A Garden in Leicestershire

Graham Cousins went house-hunting with a spade. He and his wife Jenny decided to sell their comfortable suburban house on the outskirts of Leicester because its modest garden did not afford them the scope to fulfill his childhood dream of some acreage with a view. In 1981 they drove up an unpaved and impossibly narrow drive in Walton, Leicestershire, and found a wildly overgrown acre + of land, with a little brick bungalow. Undeterred that the house was hardly large enough, Graham strode determinedly around the property, turned the dirt in several locations, and with a satisfied smile, pronounced this their new home.

Even though Graham was Director of Leicester University’s bookstore operation and there was one child still at home, the Cousins family found time to turn a forgotten refuse yard (Orchards is the property’s official name, after the grove of fruit trees along the eastern property line) into one of rural England’s treasured but hidden private gardens. In the now expanded brick cottage and in the garage (which doubled as a dining room during construction) there are fascinating series of photos documenting the stunning developments over the years. Among the family portraits is a large photo of Graham standing next to British TV personality Roy Lancaster, commemorating a peak moment in the family history, the garden’s appearance on national TV. (Ask Graham about the inquisitive cows that almost ruined the shoot.)

Graham in his garden

Orchards is not a sentimental garden; there is no irrigation system, and plants must survive without artificial support. In keeping with this ruggedness (which encourages native plants to flourish) Graham ripped out the trellises because he felt they were an unnatural crutch for the roses; the roses that remain have adjusted and are wilder and stronger.

Thousands of Japanese, Dutch, German, and British tourists have seen the garden. Even so, for so public a garden it is a very private place. Walton is a small village, and there is no parking for tour buses, so most visitors arrive in their own vehicles, parking across the street and walking up the now paved drive, aware that they are entering a singular and mysterious vision.

The garden gate

Let Yourself Go
From the beginning, instinct is the best guide. There is no single entrance to the garden, and there is no single route; everything is designed to encourage wandering. For example, through the weathered brick arch, the inviting overlook at the far end beckons, where there are benches and a hint of the landscape beyond. But on the way there is a large reflecting pond, and the sight of a sequestered Asian tea house that is worthy of investigation. However, a bank of unusually sensuous Ponytail grass (Stipa tenuissima) dotted with field poppies (papaver rhoeas) and rose campion (lychnis coronaria), comes into view, and the visitor’s purpose is again interrupted. By this casual and subtle system of invitation and redirection, the garden can never be experienced the same way twice.

Green, How I Love You, Green (Lorca 1899-1936)
On the left side of the garden, a grand and ancient apple tree (200 years old? older?) casts a magnificent shadow, the centerpiece of a stunning display of different shades of green; in fact, green is the only leaf color here. Graham’s affinity for the exuberance of Spain, where he traveled extensively in his youth before settling back in his native Midlands, combines with his English passion for understatement, in a subdued tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca’s favorite color. Astutely avoiding artificial leaf colors, he forces the eye to differentiate among so many ostensibly monochromatic tones; dark greens become more deeply verdant, lighter greens seem more yellow.

The end of "The Avenue" in winter

Borrowed Views
The gravel overlook commands a view across the Leicestershire fields to the village of Gilmorton. A perceptive eye will see that the spire of All Saints Church is one anchor point of the garden’s main axis, and that the other is the bed in the master bedroom! Here Graham capitalizes on the garden’s location; the borrowed vista implies that the land is much bigger, that the cows and the fields are all part of a larger picture.

The pond in winter

Lie Back and Relax
The wildest and least explored area is the Orchard itself. Graham lets the ground cover of native meadow grasses overgrow here, to the delight of the neighborhood cats who hunt through the dense overgrowth. On a lazy summer day naptime can be spent in a hammock slung between the pear, apple and plum trees.

In Season and Out of Season
Graham believes that gardening (and garden-viewing) should be a year-round delight, and to that end the natural life-cycles of the plantings are respected and coordinated so that the garden is worth exploring throughout the year.

Rooms for the Imagination
Another borrowed view is the pool. At first glance its size feels out of scale with the rest of the garden; the expanse of water seems to dwarf the ring of grass around it. Yet it is a serene oculus that brings the sky more intensely into the garden; the clouds, birds, and tree-tops are all mirrored on the surface, accentuating the depth and height that connects the life of the garden with the life of the air and the vistas of the world beyond.

This post was co-authored with Paul Crabtree.

A future post will include an interview with Graham Cousins about his philosophy of gardening.

For more information please visit http://www.grahamsgreens.com/

Isca Greenfield-Sanders

Isca Greenfield-Sanders

Recently I interviewed the artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders when she visited Paulson Bott Press to make a new series of prints. You can find that interview here: http://www.paulsonbottpress.com/about/oktp/oktp_greenfield1.pdf
We continued to talk about the source for her images. Her foray into abstract imagery based on the same process is especially interesting. Foregrounding a cast-off of a cast-off. Several layers of reality to think about…

Wading I (Blue)
Mixed Media Oil on Canvas, 2011
70 x 70 inches
Courtesy iscags.com

Q: When you find images on eBay, you don't know what you're getting, do you?

A: No, I buy thousand-lot slides. It takes days to go through a collection. I have a light table and a set of projectors. I wear gloves and a mask, because often these things are dirty and gross. They belong to smokers. So I go through them, scan the ones I want, and rebag them.

Q: Do you throw out the ones that you aren’t going to use?

A: I have a junk shop in my neighborhood that I supply with a lot of slides.

Q: Do you sometimes get into a painting and then decide the imagery doesn’t work at all? Do you scrap it?

A: Occasionally, I think an image will have more life than it ends up having. I was trained in watercolor first. So I can make anything into what I think of as a pretty decent watercolor/colored pencil image. From that point, some things can become oil paintings, but that then is subject to the enlargement process, and some things don't enlarge well. They are wonderful small. I'm surprised occasionally when I think something is going to end up being an oil painting and then it just never gets that far.

Q: And you just don't know in advance? You just have to work it out?

A: Yeah. Sometimes you have to try it in a different way. So sometimes it can be a large watercolor, but it can't be a large oil painting, or sometimes it works as an oil, but just a small oil.

Q: I just love the blue in the print “Mountain Stream.” What color was it in the slide?

A: The slide had lost a lot of its magenta. It had turned a sickly green.

Mountain Stream, 2012
21 x 21 inches
Courtesy paulsonbottpress.com

Q: So there was no color relationship to the original slide?

A: I did multiple watercolor studies of this image. That mountain has been purple, black, gray.

Q: With the blue, you fall into it. I heard you mention abstract. Tell me more about that.

A: Yes. Part of my “Light Leak” series was a subset called "Film Edge" images. They are literally from the end of the roll of film.

If the subject of my work is in part the medium of photography—as, obviously, seen through the eyes of a painter—these are just physically the film that no image was captured on. But the celluloid itself is just so beautiful and had such strong landscape connotations. Sometimes I have rotated it for horizon purposes.

They are simple, nonfigurative landscape pieces. They will be done in yellow and purple, which is a nod to the fragility of film, because when it goes bad, it predictably goes in those two ways.

Film Edge (Yellow Tree, Pink Sky)
Mixed Media Oil on Canvas, 2011
28 x 28 inches
Courtesy iscags.com

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I am working on some cave paintings. Any time there's a phrase that the general non-art-world public understands and that pertains to the act of making art, like a cave painting—your plumber would know what a cave painting is—that is of extreme appeal to me.

Q: The accessibility?

A: Just the phrase, yes. I have made some paintings of figures emerging from a cave. They're completely in silhouette and seen from within the cave looking towards the mouth. So you're seeing the mouth of the cave and then the figures in silhouette and against a forest.

Q: Where did they come from?

A: They are slides from 1967. I don’t know where they are from in terms of location.

Q: Taken from within a cave?

A: This one was in a cave; for the other two I added the cave.

Q: The black is powerful.

A: It's Mars Black. It has my grid in it. My paintings are a sutured-together paper collage beneath that's sealed and then painted atop.

Q: So that's visible?

A: Yeah, there's a gridded black atmosphere in that. I let them dry for almost a year, and then they are varnished. So they're very rich, want-to-lick-it black, like maple syrup or molasses.

For more information:
www.iscags.com
www.paulsonbottpress.com
www.haunchofvenison.com
www.berggruen.com

Cave Painting
Mixed Media Oil on Canvas, 2011
42 x 42 inches
Courtesy iscags.com

Another Postcard from the Southland

We went down to LA last weekend to see our friend Jessica’s play reading at the Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood. One of the great things about LA is the 99-seat house. Equity actors are allowed to perform in non-union theaters if they are less than 100 seats. There must be hundreds of these theaters in LA. You can see great plays and great actors in an intimate setting at very little cost. Jessica’s play is about a place very familiar to Paul and me. Thankfully, only one of the characters is really close to reality, and she is no longer living. One of the actors was O-lan Jones, who would be familiar to Magic Theatre audiences. She was a real standout. We were relieved not to see ourselves in any of the characters!

The playwright outside the theater

We stayed downtown at Checkers, which was once a posh hotel. I think it was like a sister to Campton Place in SF. It has been kept on life support by big chains and is now a Hilton. But the beds are good, and I love sitting in the rooftop hot tub and looking at the highrise towers above me. 

View from the jacuzzi

One of the weird LA mashups was driving out to Monterey Park and going to a Chinese restaurant in a mall where all the businesses are Chinese. There are few English signs, and they are usually misspelled. The best part was that the architecture was High Taco Bell. Really the most hideous fake Mission Revival (which is kind of fake even when it’s good) highlighted by neon. This topped off (or bottomed off?) by a surface parking lot and two-level subterranean parking garage that brought to mind that splendid kids’ puzzle Rush Hour. Once we got upstairs, there was a band on the other side of the screen playing for a wedding. A wedding attended by maybe a dozen people. That said, the duck was quite good.

We got to chat with Charlie Schroeder, whose new book, Man of War, sounds hilarious.

The screenwriter blows out his candles

We were in China celebrating our buddy Ian’s birthday. While we are name-dropping, we have to mention that Ian’s movie The Oranges, starring Hugh Laurie, comes out October 5. Welcome to New Jersey.

Our good buddy Johnny took us to the farmers market on Ivar in Hollywood on Sunday. It’s huge! A real town square. One of our favorite bookstores of all time, Hennessey & Ingalls, has a branch in a little retail center that was repurposed from some kind of warehouse. And of course we got to see the rear end of Crossroads of the World, another great LA mashup! Funky fantastic.

The Ivar Theater along the farmers market

The market

The rear end of crossroads of the world

Back downtown, we wandered around a bit and were pleased to see so many people living in converted office buildings. There is still a paucity of good restaurants and food emporiums, but there is no lack of dog walkers—always a sure sign of gentrification. Certain pockets are still just empty, and other pockets are still scary. Pershing Square is really bad. Legorreta’s bold colors don’t do much for the homeless.

Pershing Square

Union Station

We took the subway to Union Station, which was packed. It is the first time I ever saw it full of people, just as it is supposed to be. The ticket area was closed off, and Paul and I thought it would make a great setting for “The Ghost Train.” The old Harvey House restaurant is still empty, just like it was when my buddy Kristina first showed it to me in the late 1970s. Apparently, it is leased out for special events and photo shoots. The tile floor is divine. Here is a blog post about the space. http://laplaces.blogspot.com/2010/02/union-station-harvey-house.html

CA Union Station - the old Harvey House Restaurant

Across the street from Union Station is Olvera Street, the perfect alley of cheap crap. Despite the hideous trinkets, I love the scale. This time, we wandered into the Avila Adobe, which gives a sense of how LA’s earliest Spanish settlers lived. I especially enjoyed the scale of the courtyard.

Avila Adobe

Although Frank Gehry has been overexposed, his Disney Concert Hall is still beautiful, at least on two sides. The Chandler and the Mark Taper Forum brought people back downtown in the 1960s, and the Disney Concert Hall extended that possibility into the new century. Just down the street, Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art never quite achieved the same level of significance. After the expensive, postmodern, mostly subterranean showpiece was completed, most folk said they preferred the Temporary Contemporary, a former police car warehouse reshaped by Frank Gehry. That was where most of the fun took place.

Disney Concert Hall

Temporary Contemporary

My favorite show in the Temporary (now known as the Geffen Contemporary, although most members still call it the Temporary) was the one in 1989 about the Case Study Houses called “Blueprints for Modern Living,” curated by Elizabeth Smith. As I have written before, I think this show was the catalyst for reexamining midcentury modernism. It sure brought Julius Shulman out of his Soriano lair in the Hollywood Hills. The staff used the space beautifully, rebuilding two Case Study Houses and the living room of the Eames House (not quite the re-creation we saw recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but cool nonetheless). At MOCA up the hill, I count a wonderful Ad Reinhardt show and a Robert Irwin retrospective in the 1990s as two of my favorites. MOCA started life as the museum that artists supported. Back then, LACMA was kind of fuddy duddy.

Blueprints for Modern Living:
History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses
by Elizabeth A. T. Smith

So it’s sad to see MOCA in such trouble. There was an enormous show called “The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol,” and while I really liked the Mark Bradford and Tauba Auerbach canvases, I really can’t be bothered with the Andy Warhols. He is one artist who really suffers from overexposure. Rather like Salvador Dali. Director Jeffrey Deitch appears to be favoring a kind of safe avant garde. And some folks feel that he has made a Faustian bargain with tract house mogul Eli Broad. The prediction is that Broad will eventually take over MOCA and fold it into his own Broad Museum (with a new building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro under construction now).

The Broad

Over at the County Museum, director Michael Govan was willing to disagree with the mighty mogul, and after his namesake building was finished, Broad picked up his marbles and moved downtown. Strangely enough, this seems to have served the County Museum well. They are much freer to pursue all kinds of different avenues and have now become the preferred museum for artists. Although it was the Temporary that put on the Michael Heizer show in its early days, it is the County Museum that got the rock.

Levitated mass by Michael Heizer

In the last year, the County Museum exhibit “Living in a Modern Way” bookended the Case Study House show from 20 plus years ago. And their reconstruction of Ed Kienholz’s “Five Car Stud” was one of the most disturbing and wonderful pieces to be seen in recent LA history.

Although I didn’t care for the “Abstraction after Warhol” show, I was relieved to see the Rothkos from the Panza collection front and center in their show of masterworks from the collection. I remember when these were shown at the Temporary and how they were barely lit. They just hummed. Count Giuseppe Panza’s gift must have been one of hope. Hope that this new museum would forge a brave new way in art. Maybe it will again one day.

Postcard from LA

Dan Flavin at Michael Kohn Gallery

I spend a lot of time thinking about and planning travel. Many of the trips don’t come to fruition, but my online history (if I could find it) would tell of this obsession more than of any other. Hotel websites, travel agencies, and, of course, VRBO. What drives this? Seeing friends, observing different cultures, and of course experiencing architecture that I have seen only in photographs. But there is something else. The search for a deeper sense of home. As if there is some place in the world I actually belong, really belong. What if it’s not here? I just read that Armistead Maupin, a writer whose identity is largely tied to San Francisco, is about to move to Santa Fe.

When I drive through my hometown a few times a year, I feel like I almost belong—well, except for the fact I can’t afford a home there. I remember riding (and walking) my bike endlessly up and down the hills, stealing kisses in the local cemetery (where my parent’s ashes are now buried), and buying licorice from the five and dime that featured a Dutch door with a bell that rings still.

There are several places that I have visited frequently for a variety of reasons that almost feel like home because they are so familiar. The British countryside, New York City, Seattle, Tucson, Palm Springs. Whenever I go to those cities, I pick up the real estate magazines at the supermarket or look into windows of real estate offices where photo ads are posted. At the end of the workday (when is that?), I look online to see where the bargains are. If an especially fine architectural gem pops up on Curbed, I post it on Facebook. (Los Angeles seems to have more of these than any other city.)

Besides the Bay Area, the only other place I ever called home was Los Angeles in 1989 and 1990. First I moved to Silverlake near Sunset and Silverlake Boulevard in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of the Hollywood sign. It was the largest apartment I ever lived in. The neighborhood was still pretty funky back then. Sunny weather makes everything look a little better at first blush. I chose the neighborhood in part because it held so many modern architectural gems that I wanted to call my neighbors. One day I was admiring a Schindler apartment house, and the owner invited us in.

When things were going well there, I thought I would stay a long time and bought a condo in Robert Alexander’s Baldwin Hills Village, known as Village Green. It was like living in a park. I had a private garden, a fireplace, and views out across expansive lawns. In the middle of Los Angeles, I couldn’t see a single car. The big brilliant land planning idea was Clarence Stein’s, and it worked. Village Green was an integrated middle- and working-class community where folks got along. I loved my little cottage. It felt like home in part because of the climate. Nobody likes the air pollution or the traffic in LA, but I felt comforted by the warmth and the light. With trees all around, you looked up and only saw blue.

A cottage at the Village Green in Baldwin Hills.
courtesy: villagegreenla.net
photo:  Luz Anderson

Los Angeles doesn’t have the humidity that you find on the East Coast or in the tropics. But in the late 1980s, there was a lot of violence and a sense of danger, as if Raymond Chandler was directing an epic performance piece. Three people I met casually in those few years were murdered. But it was the race/class divide that I felt most intensely. After a car accident that was a set-up for an insurance scam (and a few other issues), I got spooked and returned to the Bay Area.

A Raymond Chandler moment

In the twenty-plus years since I left LA, there have been some significant urban changes, but not as many as you might think in a city known for reinventing itself. Downtown finally came into its own. The unfortunate development trend created by the Harbor Freeway cutting through downtown has been mitigated. The decades of economic depression along Broadway supported historic preservation—through benign neglect. By the time a new, young generation woke up to the beauty of the old office buildings, they wanted to live in them. There still aren’t enough places to shop, but at least people now reside downtown. The area around the convention center and LA Live looks like a wholesale transplant from Disneyland—or its naughty sibling, Las Vegas. But LA Live appears to be helping the Figueroa corridor and offers the bleak convention center some sense of place.

LA Live brings Disney street life to downtown LA
photo: Gensler

As predicted, the region’s congestion has resulted in nodal development. You hear people talking more about how they don’t leave their neighborhood much. Folks who live east of Fairfax lament going to the “Westside,” and vice versa. You would think a trip to the beach was a holiday involving airplane travel. Atwater is one of those villages not far from gang violence but sprouting chic boutiques and fine ethnic restaurants. Larchmont Village and La Brea both have a selection of high-end one-off shops and eateries.

My buddy John lives in the Hollywood Hills not far from the famous “Bat cave.” He commutes to the studios that are only a mile away. Coyotes threaten the pets and the neighborhood organizes. Down the hill, Franklin Street used to be home to junkies, but now sports an almost-chic hotel where I wouldn’t have stayed ten years ago. In the early 1990s, John walked into the supermarket and found everybody lying on the floor. He had entered just after a man with a sawed-off shotgun had departed. But you don’t hear those tales so much, as crime has moved elsewhere.

Bronson Canyon, where the coyotes threaten the kitty cats.

The riots were the culmination of the anger I experienced, but the strife has not come again, or not so visibly. Not far from John’s house, Hollywood Boulevard finally had its own renaissance of sorts with the construction of a new hotel, the new home of the Academy Awards, and, of course, a mall. But like LA Live, it doesn’t feel very authentic. More like a huge plastic Band-Aid. Although a number of neighborhoods are safer and more secure economically, one area that seems worse off is Westwood. I remember it felt like a younger version of Beverly Hills, and now it just feels out of gas, forlorn.

The Getty was the most significant architectural addition to the city in the 1990s, but it didn’t create any new urban form. The cultural acropolis is based more on the Disney model—fantastic, secure, and removed. Speaking of Disney, the concert hall named after the family is the major landmark of the new century. And from at least two sides, Frank Gehry’s sculpture is splendid and contributes to the vibrancy of the street. The photos make it look smooth and perfectly machined, but up close you can see the metal panels overlapping each other, and I like that. That is the symbol of LA. Glitzy in the photo, but scrappy in real life.

Getty Museum
courtesy: getty.edu

Disney Concert Hall brings a live street to downtown LA
courtesy: laphil.com

Los Angeles is thought of as a horizontal city, but in a weird way it can be claustrophobic, because the city doesn’t really ever end until you reach the ocean. The best parts of the city are the private or semiprivate realms. The courtyard concept expanded over an entire megalopolis. One exquisite small private realm that I had never seen before this recent trip is the Asia Pacific Museum in downtown Pasadena. Two other nearby museums, the Huntington and the Norton Simon, are large semiprivate realms. This one is intimate, a group of rooms around a small, beautiful, Asian-themed courtyard. My friend Kristina had a show in an upstairs gallery. In the next room were dozens of children having an art lesson. This museum had three coordinated shows about woodblock printing and its influences. Even on a modest budget, they put together thoughtful, evocative exhibits. And they have one of the best museum gift shops anywhere. (www.pacificasiamuseum.org)

Courtyard at Asia Pacific Museum

Continuing the theme of extraordinary private realms, we stopped off at the Ace Gallery on Wilshire, the largest private gallery I’ve ever been to, with a warren of little rooms between epic spaces. Typically it has multiple shows going, and now there is just one disappointing show of Ed Moses’s new work and a dark room in the back with an enormous Carl Andre metal piece. Down the street at LACMA, we stopped into to see Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II.” Later at dinner, a friend of mine said how much he hated it and wished they had left Burden in the storage locker he imprisoned himself in years ago. We laughed, but I countered and said the piece brought back my deep love of Matchbox cars and imaginary cities that we built in childhood. The roar of Burden’s little cars swooshing around enlivened the whole ground floor of the new Renzo Piano building. Sounded a lot better than that Bruce Nauman piece, which was kind of dull by comparison. And the kids in the museum were mesmerized.

Carl Andre at ACE

On Sunday, we went down to the Temporary Contemporary, or the Geffen as it is called, because he paid for it. We wanted to make it to both MOCA locations downtown, but we never have enough energy for both. There was a huge land art show taking up most of the building. There were some great films, but it seemed like a show about art, not the art itself. And it paled next to the explosion in the other wing of the building; Cai Guo-Qiang’s fireworks. Spectacle versus Contemplation about Contemplation. Spectacle wins.

The Geffen Contemporary aka The Temporary

One of my favorite pieces at The Ends of the Earth show.
An installation by Patricia Johanson
Stephen Long

Let's blow up a museum.
Cai Guo-Qiang at the Temporary.
Ignition of Chaos in Nature, Los Angeles 2012
photo: Joshua White
courtesy: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

But of course, that’s what I love about Los Angeles. It never makes sense, and I leave confounded.

Postcard from La Jolla

The Scripps Lab
Architect: Irving Gill

La Jolla Shores Beach
There are few houses right on the beach at La Jolla Shores, just north of the village. They tend to be large and nondescript. It’s not a community full of those “my architect is more famous than your architect” houses that you find in Malibu. Nobody is bothered too much with style. This is odd, given that it could be argued that American modernism was born and dramatically furthered here in La Jolla.

Our modern beach house for a week
Photo: Connie Poor

Our good friends David and Cherie rented the best of these large houses for a week to celebrate a milestone birthday. The arrangement of volumes was like a modernist puzzle, while the décor was faintly baroque. Most importantly, every room faced the ocean. I can’t remember when I last slept so well. Our constant companions (and entertainment) were the surfers, who never crashed into each other despite their numbers. They would shoot inside the water tunnel and fly over the top of the cresting wave to ride the backside. Invariably, we put our novels down to watch the neoprene-clad dancers wait and then suddenly cast their fate to the curl. Of course, the coup de grâce was when they pulled off their rubber skins.

Our view of the surfers

The hosts with your loyal correspondent
Photo: Connie Poor

La Jolla Village/Gill’s Corner
The best parts of the village are the coves where the seals have taken up physical and olfactory space. Up the hill is the landmark pink hotel, La Valencia, and what perhaps was the center of early American modernism, a neighborhood full of the works of Irving Gill.

The cove now taken over by seals

La Valencia

San Diego has a touch of the Texas. By that I mean questionable zoning practices.… One highrise right on the ocean in the village is the kind of carbuncle that Prince Charles goes on about. I assume it was built before the coastal initiative. No detail, no materials, no grace, wrong scale. Should be removed. There are still a number of historic buildings, but most of the contemporary buildings could be anywhere suburbia.

Carbuncle at the shore
Photo: Connie Poor

However, around the intersection of Prospect, Silverado, and Draper Streets is the heart of America’s own modernism. Known mostly to the cognoscenti, Irving Gill was one of the country’s architectural pioneers. Practicing at the same time as the Viennese Adolph Loos (Esther McCoy would argue that he was already practicing before Loos), he was creating a new architecture that paid attention to tradition and the vernacular but was built for the 20th century. He made concrete humane.

His lessons still hold. He very nearly shaped an entire precinct with his work for the Bishop’s School and his patron, Ellen Browning Scripps. (Gill designed the original building for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography a mile or so up the coast. That building still stands, although the west façade has been somewhat obscured by later construction.)

Gill’s largest commission was the Bishop’s School (1910-1916), which Scripps underwrote. A nostalgic spire designed by Carleton Winslow, who had worked for Bertram Goodhue, replaced his original tower. Unfortunately, the complex is nearly impenetrable from the street. During this period, Scripps also commissioned the La Jolla Woman’s Club, which can be seen easily from the street and is a popular destination for weddings and other social events. The columns that hold up the arcade have inspired several other buildings, including the nearby Brooks Brothers retail building by ELS.

The Woman’s Club was one of the first buildings built with tilt-slab construction. The same method was used across the street at the Scripps Recreation Center. This public building shows the wear and tear of public maintenance and is currently painted pink. But at least it still stands. Next door to the Woman’s Club is the Kautz Residence, which is now a bed and breakfast. Across the way is Ellen Scripps’s own residence, which has been engulfed by Robert Venturi’s Contemporary Art Museum. There are more beautiful examples of Gill’s work throughout San Diego and Los Angeles, and one beautiful complex in Piedmont is attributed to him. His story is tragic, but his accomplishment is immense.

Bishop School detail
Architect: Irving Gill

Ellen B. Scripps residence surrounded by Robert Venturi

Ellen B. Scripps residence surrounded by Robert Venturi

La Jolla Recreation Center
Architect: Irving Gill

La Jolla Woman's Club
Architect: Irving Gill

Kautz Residence now a bed and breakfast
 Architect: Irving Gill

http://www.sandiegohistory.org/online_resources/gill.html
http://www.amazon.com/Irving-Gill-Architecture-Reform-Architectural/dp/1580930166

Safari Park
I was worried that the Safari Park would be like Disneyland. And while there are Disney touches (Land Rovers parked in the trees?), the park is beautifully landscaped and goes to great lengths to educate the public about the animals. Our hosts treated us to a photo safari. We got on a truck (with a canopy, thank God) and drove out into the savannah to see the giraffes, rhinos, and impalas in something close to their natural habitat.

Disney-like display at Safari Park

The giraffe’s tongue was the longest I’ve ever seen. The beast can find your food and reach its tongue out several feet to get it. But the color of the tongue was not, as I imagined, a range of pinks, reds, and maroons—instead, it was the ugliest grey, like a slug. But those beasts do have the prettiest eyelashes. When they lean over to drink water, they can’t get oxygen. Just before they appear to pass out, they swing their long necks into the air and fill their lungs. Although enormous, the rhinos were quite gentle. In a photo, their hides look like metal plates, but in person they are suppler, bending and creasing as they waddle along.

The giraffe nibbles at our hosts at Safari Park

The gentle rhinos come in for a snack

http://www.sdzsafaripark.org/ 

Salk Institute
For architecture junkies, Salk is a kind of Mecca. For agnostics (about God or concrete), the place can also make you a believer. The genius of the place is that the architect integrates the ineffable and the real. Spirit and science. Space and concrete. Infinity and walls. We were lucky to get Ellen Zimmerman as our guide. She talked about Kahn as an existential architect and spoke of his masterwork in philosophical terms. Although we didn’t get to see the private offices, we did see the library and an interstitial floor. Vierendeel trusses and the full-height interstitial floors allow the lab floors to be completely flexible. This was one of the highlights of the year so far. If you go, be sure to book a tour in advance.

The ethereal and very real Salk Institute

http://www.salk.edu/about/architecture_tours.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salk_Institute_outline_of_laboratory_floor_and_Vierendeel_truss.jpg


UC San Diego
Built in the second half of the 20th century, UC San Diego is a modern campus that will take a few years to explore. That’s a good thing, because my niece Jaclyn starts school there in the fall. We explored her college, Eleanor Roosevelt, designed by Moshe Safdie and opened in 2003. It’s an interesting experiment in the scale of outdoor space. The buildings on the west side of the road are much more inviting because of the scale of the courtyards and the landscape. The east complex has few plants, and the courtyard doesn’t feel quite right. Hopefully, my niece will get an ocean view room! Then she will also have a fine vista of the Salk Institute.

Eleanor Roosevelt College
Architect: Moshe Safdie

The other goal of this visit was to see Mandeville Hall by A. Quincy Jones. It was one of the few buildings of his in California that I hadn’t seen. It is a tough building, but given that it was designed to house visual arts and music students, it had to be tough. (The art students are probably a tougher lot.) The concrete work doesn’t compare to Salk. But I doubt the construction or maintenance budget did either! His building altered Robert Alexander’s master plan forever, blocking his grand axis and resulting in a more meandering pedestrian experience.

Mandeville Arts Center
Architect:  A. Quincy Jones

We were also lucky to see Robert Irwin’s “Two Running Violet V Forms,” which gave me pause. They change the landscape if you take a few moments to slow down. Look for more reports in the next few years!

"Two Running Violet V Forms"
Installation: Robert Irwin

http://www.dah.ucsd.edu/events/ubd.shtmlhttp://www.amazon.com/University-California-San-Diego-Campus/dp/1568988605

What would a trip to San Diego be without some pink flamingoes?