Before Earth hour: Downtown San Francisco at 8:20pm
I attempted to “celebrate” Earth Hour last weekend by going to Dolores Park (down the street a few blocks from my house) to see if the lights would all shut off at 8:30, as was the idea behind the event. Never mind that I brought my digital camera, never mind that I brought my digital camera.
At around 8:30 the lights in the park went out and a few notable buildings shut off their lights- City Hall, a few towers downtown, and the Bay Bridge had most of its lights off. Overall, not too shockingly dark though:
During Earth Hour: downtown San Francisco at 8:35pm
I’m not sure how much this token gesture really helps, but maybe it makes people more concious of their electricity usage during the rest of the year. A friend pointed out that lots of extra power was probably used the hour before Earth Hour as people like me charged their digital cameras. Oh well.
One other thing. If you are looking at this in Internet Explorer, all the text is probably pushed against the left side of your browser window. My apologies. I am looking into this and hope to fix it soon. It’s a great time for you consider switching to Firefox or Google’s Chrome (my new favorite).
There is a lot going on at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art right now, here’s a brief synopsis of a few of the shows.
The William Kentridge show on the 4th floor was great, but I would probably have to budget most of a day to really see all of the work. Much of it is in video format and requires a substantial amount of time to watch. Unfortunately, his Drawings for Projection series were being shown in the smallest room with a very limited amount of seating. Had the accommodations been better, I probably would have watched the full cycle of these films during today’s visit. The large number of original drawings that accompanied all of the video work was well-presented and helped me to appreciate his process as I had only seen his work in video format in the past.
I was looking forward to J. Mayer H. architecture exhibition mostly because I hadn’t been to an architecture exhibit at SFMoMA in a while and I thought this was going to be a real show. Unfortunately, it was an installation that consisted of kiosks with TV screens mounted in them showing a variety of patterns. I know, I know- Mayer is inspired by patterns (hence the show’s title “Patterns of Speculation”). There are also videos projected on the walls showing images of renderings (wait, can you have an “image of a rendering”?) and built work. There are no drawings, and there is no information telling you what you’re looking at, and there is nothing about the process of how patterns of numbers translate into buildings. If you have no attention span and low expectations, you’ll be satisfied. After seeing the breadth of the Kentridge exhibit on the top floor it was a little hard to take this “show” seriously considering it would fit in my apartment with lots of room to spare. Maybe this is a sign that I’m too old-fashioned.
Simon Ungers, Silent Architecture (Library rendering), 2003-2004. Inkjet print on paper mounted on Fortex, Photo from SFMoMA
The next room is filled with intriguing rusted steel models of theoretical projects (Library, Theater, Museum and Cathedral) by the late Simon Ungers. Apparently influenced by Ledoux and minimalist sculpture (think Donald Judd + Richard Serra), each model is for a particular building type is made up of idealized forms. Each piece is on a custom wood base with an accompanying drawing on the wall behind it. While the work is a bit outside my normal architectural intersts, it’s an interesting show from a practitioner who built few buildings before an untimely death.
As much as I hope the “stimulus package” does work, I’m very pessimistic. Our entire idea of what “normal” is needs to be recalibrated. I don’t even know what to think about places like Detroit. After growing up in the Rust Belt (near Buffalo) and getting used to hearing about layoffs, declining populations and abandoned buildings, hearing this last hopeless statistic about Detroit is almost too much to bear (although conversely, Buffalo is doing well in comparsion right now).
The architectural excesses of the last decade and a half will not be returned to any time soon. Sam Jacob’s article on Parametricism in The Architect’s Journal lays this issue out succinctly by relating to not only the financial excesses of architecture but to the theoretical and formal ones as well. I agree. The way out of our current predicament is not going to look like this:
Travelling to Buffalo for the holidays was not a straightforward affair. Due to weather, Southwest canceled all flights to Buffalo Sunday night. We stayed in an airport hotel and ate at TGI Friday’s (note that they have eliminated all vegetarian items from the menu this year) and woke up at 4am
to fly standby.
Alas, we didn’t get on the oversold flight. Our odds didn’t look good for getting on a later one either so we booked two seats to Toronto with Porter Airlines. Porter flies large commuter planes (with propellers) to the downtown island airport in Toronto. Once we arrived, we boarded a ferry that took us to a bus that dropped us off at Union Station… the whole trip from airport to downtown street takes about 10 minutes!
After a night at the Days Hotel on Carlton, we took the discount shuttle bus to the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls where we met up with my parents. I think there were only two other non-retired people on the bus.
All in all, it was an adventure and I highly recommend Porter Airlines. After all, they have free beer.
Just when you thought you’d heard about every imaginable type of holiday decoration, the North Baltimore (Ohio) police have decorated a tree with mugshots of convicted sex offenders. If you’re worried about missing the ornaments on the back of the tree, have no fear: the tree rotates.
Natasha and I went to Yosemite last weekend and stayed in a tent cabin. I’d never been to Yosemite before, but I was very impressed… photos can’t due the scenery justice.
I didn’t get attacked by a bear, but I did see a bear. Natasha and I were in the lodge at Curry Village drinking coffee and a smallish black bear walked up within 15 feet of the window. Before anyone else caught sight of it, it ran off into a group of abandoned cabins that had been deemed unsafe due to rockslides.
A deadly bear scales a tree in search of its next meal
Black bears (the only kind of bear that lives in California, thanks to the extermination of the animal on our state flag, the grizzly bear) don’t attack people very often and generally lead a vegetarian diet unless they are desperate for food. Mountain lions are definitely more dangerous, and so are rattlesnakes. There is something horrifying about the thought of getting attacked and eaten by a bear though, so I did some research (not real research, just on the internet) and came across this article.
The biggest lesson I learned from my “research” is that the best way to avoid bear attacks is to not be a moron around wildlife. The following is the perfect illustration of this principle:
*April 1995: In Shasta-Trinity National Forest, a man found what he thought was an abandoned cub but was actually a 70-pound yearling, put it in his vehicle and said he was driving it to an animal protection facility. In the two days that followed, two women joined on the trip, and while driving in the town of Mt. Shasta, received minor injuries from the yearling while in the car.
If I was forced to ride around in a car for two days with a stranger and two women he picked up, minor injuries would probably be involved. I can hardly fault the bear.
