Abandoned Lot in Oakland, part of my visit this morning

I had to go take measurements at an abandoned building today. It’s been vacant for years, and as a result people go in and out of the building to tag the walls and steal anything that isn’t bolted down (and most of the stuff that was bolted down has been stolen too). It is also damp and it looks like some dogs have been inside relieving themselves.

It was so dirty in there, my hands smelled for the rest of the day no matter how many times I washed them. I tried several different types of soap, ranging from institutional to floral, and nothing could totally eradicate it. It reminded me of that episode of Seinfeld where the valet with B.O. contaminated Jerry’s car and he ended up having to sell it, except I can’t sell my hands.

Last year I was unceremoniously laid off on December 22nd, the day before I was due to go out of town to visit my family for the holidays. I shouldn’t say unceremoniously though, because I did get this fancy bottle of champagne with a note wishing me the best of luck in the new year. I should mention now that I luckily had another job in my back pocket, otherwise that bottle of champagne probably wouldn’t have held me over very long as I would have had to look for a new job during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I can only imagine how that would have worked out.
Since obtaining this fancy bottle of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Brut, I struggled to find the proper way to enjoy it. I thought of drinking it when I got my new job, on my birthday, the 4th of July etc. Nothing quite seemed right until the night before Thanksgiving. What to drink it with? Tacos, of course- and not just any tacos. Take out tacos in styrofoam containers from the Taqueria San Jose (please try to ignore the fact that styrofoam containers are actually illegal in San Francisco). Natasha and I dined on some of the city’s finest Mexican food while drinking some of France’s finest Champagne!

Perhaps you’ve heard of Park(ing) Day? It started in San Francisco by Rebar (an art collective focusing on public space/urban design etc) and has now caught on around the world. In a nutshell, people get together and create temporary parks on city streets by renting a parking space for the day (i.e. paying the meter). I helped my office (David Baker & Partners Architects) put together an urban croquet park in front of our building on 2nd Street.

More photos of Parking Day available on my Flickr page!

Park(ing) Day was a big success, both in San Francisco and around the world. Make sure to check out the rest of those photos on Flickr so you don’t miss the Urban Chicken park!

Folsom Dore Apartments by David Baker & Partners Architects
On Sunday, I hosted tours at the Folsom Dore Apartments, a “green” (I hate that term) affordable housing project completed by my office in 2005. It was part of the “Build it Green” tour, which was a series of open houses at environmentally sustainable residential buildings ranging from some very small houses up to the Sunset Idea House (about four blocks from where I live) which bordered on grotesque in its lavish (and schizophrenic) furnishings and wasted space (Curbed had a great post yesterday about the Sunset house).

Most of the people on the tour were from outside San Francisco, were wearing fleece, and had a lot of money. At least as far as I could tell. It was quite amusing to see them touring an affordable apartment building as they struggled to figure out what to say about it. Many people raved about the carpeting, despite the fact that they drove to the tour in a car that probably cost significantly more than all the carpeting in the 98 unit building. One visitor told me about how she bought energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs “for all her Hispanic neighbors.”

In the end, most seemed impressed that it was affordable housing because it was much nicer than they expected it would be. It was also good to show people that “green” doesn’t have to mean expensive- which seems to be the impression many people have. While some of the other houses on the tour had more impressive displays of their sustainability (like the windmill at the Sunset Idea House or an entire forest’s worth of responsibly harvested wood at the Bole/Klingerstein Residence) the type of improvements at Folsom Dore are much more attainable to the average homeowner.

As for the rest of the them, each building was totally different- they represented the full spectrum of price levels and approaches to being sustainable. I was most amused by the giant banner hanging across 22nd Street from a condo building on the tour:

rough banner translation: “Enough with rich people and their condominiums”

Note that I took that photo through a rain screen made out of responsibly-harvested Ipe wood. For more photos of the home tour, visit my Flickr page (again!). There were also more urban chickens… who knew they were so popular?

Sick of expensive real estate? Tired of stucco? Have I got a house for you. You can own a three-unit building in Cleveland sheathed in an acres of white vinyl for only $17,000. With an estimated payment of $86, even if you only rent out one of the apartments you’ll still come out ahead.

15705 Holmes St., Cleveland OH

What do you think happens in that windowless vinyl-covered room on the second floor?

Before I write about the two Wright houses I visited, I have to share this news article. Thanks to some groundbreaking research, it has been determined (scientifically) that Damp, Moldy Houses Cause Depression! Okay, to be accurate, they “MAY” cause depression. I don’t think I needed the American Journal of Public Health to tell me that. This article is not supposed to be related to the Wright houses, but I have a feeling the Martin House may have been damp for a while before the restoration started.

Darwin Martin House, Buffalo NY- work in progress. Click here to visit my flickr page and to see more images.

While traveling last week, I had the chance to go to two different Frank Lloyd Wrght designed facilities. The first was the Darwin Martin House on Jewett Parkway in Buffalo. It was one of FLW’s most elaborate commissions, it consisted of a main house, a conservatory, a carriage house, a house for the client’s sister and another house for the gardener. It is said that the budget was almost unlimited when I was built around the turn of the last century.

I went on a deluxe tour that covered all parts of the site, and it was definitely worth the time. I had been to this house a few years ago, but it looks completely different now. The Martin House Restoration Corporation (the non-profit that is restoring the house and raising money) has rebuilt portions of the complex that were torn down in the 1960s. In the last few years, the pergola and carriage house have been rebuilt and the gardener’s cottage was purchased and opened to the public this summer.

This was one of Wright’s finest buildings, done at the peak of his career. I highly advise you to visit if you are in the area. I’ve heard that Wright kept the drawings for this house pinned up in his office for the rest of his life after it was completed.

The Graycliff House from the driveway

The other Wright complex I visited was the Graycliff estate, in Derby NY (only about half an hour from downtown Buffalo). I mentioned this house before in an earlier post, but I didn’t give any of the background. This house was also designed for the Martins, but Mrs. Martin was the main client here as opposed to the city house where her husband was in control. She wanted a light-filled and airy summer escape on the shore of Lake Erie. Wright obliged by giving her a fantastic house on a 70 foot cliff. The first floor is glass on both sides and very thin so that from the front, a visitor can see the water and the horizon through the living room.

This house was much better preserved because it has never been vacant. A religious group (the Parist fathers, a group of priests from Hungry) owned it and lived there until a few years ago when it was purchased and restoration began. The priests never tore down any of the original buildings, so the work necessary here is not as extensive as at the Buffalo house.

Plastic Dinosaur Flower Planter, Derby NY

I’m going to be out of town for the next few days, so I won’t be posting much. I am visiting my family in Buffalo. I’ve been to two different Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the last two days which I’ll post about when I get back.

Here are some photos of the Graycliff Estate in Derby, NY which Wright designed in 1928. I’ll post photos of the Martin House in Buffalo soon.

Front of the Graycliff House

Waterfront side of the Graycliff house

Mouth of the 18 Mile Creek at Lake Erie, near Graycliff

I hate this tower. I see it every day when I am riding my bike to work and it irritates me every time I look at it. Not only is it that hideous blue color (it looks like the color children use to denote “glass”), but the white strips of material that go up the face of the tower look ridiculous, and they are probably going to look filthy once birds have been shitting on them and the polluted air has a go at them. I guess I don’t have much else to say about it, except that I hope several other large buildings get built in the vacinity so nobody can see it.

In other news, a severely understaffed and underfunded zoo has been exposed by National Geographic:

Thanks to the internet, I have discovered even more proof that dinosaurs were on Noah’s ark:

This blog goes to great pains to point out that dinosaurs hatched from eggs, so it would have been easy for Noah to pack lots of really small dinosaurs on the ark. I mean, look at a dinosuar next to this bunny:

What other proof do you need?

ARggh. I have been studying all weekend. I have my General Structures exam on Wednesday. If you don’t know about the ARE Exam, you probably don’t want to. In order to be a licensed architect, you have to pass 9 exams on different topics. Then (in California) you have to pass an oral exam. I have been reading and doing math all weekend. Blah.

I did stop by an open house at a two unit apartment building today. It was on my way home from studying at a coffee shop. If anyone wants to live in a run-down ground floor unit on a really gross alley let me know. It’s only $750,000. There are lots of pigeons.

This past weekend I celebrated Memorial Day by going to Shasta Lake with Natasha and watching a bunch of post-frat boys play drunken frisbee in a motel parking lot. Okay, that was only five minutes of the whole trip. What happened the rest of the time?

This gnome actually was one of the last things we encountered on the trip. On Saturday, we drove to Shasta Lake and saw Shasta Dam… the 2nd largest dam in the United State. I guess they don’t have too much of an inferiority complex about it’s second best status, becasue there was a museum and lots of enthusiasm on the part of the Bureau of Reclamation (read: the government agency responsible for covering things in water).

Although it is hazy, you can make out Mt. Shasta in the background of this photo from near the dam:

After seeing the Dam, it was on to our accomodations at Shasta Lake. The next day we rented a canoe and went up the upper Sacramento River arm of the lake. The lake is very pretty and is great for paddling in a canoe, however if the wind comes up in the middle of your trip it’s a lot of work to paddle back to the dock. There are also a lot of jet skis and wakeboarders, so it’s best to stay on the quieter parts of the lake if you don’t want to capsize or be run over.

After returning the canoe, we went up to Mount Shasta, the most spectacular mountain I’ve seen in person. There was still a good deal of snow on it, even though the winter was exceptionally mild this year. The parking lot at 6700′ was the highest point on the mountain accessable by car at this time of year (the entire mountain is over 14,000 feet tall). Within a short walk from the parking lot, snow drifts were still melting. It was refreshing to be in the cool air on the mountain, since the daily temperatures near the lake were over 90 degrees every day we were there.

The last day of the trip we stopped at Turtle Bay, a park in Redding CA. The part was nature-themed and included a number of very friendly and hungry birds:

This park is also home to Spanish architect Santiago Calitrava’s famous Sundial Bridge. It was interesting to see that the deck of the bridge is actually made out of glass, something I didn’t know from the images I had viewed in magazines. One of my coworkers said that Calatrava claimed it was done that way so that a shadow wouldn’t be cast on the river- he wanted to avoid scaring the fish. This seems pretty ridiculous to me, but I’m sure he had to find a way to justify a glass deck in client meetings and that probably sounded as convincing as anything else he could think up.

The it was back to the Bay Area with a brief stop at the Petrified Forest. For $6 you can walk through a forest trail that features a number of suprisingly large petrified trees that were buried in a volcanic eruption about 4 million years ago. I spent a good portion of the walk on the lookout for rattlesnakes (there is a big warning sign at the entrance), but I did enjoy the petrified wood:

I also, of course, spotted the gnome and his donkey pictured at the beginning of this post. It was a very eventful weekend, and now I am back in freezing cold San Francisco studing for the architecture registration exam. Yay!

Despite a sad lack of content, my blog appears to be (for the most part) working.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon in East Oakland touring a vacant pasta factory. It is part of the project I am working on at my office- eventually it is going to be renovated in to low-income studio apartments and art studios.

When I arrived at the site yesterday with two other people from my office, we were met by a woman from the Oakland Housing Authority at the chain link fence that is around the building. She informed us that the alarm had been deactivated and it was pretty obvious that the building had been occupied in the recent past. There were gang tags painted on the outside and all of the (formerly closed and latched) upstairs windows were open.

To make a long story short, the housing authority police never showed up so eventually we just went inside anyway and found the scene below. Thanks to Daniel Simons for the photographs (oops, I forgot my camera).