The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, adopted in late December 2008, states that “San Francisco is a special place because of the way in which it has always balanced preservation with change.” It is true that despite generations of natural and manmade disasters, demographic shifts, and radical economic realignment, San Francisco has managed to hold on to its essence as a place that “doesn’t look or feel like anywhere else.” > Read More
Christopher VerPlanck is owner of the preservation firm, VerPlanck Historic Preservation Consulting. > Read More
A two‐year resident of the emerging Central Market district comments on her neighborhood’s evolution and ambiance. > Read More
Rika Putri is a graphic designer based in San Francisco. She graduated from the Academy of Art University in 2010 and is now working for Gensler in San Francisco.
The Mark Bradford retrospective, currently at the SFMOMA and YBCA, collects Bradford’s best work from 2000 to 2010, representing his primary concerns of a decade. > Read More
Patricia Sonnino is an artist and architect practicing in San Francisco. Her web site is www.patriciasonnino.com
It remains nearly impossible to escape architecture, urban design, or planning education in the United States without hearing the name Pruitt-Igoe, even forty years after the St. Louis housing project’s demolition in 1972. > Read More
My friend Amanda Armstrong can’t come on campus anymore, unless she’s there to study or teach. Unless she’s there, in the words of the Alameda County DA who charged her four months after their police beat her as she linked arms with her fellow protestors to protect an encampment put up on November 9th of last year, on “lawful business.” > Read More
Eva Hagberg is a Berkeley-based writer, architectural critic, and cyclist. She is the author of the books Dark Nostalgia and Nature Framed, and her writing has appeared in, among others, Metropolis, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Wired, and Print. She is currently at work on a memoir about vertigo, and a PhD about something interesting possibly to do with buildings, she’s not quite sure what yet.
“Where were the students?” one of their professors asked me as we were leaving. It was a pity they missed the lecture, because Professor Machado had aimed to instruct, showing in detail how three of his projects moved from planning to completion, warts and all. > Read More
Co-curated and designed by CCA’s Ila Berman and Douglas Burnham, ‘Architecture in the Expanded Field’ is an Herculean and painstakingly crafted 3-dimensional exhibit that indexes some 75 works of ‘installation architecture’—an experimental terrain of practice explored by Erin Hyman for this magazine. > Read More
San Francisco is often compared unfavorably to other major cities in terms of its tolerance for architectural experimentation. One area where this experimentation has thrived, however, is that of installations, which by dint of their short duration and theoretical orientation, have been a potent force for examining the limitations and potentials of architecture and its social ramifications.
Playing to a big, friendly crowd, Rice Professor Lars Lerup acknowledged his Berkeley roots in a lecture on Wednesday night, 7 March, centered on his new book on the Houston cityscape, One Million Acres & No Zoning (Architectural Association, 2011). > Read More
It didn’t take the mortgage meltdown to make clear that residential patterns affect individual, societal and environmental health. And the crash only made the ruinous implications of conventional sprawl development harder to ignore. Now an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art asks how architecture and planning might ameliorate those consequences, proposing alternate ideals of home and imagining buildings and places to express them. > Read More
The creative process is an intriguing design problem of its own: how should you craft the method used to craft other things? This is the second in a series of essays exploring this topic through the lens of strange atlas, an interpretive creative process. Although this approach applies beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries, the essays focus on its application for designing the built environment.
Richard Ingersoll, Nomads in Sprawltown
February 2, 2012
Like every lecture nowadays, the speaker begins hunched over a cinderblock media counter checking to see if his technology is compatible with the space. Wearing mostly black and bedecked in a small beret, the Montevarchi, Italy based architectural historian and professor Richard Ingersoll commands the attention of around 50 students and visitors who stare down at him from the blocky bare wood of the New Soft Room at the Architectural Association’s London office.
John E. Parman is a visiting lecturer of creative industry and cultural policy at Birmingham City University. He can be reached at parman[at]oddpost.com.
Memories of the sculptor and painter Constantino Nivola, a friend of Corbu, a neighbor of Jackson Pollock, and in the 1970s a lecturer at Berkeley CED.
The inaugural Studio One Symposium (a component of Berkeley Department of Architecture’s new Studio One curriculum) kicks off at 6:00pm on evening Friday, February 10th, and continues through the day on Saturday, February 11th. > Read More
The Architect & The Painter, the new film on Charles and Ray Eames, is broad in its ambitions and captures a few things very well. > Read More