been in their place.

When his son Mark died tragically a few years ago, he was hurt more deeply than any of us knew or could see. I think some part of his optimism was dulled. When he got sick in April, he was himself until sometime in June. But as soon as the essential Barry was stilled by the cancer, I don’t think he wanted to hang around. He wanted to get to that place where he could start making calls again.

Terminal Days

Terminal Days
July 30, 2010

In a few days, San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal will be closed forever. The art moderne structure by Timothy Pflueger has outlived its usefulness. In the last year, I have been taking the bus home some days, and I’ve been appalled at the condition of the building. Dark, smelly, and boarded-up, it felt doomed. Although it was never awe inspiring, it was once a strong, light-filled, utilitarian structure. For suburban kids like me, it was the portal to all the excitement that urban life had in store. The entryway was the building’s most significant architectural gesture. You walked down a ramp and emerged into a huge light-filled space that said, “Adventure is just outside.”




It really looked like this before they filled it in with the Greyhound platform.




The city's pleasures were just outside.


At rush hour the ramps were filled with organization men returning home.

My father rode the H bus from our home in the East Bay to the Transbay Terminal for close to three decades. He was not a North of Market dandy, but a South of Market organization man, toiling for the phone company. When we were very small, he worked in the art deco jewel (also by Pflueger) at 140 New Montgomery Street. When the new building at 666 Folsom was finished, I enjoyed following him on his back-alley pathways to work. 666 Folsom was the ugliest place I had ever been in, and I remember thinking, “I can never work in an office.” But I liked the cafeteria. Except for a few years in college, I rarely worked in a traditional corporate office. My dad would take his lunch hour to walk all over South of Market and had nodding acquaintances with hundreds of people, including the sculptor Benny Bufano. But the doorway to his work world South of Market was the Transbay Terminal.


This is how I remember it as a kid.


The trains stopped running in the late 50s.


It was handsome once upon a time.

It always felt like a train station, even though the Key trains stopped running around the time I was born. Squint your eyes and the diffuse light from above and the vertical metal supports almost transported you to Europe. Later, after Loma Prieta, horizontal seismic beams compromised the spatial experience. When the building was renovated a number of years ago, they inserted a balcony space for Greyhound that filled in the entryway. In the fall of 1976, I took the H bus myself, walked out to the trolley car stop, and took the M Oceanview all the way out to San Francisco State University. It was my own life now. Without that tall entry space, there was no transition, no portal, no architecture left.


photo courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library


The seismic reinforcements took away the sense of space.


It was basically a shed with parking beneath and a huge front porch.


The Key system trains ran on the lower level of the Bay Bridge.


The interurbans actually worked!

This morning in the newspaper, they announced that you could see the cocktail lounge, coffee shop, and shoeshine stand that had been covered up for years. The authorities swept the bums out, tried to clean out the urine odors, and gave us sentimental folks a last look. Nobody was asleep on the miles of wood benches. The coffee shop and bar were empty and smelled like stale cigarettes.


Cuddles, the cocktail lounge.


The coffee shop


Love those stools and the plastic flowers that look very dead.


I don't remember ever eating there.


Where the homeless slept



This was hidden behind a wall.


The metal version of the office on the east side of the lower entry.


The original version of the office on the west side of the lower entry.


The exterior of Cuddles.


Entry to the coffee shop.


Love those graphics.


Who designed this? It's perfect.

SFMOMA Fisher Collection

Fisher Collection
A First Visit


Alexander Calder: Eighteen Numbered Black, 1953

The Fisher Museum at the Presidio might be under construction now if it weren’t for a few strategic miscalculations (see http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2009/03/camp-notes.html). The Fisher family should have moved the proposed building closer to Chrissy Field and off the “sacred” parade ground, and they should have built up public goodwill by sharing their collection earlier. Except for some political and cultural elites (and schoolchildren), few people saw the collection until it went on display at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the end of June. At the end of the day, it’s better that the collection went with SFMOMA instead of being housed in a separate museum of its own. If the Fishers had collected avant-garde or emerging artists like the Rubell family in Miami, the independent route might have made sense. But the Fisher collection appears to be a blue chip group that helps a large museum like SFMOMA interpret the story of art in the latter half of the 20th century.


Gerhard Richter: Seascape, 1998

The large show “From Calder to Warhol” went up within ten months of the announcement of the donation and well in advance of the addition planned just south of the existing SFMOMA next to the W Hotel. This allows plenty of time to build goodwill as well as political and financial support for the addition. SFMOMA is currently considering four architecture firms to design the addition: Snøhetta; Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Foster + Partners; and Adjaye Associates. The architectural sweepstakes just got hotter now that the Berkeley Art Museum has given the commission for its new museum building to Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Hopefully, SFMOMA will get something better than what Mario Botta left behind in the first building. It would be exciting if the commission went to David Adjaye, but he doesn’t have a big track record. I also favor Snøhetta, a daring firm that grew out of the Alexandria Library competition. You can see a video of the architects here: http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/expansion.


Cy Twombly: Leda and the Swan, 1962

I stopped by the exhibit on the members’ preview day to get oriented. It’s up until September 19, so there is plenty of opportunity for repeat visits. And you will need them.

Wandering through the fourth and fifth floors, I kept thinking, what motivates wealthy collectors? Dominique de Menil, heir to the Schlumberger oil drilling fortune, seemed to be interested in the link between the creative force and the spiritual. Her own passion resulted in the Rothko Chapel and a great museum, the Menil Collection (which also established architect Renzo Piano in this country). Her offspring followed their interests and created another great museum, DIA: Beacon, and several important conceptual art sites such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico, Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah. They also provided the seed money for Donald Judd’s ambitions in Marfa, Texas.


Chuck Close: Big Self Portrait, 2000-01

Locally, builder Steve Oliver has used his wealth and contracting expertise to build very site-specific pieces on a Sonoma ranch that will eventually be in a public trust. He has said that he didn’t want to collect valuable objects, but rather to collect experiences.

Don and Doris Fisher appeared to have stuck to a more traditional path. They say they bought what interested them. The public information says they had no paid advisors, but in a videotape interview, Fisher says they were advised by Peggy Walker (Doris Fisher’s best friend) and John Caldwell (no relation to me), former curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA. They seemed to like the bold and the bright. Although they say that they found their own artists, these works show they didn’t venture far off the well-trod wealthy collector path. The title of the show, “Calder to Warhol,” suggests as much. I am not sure what the exhibition title really means, beyond branding. Recent video works by William Kentridge and Shirin Neshat suggest a little late experimentation. It may take several years and exhibitions to understand what motivated the Fishers.


Andy Warhol: Nine Multicolored Marilyns [Reversal Series], 1976-1986

On the fourth floor, several large pieces by Frank Stella greet you, and as the rooms unfold, there are equally bright Brice Mardens and a beautiful large triptych by Joan Mitchell. The strength of the collection appears to be that the Fishers collected in depth when they found an artist they liked. (It is hard to know, because only 160 of 1,100 pieces are on display.)

On this first trip, I focused on three artists that continue to interest me. Philip Guston has two early works (one hung apart from the rest): one key transitional painting and several from his later period. For someone who is still trying to understand his shift from shimmering abstract to gloomy cartoonish representational work, this group is helpful. I was enthralled by the room full of Agnes Martin’s canvases. Here you can see one painting from each decade. Her discipline and the fluttering beauty of apparent repetitive simplicity is, as Doris Fisher states, deeply moving. What strikes me is how different they are from most of the collection on view, which tend to be overwhelming in scale and color. Another strong meditative artist is Richard Serra. He isn’t for everybody, but once you study him you see the genius. Four smaller pieces, all self-supporting, are arresting.


Philip Guston: Sleeping, 1977

The Fishers went in for the contemporary Germans in a big way, with several Anselm Kiefers, and of course, Gerhard Richter, who is the chameleon/shaman of the modern age. His message, if there is one, seems to be dexterous virtuosity. The recently deceased Sigmar Polke remains confounding, but I look forward to looking again. I am not sure that Georg Baselitz is standing the test of time. There is a lot of Warhol here, but overexposure doesn’t make him more interesting. The same is true for the three-dimensional Stellas. It’s the early work that broke new ground. For the Chuck Close fans, there are two large rooms. Surprisingly, there are just two of Martin Puryear’s fine pieces. I wonder if there are more in the warehouse. His mix of form and craft continue to delight. The Puryear retrospective last year was one of my favorite shows since the museum moved into the Botta building.


Sam Francis: Untitled, 1949

This first trip was about finding old friends that I want to sit with. However, there is a larger narrative: with the Fishers having slightly less control over the collection than if they had built their own, there will a greater chance of independent curatorial influence and critical assessment. As Kenneth Baker points out in his review in the San Francisco Chronicle, curator Gary Garrels has arranged these selections carefully. A wood sculpture by Mark di Suvero in the same room as a huge Lee Krasner canvas makes for an interesting juxtaposition: the two pieces have no apparent connection in terms of lineage, just a visual connection. I look forward to more of these unusual conversations in the future. I would just advise going to see the collection during the week, when the museum is quieter.

Nothing Too Precious

Nothing Too Precious
The Nakashima Studio in New Hope, PA


Crossing the Delaware

Most folks disdain New Jersey, but I love the area around Princeton that bathes you in varied green light—just before the summer heat sticks. We crossed the Delaware (and the state line) where Washington did and drove up along the river towards New Hope, Pennsylvania. This strange town mixes up choppers, queers, and candle shops. Turn left on Aquetong Road, and up the hill there is a little sign that says, “Nakashima, Open Saturdays Only, 1:00 to 4:30.” This is where woodworker/furniture maker/architect George Nakashima lived and worked from the mid-1940s until his death in 1990.


Sign at Nakashima Studio

As soon as we turned in the drive, I felt at home. Besides the sound of leaves and the changing light, there is something in the air. I was reminded of the Tassajara Zen Center in the mountains behind Big Sur. Maybe it is Japanese culture filtered through a western sieve with a mix of other spiritual teas. A seriousness that is not leaden.


The view when you park.


The view from the porch of the showroom building.

Thankfully, there were not many people, as it was just three quarters of an hour before closing. On non-tour days, visitors can explore four buildings: the showroom, the finishing building, the chair department, and the Conoid Studio.


The Showroom



In the showroom, Nakashima's daughter-in-law Soomi is voluble but gauges her response by your attentiveness. Although I am interested in the furniture, I am more interested in the space, what it feels like. She tells you as much about Nakashima as you want to know. The furniture and the space between the pieces tell you the rest. Although the furniture is displayed beautifully, it is also casual. This is not a museum. Everything has a job to do. Nakashima expected his furniture to get scratched or dented. Nothing was too precious.


Finishing Room



Nakashima combined European modernism, a Japanese aesthetic, a shaker sensibility, and again, something I can’t put my finger on. This is true in his buildings as well as his furniture.


Between the Chair Department and the Conoid Studio


The Conoid Studio

The Nakashima brand seems based on the simple photograph of him as a Japanese woodworker crafting alone in the Pennsylvania woods. But this is far from the truth. He was born in Seattle and received his B. Arch from the University of Washington in Seattle and his M. Arch from MIT. He went to work for the Czech architect Antonin Raymond in Japan, where Raymond had gone to work on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel and stayed to set up his own practice. Both left Japan before the war, and Nakashima ended up in an internment camp.

Raymond was able to sponsor him so he could leave and move to New Hope. And there he began to make furniture. He had a large team of skilled craftsmen helping. There is an entrepreneurial side of this tale that is also typically American. Americans love stories about foreigners overcoming obstacles, even if the foreigners aren’t really so foreign at all. But the piece of the story that eludes the casual visitor can probably be found, at least partially, in Nakashima’s own story as a seeker who happened to be an architect, not a furniture designer and maker.



Dormitory for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram

A key part of Nakashima’s story takes place in 1937, when he went from Japan to Pondicherry, India, as Raymond’s project architect to supervise the construction of a dormitory for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Golconde, as the building was known, was one of the first reinforced concrete structures in India and would become an important structure in the history of modernism in India. Given the ashram’s ideas and the scarcity of materials, it is not a typical project. What probably changed Nakashima’s path is his interest in Sri Aurobindo’s faith. In her fine biography of her father, Mira Nakashima (named for Mother Mira, Aurbindo’s disciple) writes, “Sri Aurobindo and Mother Mira taught that beauty is the expression of design truth, that freedom fosters creativity, and that focus develops discipline. They also taught that spiritual purity manifests itself in art, an expression of the divine and of the multi-faceted, ultimate truth.” She goes on to write, “Work for him was a spiritual calling, a linking of his strength to a transcendent force, a surrender to the divine, a form of prayer.” Standing quietly overlooking the landscape of the Nakashima Studio, you can almost feel that. I’ve been looking for that sort of clarity with these explorations.



You may be interested in the following websites:

www.nakashimawoodworker.com
www.sriaurobindoashram.org

And the following books:

Nature Form and Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima by Mira Nakashima. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003.

Golconde: The Introduction of Modernism in India by Pankaj vir Gupta, Christine Mueller, and Cyrus Samii. New Delhi: Urban Crayon, 2010.