Yuki is an independent writer, designer, and editor who is inspired by Sanford Kwinter, Chris Marker, and Japanese and Brazilian architecture. She appreciates the Bay Area for its food-supporting dirt, its fascinating mid-century techno-hippy history, and its rare gems of concrete brutalism.
When one turns the page of an architecture magazine and the work of Carlo Scarpa appears unexpectedly, a quiet inner thrill is felt. Since his passing in 1978, we seem increasingly moved by Scarpa’s caress of material, his strange but faultless sense of placement and proportion, the contemplative nature of his details. These appreciations are heightened by the knowledge that his output was relatively limited. > Read More
A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (1970), Dallas architect Max Levy, FAIA, established his studio in 1984. He is best known for designs that connect people with nature in both rural and urban settings. > Read More
Will San Francisco follow through on its carefully laid plans to accommodate a growing population, or will it continue to fight the same battles time and time again?
Mark Hogan AIA, LEED BD+C is a licensed architect in the states of New York and California. His primary interests lie in housing, sustainable urban design and in enhancing digital design workflows. > Read More
Spanish art & architecture collective Todo Por La Praxis is seeking collaborators and participants for their experimental research on activating the urban void. > Read More
Our experience of the present is shaped by our understanding of the past. By ignoring the urban narratives of monuments, structures, city parks, memorials…what messages are we missing for the present? > Read More
Will San Luis Obispo (SLO) County remain predominantly agricultural, or will it sink into the same morass of rural sprawl that took out Orange County? It could go either way, but there’s still hope if we act now. > Read More
Southern Exposure is launching a public art program, The Living Newspaper: Extra Extra, the first West Coast performance project by the artist Liz Magic Laser and her collaborators, the actors Audrey Crabtree and Michael Wiener. > Read More
The stone banks alongside the river contain the city. Despite them, here is the river, rising. Silently, swiftly the waters swarm downstream; the swell of water does not much alter the river’s appearance. You know there is more of it now only because benches, parks, and the bike road are being submerged. It has not yet risen to the main city wall, about 20 feet higher; three more days of flooding expected.
Elizabeth Snowden is a Berkeley-based writer and editor. A graduate of Bard College, she has edited catalogues raisonnés on Picasso and Gris for Wittenborn Art Books in San Francisco.
“Get out at the Sakuragaoka post office. Turn around and you’ll see a Lawson’s. Walk to it and then turn left. Walk up that street and you’ll see the Dog House on the right.” Typical Tokyo directions from the art impresario and entrepreneur Joni Waka. > Read More
At Roundhouse One Gallery: Lost in Translation: How prototyping is reshaping architecture, an exhibit (12 June – 9 August) and panel (27 June). > Read More
Perched on a bar stool at Sinbad’s Pier 2 Restaurant with a friend, I sipped a glass of white wine on a warm spring night. Sinbad’s is definitely a touristy establishment with its wonderful view of the Bay Bridge. And that is why I was there—to take in the recently ignited “Bay Lights” project on the Bridge’s Western span. > Read More
Join San Francisco design doyenne (and TraceSF fan) Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at the launch party for her autobiographical book, Why? Why Not?: 80 Years of Art & Design in Pix & Prose, and her experimental Utopia Myopia: 36 Plays on a Page, May 3, 2013, 7–9 p.m., McRoskey Mattress Co., 1687 Market @ Gough, third floor. $5 or free with book purchase.
Just before Christmas a superb new museum—a subsidiary of the Louvre in Paris—opened in the ex-coal mining city of Lens in northern France. To promote this breakthrough in museology, the curators chose the familiar icon of revolution, Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” one of some 200 artworks on loan from the parent institution, the world’s most popular museum. Richard Ingersoll paid a visit. > Read More
Muji finally opened in San Francisco late last year, ending a low-grade yearning that has nagged local devotees since the Japanese chain landed in New York in 2007. But unlike the fanfare that greeted Uniqlo, another Japanese brand that debuted here last fall, Muji’s arrival was more akin to sneaking in the back door—literally. > Read More
The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) convened late last fall at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco for its annual four-day conference, organized this year by CCA’s Jason Kelly Johnson.[1] It headlined an impressive list of international speakers, including Manuel DeLanda, Saul Griffith of otherlab, Greg Lynn, and Achim Menges. > Read More
Thérèse Tierney is the Director of the URL: Urban Research Lab, a research group exploring networked technologies and the built environment at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. > Read More
Kengo Kuma splits his time between professional practice and academia. He began his practice in the early 90‘s with a small office in Tokyo; his practice is now over 150 employees with offices in Tokyo and Paris, and projects in Europe, the US, and China. Kuma balances the demands of his global practice with his academic pursuits, heading the Kuma Lab at Tokyo University where he tests his theoretical speculations before applying them in real-world scenarios. > Read More
This past fall, the four founding editors of TraceSF (Yosh Asato, Yuki Bowman, John Parman, and I) sat down with Sarah Peck of Landscape Urbanism to discuss our vision for the role of TraceSF as a locally-focused, independent space for dialogue exploring Bay Area design, culture, and urbanism. Check out the interview here. > Read More