Santa Monica Topiary Dinosaurs, proudly guarding the Promenade.

Yes, even Los Angeles has dinosaurs. Of course, they are made out of shrubs and shoot water from their mouths while people casually eat frozen yogurt and shop at an outdoor mall. This is one of the many highlights of last weekend’s trip.

Another highlight of the trip was visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I’m sure many of you have heard of it by now. It’s a museum that is really more of a conceptual art project. While it projects the trappings of an “official” museum, you never quite know whether the things on display are real or not. You also never really know why they are on display, as much of what’s in the museum looks either obscure, insignificant or both. Long story short, I can’t describe it well enough to do it justice. If you are passing through Culver City, give yourself at least an hour and a half to see the displays and more than that if you want to read everything (actually you would need a whole day for that).

One of the displays featured this glass case with a dog’s head inside. Through a series of prisms, the image of a man fidgeting in a chair and barking is projected into space so that when you look into the case, he appears to be in the dog’s head. Then he starts barking. It’s priceless, and this one exhibit is worth the price of admission alone.

My Andy Goldsworthy Impression, a temporal work in San Francisco. 

For those of you not familiar with Mr. Goldsworthy, he is an “artist” who piles up crap on the beach and takes pictures of it (okay, I’m being a bit harsh on the man). He did one fascinating project where he made giant snowballs in the winter in Scotland and refrigerated them until summer and put them in the streets of London in the middle of the night. When people went to work the next morning, they were greeted by icy surprises all over the city. Anyway, a large portion of his work looks like a pile of rocks or sticks.

A few days ago, I was chatting with a coworker about frosting printers (I’m sure you have seen the cakes at the grocery store with pictures of people on them, or of a Little League baseball team, or somebody’s new puppy). A new printer had arrived in the office and we were discussing how great it would be if we could get a cake printer for the office- we could print our architectural drawings straight on to delicious buttercream frosting! Alas, it was too good to be true. Our office has a new color inkjet instead.

This led me to do some research, and I came across a product from a company called Kopykake (they must have figured out how clever it is to use the letter k instead of a c). The people over at Kopykake really couldn’t make it any easier, their signature “Kwik-Kopy III” device works in just three easy steps:

1. Simply take any photograph, drawing, logo or artwork, place it into the Kwikscan IV and press the Copy button.
2. The system automatically crops the photo or artwork and sizes it to fit the Frosting Sheets.
3. Within minutes, you’ll have a beautiful work of art, ready to be placed on any cake.

Note that it doesn’t just make dessert, it makes a beautiful work of art.

There’s nothing quite like slicing into a photo of your face with a sharp knife to celebrate a special day!

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?

Timothy Hutchings: The World’s Largest Wargaming Table - The World’s Largest Wargaming Table, June 27-August 11, 2007 (Photo:Cary Whittier, courtesy of www.i-20.com)

In response to my last post, Renu asked about the Richard Serra show in New York. I’ll get to that, but first I thought I’d mention another show that you probably haven’t heard about. Timothy Hutchings, better known for his film work, has an installation up at i-20 on West 23rd St. that fills the entire gallery.

Taking the idea of a wargame- a table game with clear rules played with miniature soldiers- to a ridiculous extreme (400 square feet) arranged as a seemingly never-ending playing surface, Hutchings’ installation creates a bizarre alternate universe where war has a clear trajectory and defined rules. The installation is installed so the the viewer is literally marginalized and at times has to walk in very narrow spaces created next to the walls.

Richard Serra installation photo from www.moma.org

As for the Richard Serra show, the most accurate word to describe it is “BIG.” When I first saw the Torqued Ellipses in New York in the late 90s I was amazed at the size, and there were only a few pieces on display at the Gagosian Gallery.

While it was nice to see the variety in Serra’s output over the years (many older works were on the top floor), it was almost gratuitous to have all the new large-scale pieces on display together. Sequence, the one piece you literally could lost in, was great but the other ones (the toruses in particular) almost seemed boring in comparison. To see images of these works, there is a great online exhibit at MoMA’s site.

Natasha and I did not make it to the roof, as it started raining while we were there and the security guards all started freaking out and made everyone go inside. They also made everyone throw out their snacks that many people had just purchased minutes earlier (luckily we were almost done with our gelato). There was a Serra piece in the sculpture garden that we saw very briefly as we were being ushered back inside the building.

If you start at the bottom of the museum and work your way up, you end up seeing Serra’s oldest work last. It looked more fresh than much of the newer stuff- it is conceptually richer and less dependent on scale to make an impression. You can’t walk through it, but it definitely has the same weight.