Subject Matters II by John J. Parman

Subject Matters II

John J. Parman

Jointly published by

Pallas Bookstore & Gallery / @_p_a_l_l_a_s_

Contents Foreword .................................................................................. Opener On architects and architecture The pursuit of the ordinary (1983) ....................................................... 1 Preface to Dinners with Chuck (2021) ................................................8 Joseph Esherick's houses (2008) ....................................................... 10 The Bay Region reconsidered (2006)............................................... 14 The rogue element (2016) .................................................................. 18 Work as if immortal (2017).................................................................20 Great Man theory (2016..................................................................... 23 My postmodernists (2012) ................................................................. 27 The classical imagination (2017) .........................................................31 Another line of practice (2012) .......................................................... 40 Transbay: History and Context (2003)............................................. 43 The architecture critic as activist (2005) .......................................... 46 In appreciation of Sally Byrne Woodbridge (2020) ......................... 50 Beverly Willis in the 1980s and 1990s (2021) ..................................... 52 Art Gensler's treatise of the firm (2021)............................................. 55 Design firms need a both/and ethos (2021) ....................................... 58 Aphorisms for architects (2020) ........................................................ 62 Some notes on value propositions (2019) ......................................... 64 Is architectural licensing necessary? (2020) ..................................... 68 Never Been (2005) ............................................................................ 74 Two lectures: Lars Lerup and Rodolfo Machado........................... 75 Design Book Review ....................................................................... 80 The bicycle shed conundrum ........................................................... 84 Fifty shades of dismay ........................................................................88 Living in a material world ................................................................. 91 Occasionally almost autistic ............................................................. 94 Two lectures: Denari and Bousquets ............................................... 95 Who designed this?........................................................................... 98 Author profile................................................................................... 102

Foreword Subject Matters includes my own work and work written with

others, most of it for publication. At least one of the journals has disappeared, while updates to websites disrupted some archives. Even when an article can be accessed, you often need an academic affiliation to do so without paying exorbitantly just to read it. All of this spurred me to put this together. In doing so, I haven't hesitated to edit in some cases. I'm an editor, after all, so that impulse is always there. But I've tried not to rewrite my own history as a writer: if an article made predictions that didn't pan out, I let them stand. Elizabeth Snowden, founder of the Pallas Bookstore & Gallery in San Francisco and my partner in our editorial studio, helped bring this and other books I've produced to life by her willingness to put them on display. Tipping my hat to Pallas, I've used my photocollages as illustrations. Those wanting topic-appropriate images can readily find them on the web. In the fall of 1972, I met Richard Bender. He became my advisor, my sponsor, and ultimately my writing partner. A good deal of what I've written over these nearly 50 years had him as coauthor and often as instigator, prodding me to work on things he occasioned. It is therefore with true gratitude that I dedicate this series, of which this is the second volume, to him.

On Architects and Architecture

The pursuit of the ordinary (1983) Although Joe Esherick worked with Gardner Dailey before the war, his office—Esherick, Homsey, Dodge and Davis—is in many ways an heir to the legacy of William Wurster, perhaps the prime mover of the school of ordinariness to which the office belongs. The progression of the office's work has been evolutionary, with minimal polemics. We published no magazine, put forward no manifestos, in general avoiding any effort to inaugurate the millennium. Nor did we build anything that went beyond what we could reasonably do—the work is incremental, and we have sometimes returned to ideas that were momentarily abandoned, since in many cases you don't really see what's good about an idea until you give it up. The office is known for its willingness to teach (almost a necessity nowadays, although there is much to be learned from students with their good backgrounds in energy and computers). Part of its "glue" is the commonality of values. This is partly due to the long ties of the partners, spanning over 20 or 30 years. George Homsey and Peter Dodge joined the firm in the early 1950s; Charles Davis in the early 1960s. It is also because of the lengthy collaboration of the main staff, most of whom have been with the office for at least five years, and because the office stands for a particular approach to architecture, a certain attitude, and is known to take this position. It therefore attracts people who find this position of interest, sharing at least the outlines of the same value system, and being willing to contribute to its evolution in response to the pressures of a changing world. When we reflect on the work of the firm, it seems to have moved through three stages. Describing these stages, and the work that attaches to them, may be a good way to describe the office. After we do this, we will turn more specifically to ordinariness, and what it meant to us. The work In the early 1950s, we began getting clients with very specific, highly pictorial images of what they wanted—images almost too specific to be really appropriate. This was the same period when, like a lot of people, we believed that some form of prefabrication was in the cards. We were working with very simple volumes—the same 1

volumes our clients were picturing—and experimenting with modularity in an effort to prepare ourselves for industrialization. This was something like the Israeli space-packing ideas—very complex spatial arrangements packed into a box, in the Corbu tradition. We were interested in a very plastic way of handling the space—in a manner which was rectilinear, but at the same time not rectilinear at all. The light in these houses moves around with you as you move around within them, producing elusive, sculptural interior spaces. The Campbell House in Sacramento, the Det Brown House in Stockton, the Wieser House, the Esherick–Wood House (designed with Becky Wood Watkin) in Kentfield, and the Metcalf House in Lake Tahoe are examples of the genre. There was also a series of houses in this phase in which—within the context of the space-packing exercise—we were interested in achieving an airiness and height of almost Victorian proportions. These houses were frankly influenced by the Victorians that dominate some of San Francisco's neighborhoods, and which are also particularly good solutions to the space-packing problem. Examples of this include the Goldman House, the Burt Summers, the Lyon (a somewhat garbled house), and, in certain respects, even Wurster Hall at the University of California, Berkeley—especially looking west in the courtyard where you can see some of these formal characteristics and proportions. Finally, and this brings us to the later 1950s—we tried to blend these two sets of ideas in a persistent effort to get a strong modular character into the building, establishing an order by establishing a module. The Kibbey House in Sacramento is an example. Soon thereafter, we shifted metaphorically into reverse. The McIntyre House was a result of this—a house whose different elements were first identified and then allowed to stand on their own. The result is idiosyncratic, and achieving it took a particular sort of client. The McIntyre House was important in that it broke a set of rules to which we had faithfully adhered for nearly 15 years. It led to the Cary House, a much more "ordinary" building as we have come to use the term. Cary is the result of a more deliberate effort to break down the sense of order by purposefully avoiding taking the regularity and consistency of the building and using these qualities to put people at ease. Instead, the building exposes people to the passing of the day, using light rather than form as the main medium

of the design, and refusing to allow form to predominate. It is the beginning of a series of buildings which get away from form as something to see. Buildings like the Cary House are intentionally anti-material and anti-focal. This quality comes through most clearly in the houses— Cary, Romano, the Sea Ranch Houses, and Culebra Terrace. The Cannery is probably the best example of these ideas on a larger scale. Charles Davis's Monterey Bay Aquarium is its lineal successor—a building that also owes something to our most ordinary building, the Long Coastal Marine Laboratory, which no one wanted to do. This was a remarkably inexpensive complex of barn-like buildings on a very sensitive coastal site north of Santa Cruz. The problem was to accommodate the needs of a marine research aquarium and laboratory without "wantonly disregarding" the coastline. People tend to deprecate the controls California has clamped on its coast, and of course there have been problems with the process, both in terms of regulatory overkill and occasional lapses of responsibility. But when you look at the oftensuburbanized coastline north of San Francisco, you see how screwed up things can get when development proceeds thoughtlessly. Readers are referred to Moore/Lyndon/Allen's Place of Houses for some horrible examples of this phenomenon. Like the Demonstration Houses at the Sea Ranch, the Coastal Marine Laboratory paid particular attention to siting and took a straightforward approach to the design of the buildings, which are really just big sheds, similar to hundreds of other sheds you find up and down the coast. The results are simple and unobtrusive, and provide the right kind of space (big and flexible) for a laboratory with a variety of research programs and needs. Monterey Bay Aquarium was designed for a far more sensitive and sophisticated site. The building sits out over Monterey Bay and also occupies street frontage on Cannery Row, where no new development had been permitted for something like 15 years. The building is appropriately derived from the existing warehouse and canning factory buildings in the area, refining key elements of the old cannery on the site and adjusting itself with minimal impact on the bay. The deliberate ordinariness of the design lends itself to the aquarium's need for flexibility, so that this is one of the few aquariums in the world capable of accommodating major changes in

its largest exhibits. Perhaps it was the client's image of the aquarium being genuinely a place to learn about the ecology of Monterey Bay, and not a place for mass entertainment, that made it possible for us to break so many of the rules of this kind of building, allowing it to become what it needs to be to be useful to the aquarium and its visitors. The Cannery, on the other hand, was an exercise in infill—within the scooped-out shell of an existing building. The problem was to create something which suited that context and also worked programmatically. This second requirement was especially challenging, there being very few prototypes for a multi-story retail/entertainment complex as compact as the Cannery, which differs substantially from Ghirardelli Square (which slightly predates it). Ghirardelli is large enough that you can stand back and see the upper levels. In the Cannery, the problem was to lure people upstairs, and we did this by using the circulation system as a dominant element in the design, trying to make the building itself into a sign that invites people to explore. George Homsey's seven Bay Area Rapid Transit stations have a similar characteristic, in that their stairs, elevators, and escalators— and other key elements, like ticketing—play a major role in the design, the buildings expressing themselves primarily through them. This approach was necessary given the degree to which the building's major characteristics were fixed by track locations and other factors. It was also thoroughly justified by the nature of the buildings, which you move through quickly on your way somewhere else. What you want to experience in these buildings are the key things that get you where you want to go. Everything else is dispensable, and we therefore dispensed with them. The idea of ordinariness These are not hero buildings. Ordinary buildings are commonsense buildings, in the tradition of Steilberg and Wurster, rooted in "first principles." They use conventional materials and methods as their palette to achieve results which, at their most successful, are often unconventional, responding to the particularities of site and client, as well as to the artistic impulses alive in the architect at that moment.

It is also a question of motive. Ordinary buildings are in a certain way unforced, because the designer is not out for an effect, but to do something which suits his and his client's purposes. Frank Gehry's famous house would probably qualify as an ordinary building by this definition, since it clearly grows out of a set of purposes, not the least of which is an economy of means and the desire for a degree of spatial plenitude. From this perspective, it makes sense in a way that its subsequent replications may not. Ordinary buildings grow out of an intelligent, regional approach, usually in the face of all sorts of forces set against regionalism: worldwide industries, the homogenization of materials, the standardization of approaches, and magazines preoccupied with selling a product. Architects are bombarded with all of this, and if they take it seriously, it makes regionalism—and the achievement of ordinary buildings—very difficult. There is a strong connection between ordinariness and regionalism—too strong, perhaps, to allow us to think of an architecture of ordinariness somehow disconnected from its particular region. (Gehry's house, for example, is regional—an example of regionalism of the Los Angeles variety.) It is like cooking and the growth of a regional cuisine. Particularly for outsiders, a region's ordinary fare expresses in its nuances the region's uniqueness. This regionalism is unconscious and by no means parochial in attitude. In fact, a measure of a region's strength and inherent sense of identity is its ability to assimilate imports—a new foodstuff, a foreign cuisine, or a cook who reinterprets the old standbys, causing temporary havoc, but in the end expanding and enlivening the regional palate. Another feature of ordinary buildings is that they don't ask you to focus on them. Buildings which do—which capture your attention—have their place (the Lincoln Memorial is an example), but too many focal points in close proximity can cause defensive myopia: things go conveniently grey. Inappropriately self-important buildings, schmaltzed up in inverse proportion to their actual importance, give rise to a kind of environmental discounting, like the value-juggling which accompanies rampant inflation. Our everyday lives are mostly spent in very ordinary environments. Shops are only rarely extraordinary, for example, yet we do very well with their ordinariness. The pursuit of ordinariness in architecture means

a deliberate choice to make these everyday settings the object of one's attention—not to transform them into a motif or some kind of new monument, but make them work better. The notion of an ordinary building being anti-focal or antimaterial means that the building qua building is not really the point. The building is part of something larger and quite seamless, so that what one wants to preserve is the logic of its context, wherein the building itself plays a supporting role. Ordinary buildings express themselves in an ordinary way, drawing on things which are commonplace and therefore widely understood. In this sense, they emerge from and belong to a "commonality." Ordinary buildings will be right no matter where you live. You see this, for example, in George Homsey's Garfield School—a project designed for the site of a reasonably venerable elementary school, scrapped for reasons of seismic safety. Homsey took the elements of the old school and restated them in a way which expressed some new ideas about the relationship between the schoolyard and the neighborhood; about light, air, and views; about the cadence of the surrounding houses as they step down Telegraph Hill; and even the memories we might carry about a school called Garfield, whether in San Francisco or some other American city. Some people mistakenly believe that Garfield School is a renovation, not a new building. That stems from their sense of the building being rooted in its particular context in a way that most modern buildings are not. Part of this context is intangible: the architect's own experience of elementary schools, while growing up in San Francisco. This is woven into the building in a very natural way—infused, you might say. One feels it in the large white windows and the appropriately emblematic use of a rusticated arch around the school's administrative portal. "Fit" is an important element of the pursuit of ordinariness, and Garfield School demonstrates that fit also has its metaphysical side. The building refers to archetypes alive in the unconscious of the architect which he, as a native San Franciscan, shares with others. It's an exercise in drawing from a common wellspring of experience, and not from more arcane sources. To put this another way, it is not necessary to be an architectural historian to understand the imagery to which Garfield School refers. We can see why the architect has made the references he made—they are appropriate to the building

and its purposes, and help root it firmly in the neighborhood, the school system, and the city. It is therefore not surprising to find that architects of ordinary buildings are also concerned with landscape, with the connection between the building and landscape. Consider George Howe's work: you see there a wonderful attachment to the setting, to landscape in the broadest sense. It was not his intention to intervene in the existing landscape, but to reveal it for what it is. It never occurred to him to change it, but to fit within it in the most subtle and benign way possible, letting it flow into and through the building, rather than regarding the building as "the place where the landscape stops." In his Elements of Drawing, Ruskin makes the point that the lines one puts on a piece of paper have no correspondence with the lines one sees in nature. For this reason, the draftsman has to resort other, more authentic ways of rendering them. To continue simply to draw lines is to admit that you fail to see, or that you see but can't render what you see accurately. In similar fashion, the ordinary building and ordinary landscape are provoked by a desire to be faithful to your observations. Written with Joseph Esherick for Space & Society, June 1983, pp. 50–61. We met and discussed the article several times, then Joe got Legionnaire's Disease and nearly died. Meanwhile, Julian Beinart needed the article, so I wrote it from notes. When he recovered, Joe read it and told me he liked it.

Preface to Dinners with Chuck (2021) “I want to make sure that the idea of successful teaming and fighting like hell to do what was proper for the client comes through, rather than the common architects’ view that design ideology is the most important thing. One thing that was so difficult for the critics of EHDD was our lack of stylistic consistency. That was almost purposeful in that it was held so strongly by the four of us. The architecture came out of solving the issues rather than a solution that was imposed on the problem and then the client had to fit within it.”—Chuck Davis

This account of Chuck Davis's work and life joins two others that, through the eyes of three of its founding partners, document the evolution of the San Francisco firm that AIA Gold Medalist Joseph Esherick founded in 1946. Davis was the youngest of the four partners who created Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis (EHDD) on 3 January 1972. Joe had spent 1971 in Portugal working on a resort project whose developer stiffed the firm—not an auspicious start. Reorganized as a team practice, the firm grew in reputation and in the scale of its work. Chuck, as the lead architect of Monterey Bay Aquarium starting in 1978, did much to make that happen. The lineage of EHDD, one of the Bay Region’s teaching offices, draws on architects as diverse as Bernard Maybeck, William Wurster, Gardner Dailey, and Louis Kahn--and equally on landscape architects like Thomas Church, Don Emmons, and Lawrence Halprin, and structural engineers like Constantine Chekene, John Rutherford, Bill Holmes, and Hal Davis, Chuck’s brother. Chuck Davis is a pivotal figure for the next generation of architects in this same lineage. His near-contemporary, the late William Turnbull, could be seen similarly. In his admonition above, Davis notes his firm’s commitment to design solutions that arise from the issues the architects confront. Part of that is the place itself—how it influences what’s added, how the architects work with others, landscape architects in particular, to let inside and outside flow to support the unfolding of life therein. In the foreword to a monograph on their eponymous firm, Laura Hartman’s partner Richard Fernau outlines an approach to architecture that centers on sparking a dialogue with and about place. Like a shaman, the architect mediates between the client and the physical setting, seeking to give place a voice, a tangible 8

influence. When he met with his clients to design their houses, Joseph Esherick famously brought a roll of blank paper and a pencil. Fernau camps at the site with his clients. This is what Zen calls the beginner's mind, attending to what's right there. This may help to explain why the Bay Region has always been an outlier, closer to the Arts & Crafts movement that’s one of modern architecture’s forebears. Early modernism drew on the oftenanonymous mills, factories, railroad trestles, and bridges that married engineering and construction knowledge to the artistic, artisanal, and vernacular traditions that the Arts & Crafts drew on. Late modernism, absorbing systems thinking and algorithms, recast architects as the generators of formal solutions—all those small models of towers for distant cities—and as mass-customizers. But Davis comes from a lineage that believes that the client, the site, and its environs will tell you what’s required. There’s no formula, but there are ways to build that come along with a place. His bestknown work faced daunting technical challenges that were very much part of what the situation demanded. That he addressed them while preserving the spirit of the place is his architectural achievement, his genius. Esherick and his partners favored teamwork over the Great Man Theory of architecture. It isn’t leaderless, but collaboration is there from the start. Davis sees it as an open-ended process, recognizing that people gain mastery and self-confidence when they're entrusted to do the work. It’s clear that he’s a mentor’s mentor, one of those great teachers that know that you only gain as much as you give. And he got this from his mother! The lineage has an innate modesty that acknowledges nature as a constant and defining presence. Others may think they’ve put nature in its place, but writing this in the midst of a pandemic, when buildings are “shelters in place” and nature is a saving grace, the balance that Chuck Davis struck in his work and life seems absolutely right. Written for Helen Degenhardt, Karen Fiene, Laura Hartman, and John Parman, ed's., Dinners with Chuck: Charles Medley Davis, Architect, 2021. They orchestrated it and conducted the interviews. I put them into book form.

Joseph Esherick's houses (2009) In his lifetime, the San Francisco architect Joseph Esherick (19141998) won the highest honors of the profession for design, education, and collaborative practice. Yet he has a less secure place in the US architectural pantheon than peers—Philip Johnson comes to mind—who practiced in the east and had closer ties to its media and cultural institutions. Ten years after his death, he finally has a monograph, one of a series of books that Marc Treib and William Stout are producing from U.C. Berkeley’s CED Archive. Appropriate: focuses on Esherick's houses—an important part of his legacy, but not the whole story. His firm, EHDD, did its own book earlier in this decade, but it omits the older, larger work. A “Part Two” from Treib and Stout would provide a fuller picture. Esherick was a pivotal figure in Bay Area architecture. He worked with Gardner Dailey before World War II, taught with William Wurster, and even joined forces with Bernard Maybeck on Berkeley’s Pelican Building. He influenced MLTW, both directly (on The Sea Ranch) and through his partner, George Homsey, whose friendship with several of the MLTW partners in the late 1950s and early 1960s resulted in work that played off of each other and riffed on Esherick’s influence. Daniel Solomon’s early projects, like his Lyon Street housing, are in the same family as Esherick’s earlier multi-family work, like Angelo Sangiacomo’s Bay-Stockton East and West, which Treib doesn't address. Coming from Philadelphia, Esherick brought an outsider’s view of the Bay Region. In this respect, he was like SOM's Edward Charles "Chuck" Bassett, who moved here from Michigan after working with Eero Saarinen, and Stanley Saitowitz, who came from South Africa, where he had designed a series of provocative veldt houses. Each of them embraced this new region. Whether intentionally or not, they both redefined its architecture. Esherick categorized his work according to what he was exploring. His explorations started with “packing the box” and also took in gables, pavilions, and light boxes. Treib uses these categories, which Esherick noted in his oral history and elsewhere, as his book’s organizing device. Esherick made a fetish of the “ordinary,” but it was very much a bespoke ordinariness, as practiced by the leisure classes. Treib’s 10

“appropriate” better captures what the houses are about. They address terroir—the total nature of a place. The country houses especially are set amid a larger setting, responding to everything around them. And everything unfolds: the people who live there, the rooms they inhabit, and the nature of the place itself. These houses, in Stewart Brand’s phrase, beat to the clock of the long now. An architecture that mediates While the hedgerow houses at the Sea Ranch are probably the best known and most iconic of Esherick’s residential projects, the Cary House for me best captures what his houses are about. The book permits a comparison between the remarkably open house he designed with first wife, Rebecca Wood, and the sense of openness that the Cary House achieves while remaining enclosed. Like that of an Eichler house, Wood’s window wall is almost transparent. Esherick’s equivalent window wall at the Cary House frames the views. This was Wurster’s influence, EHDD’s Chuck Davis told me, but Esherick’s window walls are more aesthetically composed. The Cary House’s view-facing wall is a masterpiece of how to mediate between the human scale of dwelling and the inhuman scale of nature (as Wallace Stegner called it). The Sea Ranch hedgerow (or demonstration) houses take their formal cues from trees along the coast that bend in a Taoist manner to forces beyond their control, as well as from old sheds and barns whose shape and longevity reflect a similar strategy. EHDD's later, larger-scale work similarly contends with difficult natural sites like Monterey Bay and Utah’s Wasatch Range. The aquarium and the lodges at Deer Valley are pitched up against nature, and they unhesitatingly look around for successful precedents. Esherick was doing this in Tahoe in the late 1940s— houses that still resonate, not least because they have a foothold in the past. The Goldman House in San Francisco, which draws on the city’s Victorians, is an urban example of Esherick’s sympathy for known starting points, assuming (like the philosopher Friedrich Hayek) that tradition is the accrued wisdom of a people and a place. It’s in this sense only that Esherick’s work can be said to be ordinary.

Esherick and his collaborators One virtue of Treib's book is his careful crediting of Esherick’s collaborators. Almost all of Esherick's work was done with others. His partners George Homsey, Peter Dodge, and Chuck Davis established their own identities as design architects. Homsey, who deserves his own monograph, draws on the region’s deeper traditions, unafraid to tap those roots. He’s been compared to Aldo Rossi in this respect. If Charles Moore dabbled in this territory, Homsey really did something with it. Davis, enamored of technical as well as site challenges, pioneered a new type of aquarium that as it overcame the huge operational problems of its predecessors, redefined people’s expectations of what an aquarium is and does. They both took EHDD in new directions. The Bay Region is fortunate to have the CED Archive, a repository of drawings that complements the Bancroft Library’s collections of architects and critics’ papers, and the negatives of some of the region’s best architectural photographers. The books that Treib and Stout have generated from this trove, along with others like Pierluigi Serraino’s NorCalMod, are giving a new generation of architects, students, and enthusiasts a clearer sense of what the post-war generation wrought. Esherick is just one piece of that puzzle, but he’s an important piece. Treib's monograph does justice to an architect who—despite his AIA Gold Medal— never really made the canon. It’s a good book, and well deserved. A review of Marc Treib's Appropriate: The Houses of Joseph Esherick, William Stout Publishers, 2008, written for arcCA 08.4, 2008.

The Bay Region reconsidered (2006) In Modern Architecture, Kenneth Frampton distinguishes critical regionalism from regionalism as “a spontaneously produced” vernacular. Critical regionalism is intended “to identify those recent regional ‘schools’ whose primary aim has been to reflect and serve the limited constituencies in which they are grounded.” It depends on “a certain prosperity,” Frampton writes, as well as “some kind of anti-centrist consensus, an aspiration at least to some form of cultural, economic, and political independence.” Like Lewis Mumford before him, Frampton counts San Francisco as such a school. Architect and critic Pierluigi Serraino challenges this view. Interested in California’s mid-20th-century modernism and prompted by a suggestion from Elaine Jones to look at the Bay Area, “considered a hotbed of modern architecture in the fifties,” Serraino has written a revisionist history of its postwar period, NorCalMod. Along the way, he also discusses the role of architectural photographers and the design press in drawing attention to architects at the periphery of their editorial vision. Rethinking Bay regionalism Serraino argues that the official history of postwar Bay Regionalism distorts the facts by consciously excluding modernism and its Bay Area exponents. In his view, “the evidence reveals an incohesive chorus of voices, if not an atomized design aesthetic, among Northern California architects during this time.” He concludes that, When all these dots are connected, the picture that emerges is rather different, indeed more comprehensive and richer in design vocabulary than one might expect: Northern California was an unrestrained laboratory for Modern architecture, propelled by the explosion of the national economy. Regionalists and modernists alike promoted economy of design, but through profoundly different architectural expressions.

In the early 1980s, I worked with Joseph Esherick on an article in

Space & Society on the evolution of his work. In one of our

conversations, he said to me that he felt that the steady stream of national and international design magazines made it impossible for architects here to avoid the contamination of larger movements, whatever they might be. Does his comment exemplify the anti14

centrism that Frampton believes is characteristic of regional schools? Possibly, and yet the “regional” architect who said it shares the status of an outsider with Bernard Maybeck, Chuck Bassett, and Stanley Saitowitz—to name three other of the Bay Area’s leading lights. All four arrived here trained in a larger tradition, and then absorbed what they found here— its history and most of all its sense of place. Esherick was the most directly influenced by older Bay Regional architects, but the work that he and his EHDD collaborators produced was as eclectic as Serraino posits. Among their influences: Le Corbusier and Kahn (through Esherick), and MLTW and Rossi (through his gifted partner George Homsey). Homsey, a kind of fifth Beatle to MLTW, influenced them in turn. In a recent interview in AIA San Francisco’s _line, architect and publisher Bill Stout notes ruefully that Allan Temko, Bay Regional Modernism’s main polemicist, paid no attention to houses. That omission left William Wurster free to frame the region’s story in his own image. San Francisco Modernism was the province of SOM— something imported. (It’s interesting that Wurster’s contribution to the Bank of America Tower was to look back to Timothy Pflueger for inspiration.) Not every Modernist here fell off the East Coast’s radar, but the story definitely got around. Architecture and the media A practicing architect and independent scholar, Serraino teamed up with Julius Shulman on an earlier book on the work of this iconic photographer of mid-century modernism in Southern California. Not surprisingly, this beautifully illustrated new book is also an excellent primer for architects on how to document their work so historians can find it. This reflects Serraino’s view that only “that which is photographed, reported, and generations later still retrievable can continue to exist in architectural history.” In a maxim worthy of Goethe, he takes this thought a measure further: Architecture without photographs is like a traveler without a passport: it has no identity as far as the media is concerned. Photography makes architecture noticeable. Also, photography is the oxygen of architecture. It keeps its sister field alive in the present and in the future.

His maxim refers to architects as well as architecture. Indeed, his best example is David Thorne. After designing a widely published 15

modernist house in the Oakland hills for Dave Brubeck, Thorne felt pressured by the resulting media coverage and deliberately slipped under the radar, using a different first name and assiduously keeping himself and his work out of the press. As a result, both “disappeared” until Serraino rediscovered them. So, is it “publish or perish”? Serraino is right that it’s important to document and that the photographer is a factor in getting coverage. That has its limits, though. The design press is a distorting mirror, both in how it values and reports on contemporary work and the way it credits who did what. It’s also ephemeral in terms of public consciousness. A house is rarely the Parthenon, but it is sturdier than magazines and has owners. There’s a natural curiosity about its provenance, and of course in the Bay Region’s inflated housing market, provenance has value. Roger Lee may have not be widely known, but his name still has cachet in the East Bay. Seeing the work with new eyes The rise of Dwell and the new importance of mid-century modernist houses make a book like Serraino’s, reassessing the work of earlier decades in light of current tastes, almost inevitable. Today, it's easier to see how Bay Regional modernism differs from and builds imaginatively on its antecedents. Back then, East Coast editors often saw it as derivative. LA modernists, using photographers like Shulman who made their work so sexy, got more attention. What set modernism here apart was the place itself—its dramatic sites and remarkable light and climate. A sense of place links such followers of European modernism as Donald Olsen to architects like Roger Lee who are much closer to the ranch house style that was the region's vernacular. The book shows this vividly, drawing on the region’s best postwar architectural photographers. Serraino’s tenacity in getting their photos into print makes the book an archive of one of the region’s high points. It's a kind of love letter from that past to a new generation, with Serraino as its messenger. A review of Pierluigi Serraino's NorCalMod, Icons of Northern California Modernism, Chronicle Books, 2006, written for arcCA 06.04, 2006.

The rogue element (2016) “The willingness to take a chance and depart from the script is the quality we most admire in vernacular architecture."—Richard Fernau

As I read a New York City architect's review of Improvisations on the Land, the famous New Yorker cover, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," came to mind. I pictured the map's solipsistic, Manhattan-centered geography as the architect breezily dismissed Richard Fernau's book and the built work it discusses. There's a long history of East Coast critics getting the West Coast wrong, trusting an internal map that's lamentably at odds with reality. The Los Angeles-based writer Alissa Walker uses the hashtag #lahaters to call out such distortions. Except for its cuisine, which East Coast critics generally praise, the Bay Area has it even worse than LA. The term "regional," first invoked by Lewis Mumford and then reinforced (as "critical regionalism") by Kenneth Frampton and by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, attaches to Bay Regional architecture. Richard Fernau rejects the label, pointing to Eudora Welty's contention that "regional" is an outsider's terms. Fernau and Laura Hartman's eponymous firm is part of a lineage that gathers up its senses of the place, values openness and flow, and is wary of the overly predetermined. Living here on the Pacific Rim, you're immersed in it yet ever aware of what's beyond you and behind you. The heart of this monograph on the firm's houses is Fernau's lead essay, which could serve as a tutorial on how to practice architecture as he and Hartman see it—with place and improvisation providing valid, potent bases for design. The pioneering Berkeley-based wine dealer Kermit Lynch shares their view of the role of place in creative practice. According to Lynch, author of Adventures on the Wine Route, viniculture and winemaking combine art, craft, and science with nature: the grapes, soil, and climate matter, but the rest is human and improvisational—skill, experience, nose, and luck. Fernau compares their design process to modern dance, another improvisational and collaborative art. He compares their houses to collage in their use of materials, their fabrication, and the way they incorporate the "rogue elements" that place itself provides. And he points to the vernacular as evidence of how people adapt to a place as it changes and they change with it (and vice versa). This reminds

me of William Morris's anti-scrape movement, which saw places of human habitation as evolving records to which successive dwellers contribute. Fernau mentions the architect Joseph Esherick's "ordinary"—like William Wurster punching a window "randomly" in a façade to frame a view, ignoring any imposed order. ("We don't hang windows from a clothesline," Esherick told Chuck Davis.) His uncle Wharton used to ask him, "What would a farmer do?" It led Esherick to see hedgerow windbreaks and old coastal barns as precedents for his Sea Ranch demonstration houses. Fernau and Hartman started their firm in a garage near Bernard Maybeck's house and studio in the Berkeley hills. Fernau notes his influence. What struck him was the way that Maybeck played with spaces to achieve what Peter Buchanan calls a "loose fit" suited to a casual, open, unfolding existence that's set in a place, not against it. When the weather was good, Maybeck worked outdoors under a canvas canopy and slept on a porch. Fernau + Hartman's houses have the variety and maturation you would expect from a decades-old firm. The houses take the settings seriously. Fernau describes living there with his clients, their shared experience of it giving each house its specificity. Yet the process he describes continues long after a house is finished and occupied. The unfolding experience of a house in its setting gives it added depth and character. Such subtlety may be harder to see at a distance. Theirs is a teaching office, another Bay Regional tradition. An elaborate list of the houses' teams both shares the credit and makes it clear how many young designers benefited from the collaboration, starting their own practices or rising to prominence in other firms. A review of Richard Fernau's Improvisations on the Land: Houses of Fernau + Hartman, Monacelli, 2015, written for ARCADE 34:1, 201

Work as if immortal (2017) "When you work together with someone like that, you understand that sublime persistence is the only way to get to the center of things."—Renzo Piano on Louis Kahn, who employed him in Philadelphia

In making his memorable film My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn sought to know his father through his buildings, his peers, and his complicated personal life. Wendy Lesser's wonderful biography of Louis Kahn expands on the film's account, filling in details about his slow-to-ripen career, his relationships, his evolving creative process, and the late-appearing monuments that made his reputation. Lesser notes Kahn's involvement in Donald MacKinnon's late1950s study of architects' creativity at U.C. Berkeley. When asked if he had exceptional talent, Kahn wrote, "Yes, a sense of order from which design flows. I am unique in this. Order! out of which stems true design and structure." Kahn's "order" was influenced by the ruins of antiquity and by modern buildings like Le Corbusier's La Tourette and Ronchamp. He worked with structure, volume, light, and view—the elements of form. Place and function led to designs that engage their sites or turn inward. As Lesser explains, Kahn made his reputation initially with his modernist Richards Medical Building at the University of Pennsylvania. The work that followed established him as an architect sui generis, and she sees the Trenton Bath House as marking that transition. Kahn ran his office as an atelier; the Yale Art Center, designed with Anne Tyng, reflects her influence, and although Tyng joined Trenton late, she grasped what Kahn had intuited from the ruins he visited. The result is a brilliant small work that anticipates the later ones. Lesser describes it eloquently: Picture a girl from nearby Trenton—an adolescent, say, just a year or two younger than Kahn's oldest daughter—who might have come to the Bath House for a swim after it opened to the public. After passing by the front wall's mural and reaching the central courtyard, she goes left to get into the women's changing room. Slipping through one of the twisty, doorless concrete entrances that lead in from either side, she finds herself released into the surprisingly grand space of the room itself, all the larger in comparison to the tunnel-like approach. Above her, the high arch of the pyramidal wood roof guides her eye upward to the square hole from which light pours down, making everything, even her own body, seem to bask in the ceiling's glory. At 20

one side of the room, a five-foot space between the roof and the wall—one of Kahn's earlier and largest "light joints"---allows the sun to shine directly on her shoulders as she sits on the changing-room bench. Looking around, she notices how lightly the massive pyramid rests on its four corner supports, so that the ceiling seems to float above her head.

Trenton Bath House, the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh— Kahn's masterpieces—use the pared-down elements of his intuited order to define and orchestrate sequences of viscerally human experiences. He achieves this despite differences in scale, purpose, and setting, situating each building in an unfolding present that refers to history's ruins and to the ruins the building will become. Building the monuments Lesser "reads" Kahn's principal works evocatively in a series of vignettes that bracket the main text. (She recommends Robert McCarter's monograph, Louis Kahn, as visual accompaniment.) She also exposes the lengthy struggles required to get them designed and built. Kahn engaged an array of collaborators for these commissions, including his client–patrons. He animated the process through design and construction, with others taking significant roles. His openness to ideas from all quarters and his willingness to persevere are rare in architecture, then and now. Salk and Kimbell were both substantially reworked to address functional concerns and realize the order Kahn sought. At Salk, this meant prying the two wings of the building open and then reconceiving its plaza (on the advice of Luis Barragan) to view the sea. At Kimbell, it meant finding the right arch—a cycloid arch—to give the galleries volume without ruining the experience of the art itself. Kahn's staff architect, Marshall Meyers, worked this out. The Bangladesh project was complicated by distance, political upheaval, the challenges of local construction, and Kahn's death while it was under way. It completion testifies to the commitment and brilliance of Kahn's closest collaborators. Dying at 74, Kahn lived at full tilt, habitually overscheduled. His office ran on cash flow, mostly losing money. Only the Salk Institute, for which the office was paid for every hour, made a profit.

The art of parallel living Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect brought his father's personal life into public view. Lesser elaborates, and both her book and the film make it clear that, despite turmoil and heartache, Kahn enjoyed his extended family's loyalty and affection. He had a rare ability to be entirely present with others, as Lesser recounts. Stanley Tigerman, running into a disheveled Kahn at Heathrow, returning from his final, fatal journey to and from South Asia, noted his coherence and gracious gesture toward Paul Rudolph, still admired despite Rudolph's shabby treatment of him. "Work as if immortal," the writer EM. Forster's credo, could have been Kahn's. His "sublime persistence" led to a unique body of work—not purely his own, but only he could have produced it. A review of Wendy Lesser's You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, written for ARCADE, Winter 2017, pp. 15–27.

Great Man theory (2016) "Most persons live a sort of half-life, giving expression to only a very limited part of themselves and realizing only a few of their many potentialities."— Donald MacKinnon

Unlocking one's creativity is a perennial quest. The indefatigable Pierluigi Serraino has unearthed an epic attempt to do this—a 1960 study led by Donald MacKinnon and his collaborators at U.C. Berkeley's Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR). By interviewing and testing a group of highly creative architects, MacKinnon hoped to find ways to unlock people's creative potential more generally. Many large organizations today share that interest, and Serraino's look at IPAR's study is timely. MacKinnon was to creativity as Kinsey was to sex. And like sex, creativity is a topic with inexact norms and a preoccupation with individual performance. The IPAR team wore suits, not lab coats, but this was serious business. Turning to the architecture field's academics, editors, and writers, IPAR put together a long list of luminaries to consider. Of the top architects IPAR identified, only Saarinen, Kahn, and Neutra are still in the pantheon. Once chosen, the architects descended on Berkeley for three days of tests. Among other tasks, IPAR asked them to discuss abstract problems with their peers; undergo personality assessments; note what they saw as the attributes of creative architects; and make mosaics of colored blocks and small, captioned drawings in two grids of blank squares. A postwar view IPAR drew on Ernest Jones's 1957 account of Sigmund Freud's nine characteristics of genius to develop its own view of the key attributes of the creative personality. While some of Jones's nuances were preserved, phrases like "the subject's life history as recorded in the Personal Data Bank" reflect an era captivated by the computer and, more broadly, interested in giving the social sciences the perceived rigor of the hard sciences. In architecture, this was the heyday of design methods, an outgrowth of the application of mathematics-based systems thinking to manufacturing and logistics during World War II. The

hope was to extend this approach to fields like architecture, with creativity figuring in the mix of performance outcomes. By the end of the 1960s, this unalloyed faith that the methods of science and engineering could be so applied was in question. Architecture— famously nonlinear and rife with politics and emotion—was ripe for apostasy. MacKinnon faced skepticism even from his would-be subjects that his research qualified as science, but his focus was on first identifying the traits of highly creative people and then understanding what would or would not contribute to their realizing their creative potential. This is why the IPAR study's conclusions are still relevant and worth understanding. Back to the Great Men IPAR noted that the greatest of their Great Men profiled as INFP on the Meyers-Briggs spectrum. (INFJ placed second.) An INFP profile suggests a greater tolerance for keeping one's options open. The F in INFP is for "feeling," but MacKinnon equated it with "feminine"—which he saw as an attribute of the creative personality. While foew of the Great Men described themselves as "feminine," MacKinnon felt that most of them were. This and the study's complete lack of women among its creative architect subjects place it in its era. Though IPAR was interested in femininity as a characteristic, the role and influence of women went unexplored, despite the involvement of women researchers at IPAR—and also despite the fact that Kahn and Saarinen, for example, had strong, creative women as partners and collaborators. Alone with others Another limitation of the IPAR study was its insistence that creativity is best done alone. Serraino writes, Because creativity is so intertwined with unconventional associative processes in the minds of individuals, it will come as no surprise that for the creative individual the gap between conformance to group behavior and compulsion for self-expression is wide.

For good measure, he cites MacKinnon: "One of the best methods for nurturing creativity is to deemphasize group participation."

Today, creativity is mainly thought of in the context of distributed teams that work across time and space. The individual creator still matters, of course, and much effort goes into supporting her. It's really both/and, not either/or, but teams are nonetheless a focus. So, a question that arises is how the attributes of creative individuals apply to teams. Larry Leifer. a founder of Stanford's d.school, points to autonomous teams as the creative force behind tech-industrial ventures like Tesla Motors. That there are visionaries behind these teams doesn't negate their importance. Half a century later, MacKinnon's successors may have creative teams in their sights. Note: MacKinnon's top 10 included Saarinen, Kahn, Belluschi, Neutra, Lundy, Pei, Johnson, Johansen, Rapson, Harris, and Weese (tied for 10th). Perhaps because IPAR was based in Berkeley, his list also includes such Bay Regional architects as Ciampi, Warnecke, Callister, Dailey, Born, and Funk. A review of Pierluigi Serraino's The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, Monacelli, 2016, written for ARCADE 34.2, Fall 2016, pp. 62–63.

My postmodernists (2012) Postmodernism emerged in the Bay Region in the late 1970s as a reaction to stuck corporate modernism and Sea Ranch knockoffs, but my personal encounters with postmodernists began a decade earlier.

I. Norman Spatz "When postmodernism was defined in the other arts, sciences, and cultural forms, it was understood as “subversion from within” the establishment, using the reigning voice to send a different message."—Charles Jencks

My first postmodernist was a Washington University classmate. We were in the third-year studio, in a school of architecture devoted to Corbu. The assignment was to replace the traditional house of one of the professors. “Pretend it burned down,” we were told. The house was in one of the gated neighborhoods that adjoined the campus. Spatz opted to replace it with a house in the same idiom, complete with a pair of lions guarding the doorway. Spatz's scheme was a riff on tradition, not a replica. Talk about subversion! The professors rounded on the project like a pair of imams dealing with an apostate. This was in 1969, so my classmate was in the avant-garde. I tracked Spatz down in Montréal a few months ago, hoping to obtain an image of his project. He had abandoned a career in preservation to become a teacher of English as a second language. After another classmate photographed his model, he told me, he destroyed it, only to learn that there was no film in the camera. II. Minoru Takeyama "Postmodernism in architecture is usually thought to have rejected earlier metaphysical efforts in favor of the playful, more or less arbitrary exchange of signifying elements. But this exchange spoke a jargon of its own."—Reinhold Martin

My second postmodernist made the cover of the first and second editions of Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) with two versions of the same night-club building in Tokyo. I was in graduate school when Takeyama arrived

at Wurster Hall at U.C. Berkeley on a Fulbright fellowship. Helping him transliterate a few of his essays from “Takeyamese,” I learned of his interest in semiotics, referencing Saussure and Barthes. Based on this, Takeyama argued that each place generates an architectural language that reflects its underlying culture. His work was influenced by Metabolism, and by Bauhaus and Scandinavian modernism. (He studied at Harvard and then worked in Denmark for six years). Having Rossi, Sottsass, Venturi, and even Hundertwasser as contemporaries may also have figured. “The methods of architecture are more opportunistic and subversive than strictly logical,” he noted. Part of what makes postmodernism subversive is its critique of modernism’s bias toward the universal. This is the core of his understanding and use of semiotics, and what makes him an early and enduring postmodernist. As he argued, Architecture may appear to have achieved a global syntax. The truth is that this syntax is filtered through a multitude of cultural screens that differ with each individual community. Unless one is attuned to this, it is easy to misread the signs. Many architects are like tourists, projecting their own values and biases on particular cultures. Architecture should rather emerge from a process of understanding and responding to the particularity that we experience, allowing its meaning to enrich our world rather than imposing our world up on it. Otherwise, I fear the universal world will come again.

III. Thomas Gordon Smith "I was uncomfortable with the notion of this street, “Strada Novissima,” and the title, “The Presence of the Past.” It may be one of those cases where I thought I didn’t belong, but in the end belonged much more than I thought."—Rem Koolhaas

My third postmodernist participated in the 1980 Venice Biennale to which Koolhaas alludes, but I first met him in the early 1970s as the classmate of a friend in Joseph Esherick’s graduate architecture studio at U.C. Berkeley. I believe that his thesis project was modernist, but I can't swear to it. But Thomas Gordon Smith really made my map later with his Richmond Hill House, a self-built project in the East Bay to house his growing family. Although “a key figure in the development of postmodernism,” the critic Richard John wrote, Smith “rejected the ironical approach of 28

Robert Venturi and the decontextualization of Charles Moore to develop an architecture which draws freely on the 25 centuries of the classical tradition.” Bernard Maybeck was an influence, he adds, an architect “who fused a wide-ranging knowledge of architectural history and a fascination with modern materials and techniques. Smith has come to pursue a similar synthesis in his own work.” Smith’s Richmond Hill House pulls off what amounts to the greatest challenge for a young architect without a private income, which is to infuse a body of thought into a small and dirt-cheap package without having it sink under its own weight. It has always appealed to me as a creative fusion of his growing interest in classicism with the inevitable influences of his education and upbringing—his actual time and place. IV. My postmodernism "The historian John Summerson said Post-Modernism’s original claim was to insist that “Modernism could die” when he, like most people, thought it was immortal, and therefore inevitable."—Charles Jencks

The real necessity of postmodernism in the late 1970s, here and elsewhere, was modernism’s sclerosis. The motto of that moment was Paul Feyerabend’s “Anything goes,” bidding farewell to the claims of the scientific method, the existence of which he denied. Postmodernism freed modernism from its status as the “official corporate style,” letting it evolve. In a 2011 essay, Jencks notes Anthony Blunt's assertion that “there are no perfectly and completely Baroque and Rococo buildings because the category is always more capacious and contradictory than any single structure.” What postmodernism revived is similar, Jencks believed, "a new take on an old cliché: sometimes history repeats itself better if the architects don’t know it.” Note: Jencks's essay, "What is Radical Post-Modernism," appeared in Radical Postmodernism, Architectural Design o5/2011 and Wiley, 2011. Written for TraceSF, 12 January 2012.

The classical imagination (2012) The architect and educator Thomas Gordon Smith lives and practices in South Bend, where he moved from the Bay Area in 1989 to become the School of Architecture Chair at the University of Notre Dame. Through the work of his eponymous firm and such publications as Classical Architecture: Rule & Invention (Gibbs Smith, 1988) and Vitruvius on Architecture (Monacelli, 2003), Smith emerged as one of the leading advocates for classical architecture in the United States. Smith did his M.Arch. thesis with U.C. Berkeley Professor Joseph Esherick, but encountered modernist and regionalist antipathy to his interest in classicism from the faculty. He designed a remarkable house for his family in a nearby town, and after winning a Rome Prize, participated in "The Presence of the Past" exposition at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Although "The Presence of the Past" is viewed retrospectively as heralding the arrival of postmodern architecture, Smith's focus was on classical architecture's creative potential. By the late 1970s, postwar modernism—now thoroughly absorbed in the U.S. by corporations and corporate tenantseeking developers—was at an impasse. Postmodernism arrived in part to drive around the blockage, drawing not only on classical forms but also on contemporary movements in art and literature. Colin Rowe's Collage City, the pop art-derived Memphis movement led by Ettore Sottsass, and the nods to classicism made by architects as diverse as Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, and Robert Stern set the tone. Deconstruction slid in, sparking the modernist counter-revolution that became late modernism. Smith withdrew from this mélange, seeing in classicism's "rule and invention" another way forward. When the editors of Room One Thousand announced the theme of "Timeless," I thought of Smith because he illustrates that architecture is always rooted in time, even when it strives to cleave to an honored past or evade the ravages of time on taste and function.

Some years ago, you mentioned that you regarded Greek Revival as having untapped creative possibility. Could you elaborate what this has meant in your own work? What have you learned?

TGS: I prefer the term "Grecian," used by practitioners in the early 19th century to describe the American approach to incorporating ancient Greek architecture in new buildings and furniture design, based on their enthusiasm for archeological work in Greece that was published in the late 18th century. Books such as The Antiquities of Athens, 1762, by the English architects Stuart & Revett, produced a profound effect on architecture in Britain and

the United States, and continue to influence many practitioners, including me. For example, in Chapter III, Plate III, an elevation and section of the Tower of Andronicus in Athens was an inspiration for several early 19th-century civic buildings in the United States. I used it as a starting point for the tower that brings light and ventilation into the living room in the Wilson House in Livermore, California (1972); the tower that houses an office with spectacular views of the surrounding landscape in the Wisconsin House near Spring Green (1998); and in the tower at the highest level of the Cathedral City Civic Center in California (1996). As a classicist, you're not working in the manner of Quinlan Terry, who seems to be reproducing Palladian forms almost as replicas. How does your idea of classicism differ from his?

TGS: Quinlan Terry's work is very, very tight. Nonetheless, if you look closely, you would never mistake one of his houses for one of Palladio's villas. I am at the other end of the classical spectrum. My work as a classicist has been an effort to integrate a range of ideas about classical architecture, looking at many aspects from over two millennia of examples. There has been a growth of interest in this in recent decades in places like Notre Dame and among members of organizations like the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. Nathaniel Kahn's film My Architect notes Louis Kahn's almost archeological interest in ancient buildings. You and I had an exchange after I saw it. I'd wondered if this influence on Kahn's work qualified it as classical. You said the work isn't classical because it doesn't follow any canon—they are purely, abstractly formal. Kahn is hard to categorize. What's your take on him?

Kahn is hard to deal with because he is so individual. On the other hand, he's delightfully specific, unlike a number of people who are just playing with this or that. His buildings are so serious; he's not going to deal with silly things. How did these ideas about classicism versus modernism influence your teaching?

TGS: Typically, I would begin the semester with assignments that required engagement with a pair of contrasting historical approaches, followed by a primary design for the semester of a large32

scale building such as a library, museum, or school in which the students could utilize some of the ideas they had developed in warm-up projects. However, I did not make a particular design approach mandatory and encouraged the individual decisions of the students for the main project. "Timeless" is a word architects like to use. I heard it at SOM, and Christopher

Alexander appropriated it polemically as part of his campaign against modernism. Modernism, which you were accused of deserting in graduate school, is now part of history. Is timeless a word you use? Do you see classicism in that light, "the timeless style," or as one possibility among many?

TGS: I prefer to use the word "classical" instead of "timeless." It is broad enough to cover two millennia of approaches to design. The term classical takes in new paradigms as readily as obscure precedents. My use of the term classicism is based on Vitruvius's advocacy of making buildings that achieve "wholeness" through a simultaneous balance of strength, function, and beauty. A classical building is recognized by this inherent wholeness, not by a selection of ornament, materials, or tectonic elements. A graduate student in architecture in Berlin contacted me about a presentation he was preparing on the Cathedral City Civic Center. He asked, "What happened to the columns that were in the initial design competition drawings? Was it cost or something else?" In response, I sent him a series of drawings from my sketchbooks about the process of design when it became a commission. It was more crucial to create a large, high paseo, to provide access to the civic functions of the structure with clear entrances to the police and fire departments, than to have a pedimented main entry, and so the columns disappeared! Not essential! Still a classical building! And a modern building! Some people use "timeless" to mean "enduring," which may be valid, but whenever you design a building, you inevitably place it in that time, in some sense. Do you ever use the term?

I don't, because "timeless" does not adequately indicate a hierarchy. If I want to read a good book, I look for a "classic," not a "timeless" book. This is my rhetorical preference. As an architect, I have attempted to compete with Borromini and Palladio's best buildings

and with the work of many other architects whose buildings I admire. I have aspired to create buildings that balance rule and invention, and that are full of life, with what Vitruvius called "lively mental energy." When you started out, you were part of a postmodern cohort. I still view Richmond Hill House as one of that movement's most interesting built projects. Graves, Moore, and Stern all struggled to reconcile postmodern impulses with contemporary programs, especially at a larger scale. What was your experience?

Richmond Hill House is my most widely published building and its owners tell me that many architects make visits. They have maintained it beautifully. It was the last of my postmodern designs. The architectural critic Heinrich Klotz thought it was not postmodern enough! He found it too sedate; he wanted me to add some neon lights! I thought that Charles Moore's small projects were his most successful postmodernist designs; his eventual larger works lacked cohesion. A good contrast to the Richmond Hill House is my Wisconsin House. It is much larger, at about 8,000 square feet, than Richmond Hill House at 1,500 square feet. Wisconsin House has the exuberance of Richmond Hill House, but its design is disciplined by a better understanding of classical principles. And what is your attitude toward postmodernism as a useful term? Does it apply to you?

Yes, because the postmodernists thought they were very brave—and they were! Philip Johnson's partner John Burgee tells a wonderful story about the AT&T Headquarters in Manhattan, how the CEO kept the design totally under wraps until Johnson presented a model of it to the board of trustees. It was greeted with total silence. Then the CEO leaned forward with his elbows on the table and asked, "What do you think of it? I LOVE it!" I became a postmodernist because I loved using ideas, all together, from Maybeck, Plečnik, and Dientzenhofer, and because Venturi wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture to give me permission to do so! I was a postmodernist until I learned enough to become a classicist! Part of what I learned was from

making visits to Le Corbusier's buildings in France. I visited Mies's Villa Tugenhat in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1976 and saw it again, fully restored, in 2014. My work is indelibly influenced by modernist ideas about space and form. We are, for better or worse, in a postmodern era where it informs the larger discourse. Can you distinguish between postmodernism and classicism?

One aspect would be the part of postmodernism that's making fun, that we could say, Ha-ha. With classicism, we could get serious about using architectural paradigms. That's an interesting point. It makes me think of Memphis, which definitely had a spirit of fun, like some of Charles Moore's work, too.

Oh, yes. Charles Moore had a lot of anxiety as well as a spirit of fun and irony. I think that the postmodernists were anxious as to "what can we do?" When I look at your work, I'm sometimes struck by the sumptuous interiors. Were you ever tempted to shift to hospitality, which has an appetite for sumptuousness?

I certainly did enjoy designing the freestanding double staircase in the Kalb House in Illinois (1992), based on a beautiful precedent in the Shrewsbury House by Francis Costigan in Madison, Indiana (1846), both definitely sumptuous. After designing churches inspired by my love of Baroque examples, though, I've reoriented to developing a Romanesque simplicity in new ecclesiastical designs at the request of clients like the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, for a new seminary in Nebraska, and for the Benedictines at Annunciation Abbey at Clear Creek in rural Oklahoma for a new monastery. These major commissions were for clients who were seeking to express in their architectural work a radical return to the roots of Catholic religious practice. Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary, completed in 2010, is based on paradigms of Romanesque architecture in Italy. The Benedictine monastery, in construction in phases since 2013, is based on austere French Cistercian models.

Both complexes are built in brick and limestone. The public areas of the interiors of the seminary express a hierarchical sequence comprised of the octagonal Entry, the Refectory, the Library, the Aula Magna, and the Chapel of Saints Peter & Paul through increases in height, spatial complexity, finishes, and decoration. I enjoyed detailing the interiors, on moderate budgets, for buildings that serve as the home for the residents, ranging from several years for seminarians to the remainder of their lifetimes, in the case of the Benedictine monks. The 19th-century Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, which found its way into modernism through the Bauhaus, was surely anticipated by the fusion of arts and crafts in architecture and its settings that long predates it. You painted Roman murals in the rooms of Richmond Hill House, I remember. Is this fusion, if that's the right word for it, a factor in your work? Has it informed the way you've taught?

Bernard Maybeck's hands-on approach was an early inspiration. I read how he painted the exterior of one of his houses through the device of bucket after bucket of various colors of paint being thrown against the stucco walls until the desired amalgam of colors was achieved! I have not tried that technique, but I was intrigued to experiment with painting Pompeian-style frescoes for Richmond Hill House, Vitruvian House (1990), and Wisconsin House. I have delighted in opportunities to engage sculptors and artists for projects like the Bond Hall School of Architecture and the Cathedral City Civic Center. James Langley was commissioned to paint a depiction of Our Lady of Guadalupe for the seminary in Nebraska that is magnificent. Langley also made beautiful decorative wall paintings for my design for the Classical Galleries in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007). My son, the sculptor Andrew Wilson Smith, carried out a series of eight heroic-scaled herms for the entablature on the interior octagonal entry in the University Bookstore at California State University, Stanislaus (2008), which depict six California authors and their inspirational predecessors, Homer and Sappho. He also sculpted the historiated capitals and the lintel depicting the 12 apostles on the West Portal of Annunciation Abbey. This question about the fusion of art and architecture also makes me think of my teachers at Berkeley. Ray Lifchez was my most influential professor there. He insisted that we make models with

simple materials, inside and out, to study a project as it was developing. For his assignments, I made model after model, trying to visualize three-dimensionally the ideas I was attempting. I had studied painting and sculpture as an undergraduate at Berkeley, but I still had a tremendous amount to learn about how to think threedimensionally as an architecture student. Later, I found it incredibly hard to motivate my own students to make process-models, so I hold up Ray as an exemplar! And while I'm thinking of exemplars, the librarians at Wurster Hall take the cake for their care in assisting eager students! When Charles, Prince of Wales, published a polemic against modernism, the editor Peter Buchanan wrote a rejoinder in Architectural Review, arguing that modernism was capable of addressing the issues Charles raised. While finding this persuasive, I also felt sympathy for Charles's critique. Christopher Alexander makes similar points. Of course, Pugin made them against neoclassicism, arguing for neo-Gothic. These aren't really arguments against style, but style ends up being the issue. What's your position? Is it a question of stylistic hegemony, as some of the postmodernists argued?

The conflict is deeper than style. It is a humanistic issue disguised as an aesthetic one. Architecture is a powerful and public expression of values in society. Some architects neglect the obligation to use their authority to build humanistic architecture, which requires building durable, functional, and beautiful structures. The exterior of a building "speaks" about itself to passersby walking down the street and its interior "conveys" itself to the people using it. The Prince of Wales argues that buildings, as a public art, need to have a much higher quality than they have had, in many cases, especially when he looks at what has been built since World War II. He is trying, and keeps trying, to provide a conscience on this crucial civic topic! You reviewed several reprinted architectural treatises for Design Book Review. Have you written your own?

Classical Architecture: Rule & Invention (1988) was my first

attempt. The commentary I wrote to accompany a revised translation of Vitruvius, Vitruvius on Architecture (2003) was my second effort.

Are pattern books worth reviving?

As chair of the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, I took great pleasure in building up the Rare Book Collection within the School Library, including many 19th-century American pattern books. Because I found such books so useful, I wrote illustrated introductions to new reprints of The Carpenter's Assistant by John Hall (1996); The Modern Style of Cabinet Work Exemplified by Thomas King (1995), and The Builder's Guide and Practice of Architecture by Asher Benjamin (1994). I enjoyed working on these three reprints by Arcanthus Press, Dover Publications, and Da Capo Press, respectively, because these publishers make these works, and many others, widely available. Has living in the Midwest influenced your work?

We are here in provincial South Bend, but we have connections and access to all kinds of people and things. I used to brag that I built nothing that wasn't at least 150 miles away; then I designed a series of buildings for Notre Dame—the Bond Hall School of Architecture, Carole Sander Hall, and four mausolea for the Cedar Grove Cemetery on campus, so I had to give up that inconsequential distinction of distance! But yes, I have been influenced by the Midwest. Its dire weather requires greater effort to provide durability in construction. Its clients require more sober patience. Its masons are ubiquitous, proud, capable, and enthusiastic to carry out complex and exacting details in brick and stone. To go back to "timeless," do lineages matter in architecture? Are they unavoidable if you work with someone good who takes an interest in your work? I mean this in both directions, of course.

Now that I have retired from practice and teaching, it gives me enormous satisfaction to know that the ideas I have shared are being carried out in the work and teaching of many students. My legacy is now in the hands of those I taught in studios and mentored in my architectural office. I am proud of them and appreciate seeing their work. And I hope my influence will also reside in those who read my books or look at my buildings!

Each of us would like to be a fulcrum between the past and the future in some way, large or small. Vitruvius provided a unique role as a fulcrum by conveying in his Ten Books on Architecture all that he learned about ancient Greek principles of design from his study of more than 30 Hellenistic treatises that he cites, none of which have survived. His text is the pivot on which our understanding of the thinking of the architects of many ancient temples rests because many of them wrote a treatise after completing a major work. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I studied Borromini's Opus Architectonicum, trying to understand how the architect of the jewel-like San Carlo alle Quattro Fontani and the geometric wonder, La Sapienza, could also spend a page describing how he worked out an efficient way for many priests to wash their hands before entering the Refectory at the Oratorio dei Filippini. Yes, lineages matter in both directions and from many places. We are not "timeless" creatures; time is our treasure and our gift, whenever it is endowed with a beautiful image or an enduring word. This interview, conducted by email, appeared in Room One Thousand 5, 2017.

Another line of practice (2012) "Knowledge itself is a massive heavy object, with enormous foundations and a reliance on gravity. Religions, monarchies, systems of law, corporations— these historical patrons of architecture have provided us with the objects upon which minor architects can write their objections."—Jill Stoner

Among the themes of this short, provocatively discursive book is that the taint of capital runs through and distorts architecture, giving rise to celebrity practitioners and to signature buildings that, in Stoner's view, are indecipherable. She traces back to Louis Kahn another line of practice in which architects self-effacingly served their communities, taking for granted the beneficent nature of their civic institutions. She contrasts this with Foucault, for whom these same institutions were "mechanisms of exclusion, segregation and control" that gave rise to a dissenting minority. Stoner's minor architecture riffs on the minor literature of Deleuze and Guattari: "that which a minority constructs within a major language," as they put it. "They locate 'minor' and 'minority' as conditions that exist at the bottom of power structures, yet hold an extraordinary potential for power," she adds. This is the territory of Occupy, Marx, and Jesus, but Stoner cites Kafka: he saw it as the closed world of institutions in Foucault's sense, in which the buildings double back on themselves, and the powerful post guards at every gateway. Part of the attraction of the book is its constant reference to novels and short stories—like Cheever's "The Swimmer"—that view a conventional "major" landscape, like the backyards of suburban enclaves north of New York City, from the "minor" standpoint of a man who is sinking, even drowning, in their midst. How we relate to nature and how we integrate it is one of Stoner's leitmotifs. In "The Swimmer," the protagonist attempts to traverse his neighbors' swimming pools, likening them to a creek running through their town. Reality proves otherwise. Noting how peregrine falcons in Manhattan perch on the ledges of older skyscrapers, Stoner says that nature "is both celebrated and excluded" in today's green buildings. Accommodating the falcons that might perch on them wins no LEED points for their owners.

Is this a guide to becoming a minor architect? Occasionally, the book plays with that possibility by suggesting that what's being discussed is applicable to the mainstream. The real question is why anyone would want to become a minor architect. Burnham's "make no little plans" comes to mind, but then big plans so often disregard the vitality of communities along with the intimacy and immediacy of neighborhoods. If Kafka described the landscapes to which a bent and evil bureaucracy gave rise, Jane Jacobs took on the brave new world envisioned by planners like Edmund Bacon and Robert Moses—not quite the landscape of terror and incarceration Stoner invokes, quoting Ballard and Timerman, but sufficiently dystopian to warrant resisting and overcoming. This is the minor architect's creative space. Stone illustrates it with Corviale, a public housing ground-scraper that opened outside Rome in 1982, the year when Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was razed. The fifth level of this 8,000-person complex was left open, a gesture toward Le Corbusier and the Marseilles Block roof. Squatters took it over almost immediately. Today, when the large, fixed apartments intended for families are sparsely occupied by the aged, the fifth level retains its vitality and potential for reinvention. This is what Stoner is getting at when she says, early in the book: The overwhelming weight of an architectural object is its ability to resist change. Frozen in that illusion of being complete and remaining complete, buildings produce an ironic and subliminal longing for their different futures.

An architect of my acquaintance put it more succinctly. "After 30 years, we want them to go away. Yet we persist in building for 100 years." So, while commercial office buildings can accommodate a changing workforce, they aren't designed to be taken down after a generation or two of use, their pieces and parts recycled and reused. Buildings provide a framework for infill, but an imperfect one. We long for a framework that's good for millennia or, if not, is designed as infill too, with the city around it providing the long-lived frame. Most of the time, the minor architecture Stoner posits is done piecemeal, appropriating the cityscape for new, often momentary purposes. Vacant buildings are invitations to squat. Unused land invites the favela. In her own work, nothing ever looks finished.

Works assumed to be are cast back into a state of becoming. Authorship is put into reverse, and the design process becomes editorial, reflecting a composite of a blurred identities. It is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. In architecture as in literature, this is language purified of style, language stripped bare.

That it's not all chaos is implied by that word "editorial." It suggests an editor, but that's not how cities work. A relevant theorist here is Hayek, who argued that our social institutions are products of evolution, not design. If cities provide a frame for a mostly anonymous process of building and rebuilding, it's because they are rooted in tradition. When an urban economy collapses, in whole or in part, the minority—artists, artisans, filmmakers, and writers among them—provide the first signs of revival. Tradition hands them back a frame that they can appropriate and transform. Stoner gives examples of urban towers, vacant or abandoned, that have undergone this process. There's no real limit to the size of the frame, she implies, but she has a constant revival through myriad minor acts in mind. The fast-growing megacities of China and the Gulf depart massively from the traditions that make this possible. That hubris may leave them, like the dinosaurs, short of the deeper resilience that the future is likely to demand of us. A review of Jill Stoner's Toward a Minor Architecture, MIT Press, 2012, written for ARCADE 30.4, Fall 2012.

Transbay: History and Context (2003) The San Francisco Board of Supervisors created the 39.2-acre Transbay Redevelopment Project Area in 1994. Its boundaries are Mission Street to the northwest, Folsom Street to the southeast, Main Street to the northeast, and Second Street to the southwest. The area is named for the Transbay Terminal, a 1930s-era streetcar and bus terminal, part of the regional transportation infrastructure that, along with the Embarcadero Freeway, connected the city to the Bay Bridge. A decisive event in the Transbay Area's history was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Quake-related damage led to the demolition of the Terminal Separator Structure and the Embarcadero Freeway. This freed up 10.4 acres of irregularly shaped parcels, all publicly owned, for redevelopment. Replanning the Transbay District, 1994–2001 Since 1994, the Transbay Area has been the subject of two largescale planning efforts, as well as an architectural design proposal to replace the existing Transbay Terminal. Led by the San Francisco firm of SMWM, the December 1996 Transbay 20/20 Concept Plan envisioned "an intriguing new district—rich in urban resources— with a character tailored to the needs of the next century." The 20/20 Plan studied a considerably larger land area than the current Transbay Redevelopment Project Area—a square, 182-acre district that stretched from Market Street past Harrison Street, and from Spear Street to New Montgomery Street. The 20/20 Plan pictured this district being redeveloped as a series of "signature subdistricts," each responding to its immediate surroundings—the Financial District, the Waterfront, South Beach, Multimedia Gulch, Yerba Buena Center, and Union Square. The 20/20 Plan also proposed to turn Folsom Street into a mixed-use boulevard. Locating a new Transbay Terminal remained a contentious issue. Proposition H, passed in 1995, required that it remain in its current location and be served by CalTrain. The 20/20 Plan incorporated the City of San Francisco's recommendation "that new bus facilities be located between Main and Beale Streets at Howard Street, and that a potential new underground CalTrain Terminal be located at the site of the existing Transbay Terminal." SMWM, Richard 43

Rogers Partnership, and Arup revisited the issue in the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's 2001 Transbay Terminal Improvement Plan. Its focal point was a concept design for an intermodal (bus/train) replacement terminal on the current site of the 1930s Transbay Terminal building. Rethinking Transbay's Future, 2002–2003 In October 2003, a team led by SOM San Francisco issued the Transbay Redevelopment Project Area Design for Development, a detailed plan for the 39.2-acre set of publicly owned parcels. The plan reflects the active involvement of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, including the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, the San Francisco Planning Department, and the Mayor's Office of Economic Development. SMWM's 20/20 Plan had designated the Project Area as a transit hub and a direct extension of the Financial District, but by now San Francisco faced dramatically different financial conditions, including a more-than-20-percent vacancy rate for Class A office space. A market analysis of the Transbay Redevelopment Project Area by Sedway Group identified the potential for 3,300 new housing units there by 2025. Office space was another likely future use, but six new office buildings—1.5 million square feet—were already slated for development in the area. New hotel development was in a similar situation. New retail space was also a likely use, but only in conjunction with new housing and office space, which it would primarily serve. A high-density area with distinct neighborhoods SOM's plan posits a Transbay Redevelopment Project Area that mixes widely spaced residential towers with low- and midrise housing, open space elements and, along its western edge, infill development where it overlaps two conservation districts that preserve existing historic structures. From a skyline perspective, the intent is to preserve views to the north and avoid a wall of closely spaced towers. New housing at Transbay will follow the precedent of Vancouver's tall and slender residential towers, a model also cited in the San Francisco Planning Department's Rincon Hill Plan. SOM's plan borrows another idea from Russian Hill and other San Francisco residential neighborhoods—a pedestrian-scale street

environment activated by individual housing entries, landscaped building edges, and resident control of entry gardens and stoops. It brings forward the 20/20 Plan's idea of making Folsom Street a tree-lined boulevard that terminates at the waterfront's Rincon Park. It also posits making Spear, Main, and Beale Streets more pedestrian-friendly, with wider sidewalks and fewer lanes for through-traffic. Finally, SOM's plan proposes to create four distinct Transbay neighborhoods, each with its own character. Folsom Boulevard is the social/commercial heart of the Transbay and Rincon areas, providing them "with a much-needed core." The housing developed along this corridor will have street-level retail fronting on wide sidewalks. Main/Beale Precinct is a "high-density residential neighborhood" with "a network of open space" that links the downtown core with housing in Rincon Hill and South Beach. Mixed-use Historic District extends from Mission to Folsom Streets, including the alleys connecting Second and Third Streets. New infill development in this neighborhood will be compatible with its existing clsters of early 20th-century buildings. Terminal Hub is "the future center of the city's downtown" and a gateway for 80,000 weekday commuters. A covered terminal plaza along Mission Street will serve as a forecourt for both the new Transbay Terminal, replacing the old one in the same location, and an adjoining Terminal Tower. Viewed from the waterfront, this new tower will give San Francisco a third landmark at its midpoint, balancing the Bank of America and Transamerica towers north of Market Street and a proposed housing tower at Rincon Hill's Highway 101 edge.

Written for SF3: Architecture for High-density Living, a CCA publication based on a studio led by SOM San Francisco's Craig W. Hartman, FAIA and CCA's Rodolphe el-Khoury, with the involvement of Patrick Daly, Eric R. Keune, and Marc Goldstein, FAIA, Fall 2003.

The architecture critic as activist (2005) When Allan Temko started writing for the San Francisco Chronicle in the early 1960s, he didn’t see himself as a regional critic, despite outsiders’ perceptions to the contrary. Back then, the city was a fast-growing metropolis, the Golden State’s financial capital. But Temko hardly limited his writings to the region. He wrote a book on Eero Saarinen and countless articles for Architectural Forum (he was its West Coast editor), Horizon, and other magazines. Still, Temko, now 81, is best known as an activist who unhesitatingly took on anything that threatened the Bay Area’s soul—the first designs for the San Mateo Bridge, for example, and the horrendous plan to criss-cross San Francisco with freeways. Without Temko’s voice, the Bay Area would be markedly different, and decidedly less beautiful, today. Fifteen years have passed since Temko left his post. One realizes, talking with him, that the people he wrote about were often his friends, despite his reputation for making enemies. He was admired, even by his targets, for his ability to place design in a cultural context he so clearly loved.

How did you become a critic?

AT: When I left Columbia University in 1947, my professors helped me get an American Lectureship at the Sorbonne. I was in France, teaching American literature, for seven years. Most of this time, I looked at Gothic churches, which to me had everything—rational structure and daring new forms to suit new conditions. But I also saw modern architecture, like Le Corbusier’s. Because there was no good book in English on Notre Dame, I wrote one. Lewis Mumford edited it. When I returned to the U.S., he suggested I do what he was doing at The New Yorker for a newspaper. I knew the executive editor of the Chronicle, Scott Newhall, so I went there. What's changed since then?

In the 1950s and 60s, people talked about painters, sculptors, and politics. Now they talk about buildings, spaces, and important environmental problems. The need for good criticism has never been greater, but if you look around, it seems mighty sparse. There are some outstanding critics, like Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune, but not many today understand activist criticism—the need to get out there and fight with fang and claw. With a big metropolitan paper, you can accomplish a good deal. Looking back,

we were much better at stopping bad things than creating good things, but we were far ahead of other metropolitan areas, especially when you consider our resources. One big difference between being the critic of the Chronicle and being one for a great newspaper like The New York Times is that New York is really unmanageable. Here, it was possible to have an effect—to stop the freeways and keep Fort Mason and the Presidio from being ruined. How were you edited at the Chronicle?

Newhall read my things. So did the city guys, the assistant managing editors, and if they couldn’t understand something, I’d rewrite it. They were good stand-ins for the public. Newhall encouraged me to be controversial and shielded me from the owners. When the architect of Pier 39, Sandy Walker, sued me for $2 million, the Chronicle defended me. Actually, Bill German, then the executive editor, told me that if I lost, the paper would pay half! The suit was thrown out, but Walker appealed. When I learned that the case was back in court, I asked Chronicle executive Phelps Dewey why I hadn’t been told. "We want to win this thing," he replied. When you’re trying to stop something, you have to go straight for the jugular. Most critics today don’t have that instinct— but neither do their papers. I’m vain enough to think that I could have stopped the whole Bay Bridge fiasco if I hadn’t been ill. What influenced you as a critic?

My years in France led me to see art and architecture as expressions of great civilizations. I always cared about heightening the public’s sensibility. I wrote for the educated public, but I wanted everyone else to be able to understand my articles and enjoy them. I saw my role as achieving better design for the whole region. I might have been the only architecture critic in this period who looked at cities at a larger scale—even as large as, say, the Bay Area’s seashore, which became a national park. Today, you can walk on public land along the ocean for 50 miles north and south of San Francisco. That wouldn’t have happened without people fighting for it, and stopping things like the nuclear reactor that PG&E wanted to put on Bodega Head. I played a big part in these initiatives, writing articles

and then getting the Chronicle behind them. They were great victories. But I took on causes that ran the gamut—protecting Frank Lloyd Wright’s store on Maiden Lane from retrofitting, sparing Market Street the mediocrity of the early design for San Francisco Center, taking Silicon Valley seriously, helping make the Presidio a national park. That’s an appropriate range for a critic. Did you make enemies?

Sometimes I was a bit harsh. People say I was brave, but that wasn’t the point. It sold newspapers. It still would today but, despite media’s resources, there’s still not enough serious coverage of architecture and planning. One big difference is that when I was writing, I was often speaking for the paper as an institution. I would write a critical piece and then I would write an unsigned editorial for the Chronicle that supported my stance. Without that endorsement, there’s no way I could have accomplished what I did. What do you think of today's critics?

There are very few people writing things that you’d remember the next day. Part of our purpose, after all, is to be entertaining. Architecture is like tennis—there’s a small group playing at Wimbledon, and the rest are playing on the neighborhood courts. Which is not to say that the small courts don’t have big players. When I started as a critic, San Francisco was a magnet for good architects. Richard Rogers was among them—he appeared on my doorstep one summer, saying, "Lewis Mumford sent me"—and I got Chuck Bassett to sign him on at SOM. That influx of talent gave us Bassett in my generation and Stanley Saitowitz in the next, architects whose work is original and unique but which also reflects what they found here. A contribution to "On Criticism," published in conjunction with a symposium in Manhattan organized by Cathy Lang Ho, founding editor of Architect's Newspaper, where this appeared in the 16 November 2005 issue.

In appreciation of Sally Woodbridge (2020) In the era of Google Maps and Wikipedia, that print was once how architecture news and criticism circulated has mostly been forgotten. The death in late November 2019 of architectural historian and journalist Sally Byrne Woodbridge went unnoticed even in the San Francisco Chronicle. As a longtime correspondent of Progressive Architecture, Woodbridge kept the Bay Region's architects visible nationally, exposing its readers to a broader slice of work than usually made New York City-centric editors’ maps. As the main curator–compiler of a series of guides to its architecture, she explained the region to itself. Her books on Bernard Maybeck, John Galen Howard, and Bay Area houses gave depth to that broad and discerning overview. Sally Byrne was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1930 and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She studied art history at Duke, graduating in 1951, then went to the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Scholar. While in Paris, she met John Marshall Woodbridge, returning with him to Princeton and working at the art library while he finished graduate school. Sally and John’s circle at Princeton included Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, and William Turnbull—who together went on to later found MLTW, of Sea Ranch fame—and Hugh Hardy and Norval White. They were lifelong friends of James and Pamela Morton. As Dean of St. John the Divine Cathedral, James Morton restarted its construction and initiated its art program. Sally and John married in 1954. John finished at Princeton in 1956. Moving to San Francisco, John worked the architect John Funk. They became friends with his colleague Albert Lanier and his wife, the artist Ruth Asawa, who introduced Sally to the photographer Imogen Cunningham. Moving to Berkeley, they raised a family in the 1912 house that John Galen Howard, U.C. Berkeley’s first campus architect, designed for himself. John worked as an architect and planner for SOM in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and Sally began her career as a journalist, critic, and historian. Although they divorced, Sally and John remained good friends and writing partners. John married the poet Carolyn Kizer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Sally never remarried, living on Vine Street in North Berkeley with her daughter Pamela Woodbridge and her son-in-law, the cinematographer Elliott Davis, as neighbors. 50

The final edition of their guide, San Francisco Architecture, designed by Chuck Byrne, appeared in 2005. Bay Area Houses, which Sally edited and coauthored, came out in 1976. Monographs on Bernard Maybeck (1992) and John Galen Howard (2002), two giants of early 20th-century architecture in the Bay Region, followed. She participated in the Historical American Buildings Survey in California and organized exhibits on architecture. Writing for Progressive Architecture, Sally covered the region’s architecture with critical and historical awareness. Coming of age in Paris and Princeton, hers was a cosmopolitan, even existentialist sensibility that saw how the best work here reflected the wider world, including the vernacular modernism of Finland and Japan-work attuned to such attributes of place as terrain, climate, light, view, fabric, and pattern. Modernism here varied across a wide spectrum, as Pierluigi Serraino noted in NorCalMod. Lewis Mumford’s “region apart” was never really true, nor was the idea of “critical regionalism” quite accurate. Some architects here agreed, but others were wary of a label that implied provinciality. She dealt with the region by considering its history—Maybeck and Howard were products of the Beaux-Arts system, but both designed buildings here that looked back to Arts & Crafts and picked up on the Bay Region’s artisan tradition. She also stayed open to everything that arose here. The countermovement around Archetype, with work by Andrew Batey, Mark Mack, Steven Holl, and Jim Jennings, and the postmodern, anticipatory classicism of Thomas Gordon Smith, rebelled against a too-narrow view of the region's architecture. A close friend of Charles Moore, Sally saw him embrace developments like Pop Art, Bobbie Stauffacher’s super-graphics, and Larry Halprin's art–environmentalism. As she wrote, the region was in constant ferment, viewed from within. She also leaves her son Lawrence and four grandchildren. Her daughter Diana, who worked with the San Francisco architect Jeremy Kotas, died in 2002. John Woodbridge died in 2014. Written for Architect's Newspaper, 28 April 2020. Sally Woodbridge lived around the corner for decades. Her daughter Pamela lives in the next block.

Beverly Willis in the 1980s and 1990s (2021) The 1980s was the high-water mark of the Bay Area phase of Beverly Willis's long career. Over this decade, she made her mark here as a pioneering woman architect and architect-developer, part of a circle of ambitious women in San Francisco involved in politics and real property—two fields that were open to them in a way that architecture, still a boys' club, was not. While leading her eponymous San Francisco architecture firm, Willis often turned to development to self-finance its work, including a five-story adaptive re-use project on Mission Street downtown that housed her office. Another significant project in the city was Nob Hill Court, a multi-unit residential building on Nob Hill commissioned by Huntington Hotel owner Dolly Cope. Willis's interest in ballet led to her most important and visible project, the San Francisco Ballet Building on Franklin Street, west of the beaux arts Opera House. The Ballet Building defers intentionally to both its neo-classical and high-modern neighbors in the Civic Center precinct, including Charles Edward Bassett's Davies Hall. Its attention to scale and its classical massing contrast with the machismo of the nearby State Office Building by SOM's Larry Doane. SOM's David Childs and Brian Lee's late-1990s addition to Bliss & Faville's neo-classical State Office Building similarly gives a classical organization to its modernist main façade. Within its four loft-like stories, the Ballet Building accommodates a full array of rehearsal and support spaces for the ballet company. Motivated by her love of ballet and her friendship with the company's principals, Willis took great pains to meet their specific and exacting needs—no small achievement in a sponsored project with all of the usual budgetary constraints. Willis's visibility and her working knowledge of real estate development in San Francisco led Paul Reichman's Olympia & York to engage her, along with the Toronto architect-planner Eberhard Zeidler, to produce a new master plan for the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area, which extended south from Market to Folsom Streets between Third and Fourth Streets and took in San Francisco's convention center on its southmost block. Zeidler and Willis's Yerba Buena Gardens envisioned a public park and promenade, anchored by cultural uses, between Mission and 52

Howard Streets, connected by a bridge to the roof of the convention center. The roof provided a platform for Tivoli-like children's attractions. A mixed-use program of commercial buildings across the larger site would pay for the public benefits. Zeidler and Willis broke with the Metabolist-Brutalist tone of a plan by Kenzo Tange. Their connected outdoor settings were framed by new buildings along the addressing streets—an orchestrated sequence of landscape elements, promenades, and overlooks. Despite Olympia & York's rolling collapse in the early 1990s, their plan caught the public imagination and provided the template for the site's subsequent redevelopment. Willis sold her pioneering Mission Street adaptive re-use project at the height of the market and bought vineyard property in St. Helena, building a house there and living in semi-retirement for several years. The flood-prone Napa River made an island of her vineyard—her house safe on its hillock but her vineyards submerged. Once property values recovered, Willis sold her house and moved to Manhattan, presciently buying and renovating a four-story brownstone near the Morgan Library and launching the next phase of her career as her namesake foundation's doyenne. Willis shared the ambition of other Bay Area architects of her generation to be known beyond the region. As a woman in what was then a male-dominated profession, she made full use of the routes to prominence available to her, including real estate development. Her love of ballet led to a notable civic commission that became a reference point for ballet companies elsewhere. That building also spoke to her cultural interests and her ability to read the city as a socio-political landscape—a field for her creativity. Had she lived on as a vineyard owner, we would remember her today as an important Bay Regional architect whose sense of the city gave what could easily have been one more soulless superblock or overwrought civic building real urbanity. Yerba Buena Gardens thrives precisely because of the cultural park at its heart, still the best and most humane of the city's downtown civic spaces. The Ballet Building endures because it combines superb functionality with an informed respect for the Beaux Arts character of its precinct. Written for a piece by Fred Bernstein for Architectural Record, 17 April 2021.

Art Gensler's treatise on the firm (2021) The recent death of Art Gensler (1935–2021) led me to look again at Art's Principles, his 2015 primer on architecture firm-building and architects’ careers. I was hired by Gensler late in 1997 and worked closely with him and his successors in an editorial capacity for the next 22 years—a good vantage point from which to see how his principles played out in practice. Gensler was no theoretician, and yet he evolved what might be called a “theory of the firm” that reflected his understanding of architecture as it unfolds in the real world of clients and markets. Writing an introduction to the drawings of Thomas Gordon Smith, author of a treatise on architecture consciously modeled on those of his classical predecessors, has led me to distill Art’s principles into a pocket treatise that draws on my own observations.

1. Architecture is best understood in a total design sense Art preferred "design" to "architecture" in describing the openended nature of his firm. He saw every attempt to put the firm into professional, disciplinary, practice, or project buckets as misguided, given the fluidity of markets and the humanity that drives them. A design firm exists to deliver desired outcomes and support clients from strategy to strategy within close working relationships. Whatever is needed has to be found, whether it exists within the firm or is tapped through collaboration. This evolving totality is design as a professional activity, and architects are an integral part of it, but only one, and honor-bound to collaborate with the rest. 2. To be a business, architecture has to be run as one. This has two implications. First, it means situating the firm in the marketplace. Second, it means acknowledging that what you’re running is a design business, which requires a constant search for balance and synergy between designers and clients so that both are attracted. This dilemma isn’t unique to design firms. Higher education, for example, faces something like it. To be a business means to deal rigorously with the issues every business faces. How well they’re dealt with is the difference between a business that thrives, stagnates, or fails. How well design is dealt with means everything for its reputation, its influence, and its ability to attract talent and clients. To succeed, a design business has to navigate these twin challenges. To do this well, its culture has to be steeped in awareness of them, framing actions and outcomes in light of this.

3. That culture benefits from broad ownership and transparency As Arie de Geus has argued, companies that endure are "living communities" that transcend successive generations of leaders and workers. Art made everyone an owner, directly or indirectly, in the design firm he founded. Since everyone was an owner, the firm shared financial details with them. It made ownership a financial advantage, with a substantial part of compensation long-term and tax-sheltered, topped off by firm contributions that reflected its performance and its leaders’ bullish or bearish sense of its prospects. 4. Relationships, not projects, are the heart of a design business This means, first, that constant engagement is sought both with individual clients and the larger collectivity to which they belong or identify, with which they share issues and experiences. The goal is to expand the relationship, not simply to land the next project. Second, it means that mutual trust is crucial, as a relationship brings such responsibilities as the need to advise against a project not in the client’s interest. Within the design firm’s own culture, it means that personal and collective integrity matters. To thrive, the culture delegates responsibility on the basis of trust and individual initiative, but the ruling context is the collaborative teams that include and serve the clients and their clients. It’s within ongoing collaboration that both of these relationships are forged, built, and evolved. 5. A design business is organized to absorb shocks, yet evolve Most of all, this means being disciplined about the core activities that keep ongoing operations humming, while scanning the horizon for new opportunities and threats. The danger of focusing on any set of relationships is myopia, banking on continuity and failing to anticipate disruption. Growth means changes in scale, each of which strains the core activities in their existing state, so part of the discipline needed is to ask regularly what the future demands. Some of this will come from clients, but the firm also has to look ahead and make its own decisions. It doesn’t have to be the first out of the gate, but should know its options and be ready to act and invest. One big advantage of a strong culture is that piloting new initiatives is much easier against the background of consistently profitable ongoing operations. Such initiatives are a firm's investments in the future.

6. A design business is organized to grow and sustain its growth It's agnostic about its offer and the markets that take it up, knowing that the scale of the take up involves time as well as space. Especially when assignments are singular and huge, it looks for points of entry and roles that don’t leave its teams hanging when the assignment ends. If, to break into a market, it takes risks, it weighs them in light of the potential opportunities, viewing any losses as learning curve investments. But it tracks those assumptions against reality. It learns as much from mistakes as from successes. 7. A design business needs a talent pipeline and a succession plan A thriving design business gives its co-owners the possibility of career longevity. This means not only giving them opportunities to contribute, but actively investing in their careers in mutually beneficial ways. Advancement reflects performance, with allowances made for life events and reversals beyond anyone’s reasonable control. Making strong performance possible is the goal of career investment, with an emphasis on the most-promising performers, but also with a conscious effort to raise all boats. Yet the standards of performance evolve. Career longevity doesn’t mean tenure; it means rewarding constant, meaningful contribution. Those who fail to deliver, despite career support, are let go, while outside talent is recruited. An effective succession plan simplifies the transition from one generation of leaders to another. Term limits, especially for upper- and midlevel leadership roles, make room for new blood. 8. A design business builds its future; it doesn't borrow against it Financial solidity requires the business to perform well, even when market conditions are adverse. It prepares for what it can anticipate and for the unforeseen as an operational and a cultural imperative. Yet in its dealings with its co-owners, humanity and integrity guides its actions, knowing that those who leave will reappear as industry colleagues and often as clients. Coming back after a productive stint away is culturally acceptable, even desirable. Written (as "The Principles of Art Gensler") for Common Edge, 17 May 2021. When I published this, a few people read it as a history. As noted, it's a treatise on architecture and design firms gleaned from Art's book and my observations.

Design firms need a both/and ethos (2021) Design firms face a quandary: how to solidify their "steady state" of ongoing operations while taking steps to anticipate the future and ensure that they're positioned for it. For a large firm, this quandary centers on its need as an enterprise to address its operations rigorously and systematically—a need that pushes it toward centralized command and control. There are compelling reasons for this, especially as a firm's operations cross jurisdictions that expose it to added regulatory perils. Recent examples like Wirecard and WeWork are cautionary tales of how networked organizations can easily slip past the scrutiny of their top managers and regulators, succumbing to fraud and bad practices. What makes it a quandary for large firms is three-fold. First, there are absolute limits to central control. The sheer size of a firm can make it challenging to manage top-down. Second, the firm's activities and pursuits tend to move faster than central decisionmaking, so that delegating to teams and locales is crucial, as is their ability to collaborate effectively. Third, innovation can be inhibited by a firm's tendency to bureaucratize initiatives rather than let them evolve organically. This tendency reflects a firm's efforts to cope with size and complexity, but it ends up promoting reductive thinking instead of needed exploration. What to do? A starting point is to consider the "steady state" needs of the firm as an ongoing enterprise separately from the need to support initiatives and ventures that run in parallel—and sometimes in conflict—with the firm's established practices. The idea here is not to place these initiatives and ventures beyond the firm's control, but to recognize how they vary from the norm and then create contexts more favorable to their success. For example, a firm hires a specialist who can be leveraged across multiple projects. How does it support her outside the prevailing profit-and-loss structure of an office or practice? Or it enters a new geographic or practice market. How does it account for its investment in a way that doesn't unfairly burden its established business units? How does it manage it? Or a firm sees the need to shift its approach, but there's enough variation—in the technology or in local conditions across its markets—that it's not obvious 58

what's best to do. How does it start to shift while acknowledging these differences? Can it turn those differences to its advantage? These examples point to the desirability of a both/and ethos that gets past the limits of "steady state" to ensure that the firm is also moving toward a future whose horizons are only partly predictable. Such an ethos requires the firm to balance its real need for systemic control with its equally real need to find new possibilities and to innovate, sometimes radically, in light of them. Intrinsic to this balancing act is a shift in how the center views everything else. It requires understanding that a large firm is both a networked organization and an array of silos, each with a better understanding of local conditions than the center will ever possess. A relevant text is Stanley McChrystal's book Team of Teams. He says that the top leaders of networked organizations have to model behavior and expectations while they cultivate the mutual trust and openness needed to facilitate communications among the multiple actors engaged in any initiative that cuts across the boundaries that separate the different parts—the silos—of these organizations. Top leadership's role McChrystal calls the top leaders of networked organizations "gardeners," emphasizing a role that always deals simultaneously with now and next. The role differs from how top leaders usually see themselves. "Stewards" is another way to put it: both securing the present and looking beyond it to prepare for medium- and longerterm changes. The latter is also an enterprise responsibility—a discipline that's as important to establish as financial controls. The firm's business units understand the immediate horizon of their activities—indeed, one value of scale is the ability to tap this information for its predictive value. But this breaks down 18 months out. Forecasting regularly by considering four-year horizons, the limit of what top leaders can realistically address, can guide new investments in talent, locations, and resources. It can also guide shifts in emphasis, recognizing that cycles of growth and decline mean that activities will fall away as well as persist and emerge. Striking the right balance between the center and the periphery in a large firm is more of an art than a science. A commitment to a "both/and" ethos across its culture provides latitude for its edge conditions, which are often where innovations arise first. It also

acknowledges diversity, relying on cultural norms rather than imposed rules and censorship. The latter signal "top-down and bureaucratic" in a stultifying way, internally and externally. Enterprise imperatives are typically very specific and can be addressed as such across a firm without dampening the animal spirits that fuel the entrepreneurial activities it needs to thrive. Smaller firms can also benefit from "both/and" by internalizing the need to look ahead as they grow. The reality is that every design firm is throttled by the business cycle and its own cycles of growth and decline. "Steady state" is at best a passing thing; one of its perils is that it can lull a firm of any size into overinvesting in now and failing to invest in next. Written as a LinkedIn article on 16 September 2021. McChrystal's book is the best I've found on the art of getting important things done across big networks. I have Columbia University's Michael Bell to thank for putting me in the room when Larry Leifer recommended it. McChrystal is particularly convincing because he was dealing with the U.S. Armed Forces, the CIA, and other silos. It's all downhill from there, he implied, without ever actually saying so.

Aphorisms for architects (2020) A half-century of working at every type of architecture firm—S, M, L, and XL—has left me with the desire to share some insights. I’ve written them as aphorisms, which boil experience down to a line or two. They’re meant for people across the board: students, midcareer professionals, and senior folks wondering if it’s time to move on. (A personal note on that final category: They’ll be surprised how liberating this is.) These are by no means definitive; as I wrote them, other thoughts occurred, so there may be sequels

Healthy firms have a rhythm like the beating of the heart. A push is followed by a rest that lets the heart consolidate itself for the next one. An arrhythmic heart skips a beat or pauses too long. The issues faced by small firms are essentially the same as those faced by large ones. They face the same existential threats and the same internal and external pressures to evolve. It’s a myth that the size of the firm makes it more or less interesting. What’s interesting are the opportunities it has and what it does with them—assuming those same opportunities interest you. Working effectively across a network is the most important skill a firm can develop. Leaders who thrive across networks are diplomats, facilitators, and cultivators of budding talent. Command-and-control doesn’t work. Hierarchy is pointless except in the most minimal sense. Focus on the task at hand, and every conversation will go better. Meet, but don’t overdo it. Every firm has pluses and minuses. The idea of a firm is often better than its execution. What matters is that you share its ambitions, it supports you, and you’re both making headway. Firms need to forge new relationships and grow existing ones. The latter responsibility should be delegated to those who do the work; the former is the main responsibility of the ownership.

Consciously growing a firm means confronting the fact that it will outgrow some of its staff. Handle this well—they may work for your clients or your competitors, or acquire new skills and return. If your goal is to work with dynamic leaders, then it's best to be a half-generation older or a full generation younger than them. If your goal is to succeed them, then join early and force them to retire. A firm’s commitment to diversity is reflected in whom it hires and promotes. It takes time to gauge how committed a firm really is, but there are early indicators—and, sometimes, red flags. Don’t waste much time working for an idiot unless the firm realizes its mistake and quickly sees him off. Toleration of idiots is a sure sign of a firm’s decline. Keep your eyes open and your CV updated. Senior lateral hires work only if a top leader is prepared to make it work. It has to be a personal, mutual commitment, a trust-based relationship that gets them through the inevitable rough patch. Bespoke, problem-solving, prototyping and form-giving, and mass customization: these are the main categories in which firms fall. They overlap, but emphasizing one may preclude others. To be seen as innovative, a firm has to do something stunning often enough that people take notice. This requires time, investment, courage, realism, and luck. Imagination is the least of it. Written (as "The Nature of Design Firms from a Five-Decade Veteran") for Common Edge, 29 October 2020.

Some notes on value propositions (2019) In mid-January 2019, the San Francisco chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) convened a panel on value propositions. Traci Vogel, content manager at TEECOM, was the moderator, and I was a panelist along with Kenneth Caldwell, Erin Cullerton, and Sarah Young. To prepare, I made some notes prompted by Vogel’s questions. While some distance from my spoken remarks, they may be useful nonetheless.

How do you define “value proposition” in relation to your work as AEC strategists, marketers, BD professionals, communicators?

To me, “value proposition” is a tactical term that’s most useful in the context of project development, when the goal is to reduce the entirety of what the team offers into a pitch that speaks to the client’s motivations and then tries to go beyond them to give compelling reasons why this team is the one to pick. I prefer “pitch,” because it makes it clear how context-bound a value proposition is, tailored as it is to the opportunity in question. A value proposition can also be applied to an industry to the extent that its projects share a number of traits, so what might be thought of as an “elevator pitch” will resonate with potential clients and help a firm or team qualify for specific opportunities. Here, the goal is to get on the sector’s map and yet differentiate the firm from competitors. The more a firm has conveyed its experience, expertise, and point of view to the sector before it pursues a new client or project, the easier it is to tailor its pitch to the actual context. Starting from zero, what are the essential steps or elements in creating a value proposition, whether it’s for a firm, a sector, or a pursuit?

You're never starting from zero. There’s a history—the track record of the firm or team, for example, and its visibility. There’s the zeitgeist, which can favor new faces and/or convincing signs of reinvention. A successful relationship with a given client can result in non-compete wins: a string of work that rewards a responsive team. If the team is truly responsive, the value proposition will keep pace with the client’s needs. The pursuit is where you demonstrate this, again and again.

Ideally, every team feeds itself and uncovers new opportunities for its colleagues. As this implies, any work a firm is doing for existing clients is part of the pursuit of new work from them. Describe how a value proposition shapes communications strategy.

It’s the reverse: the communications strategy shapes the value proposition by helping to establish its broader context. When firms communicate, they are thinking about the bigger picture of how they’re perceived by potential clients, industry partners, the media in its role as amplifier and influencer, designer peers, and students as likely future talent. The bigger the firm and the wider its geographic reach, the more it has to delegate content-creation to market specialists. This can create dissonance unless there’s widely shared agreement about brand and identity. They have to be meaningful in other languages and cultures, so they need to be clear and simple. A communications strategy uses what the firm controls—its own outlets and its top leaders when they speak for the firm—to engage what it doesn't. Social media, tipped toward individuals, forms a parallel stream to the firms’ official channels. Practically speaking, a firm's control of individual communication is limited. But with the individuals’ agreement, it can “follow” them, tapping and amplifying posts that get traction. It can also encourage people to repost firmgenerated content when it’s relevant to their own followers, thus reaching audiences that are unlikely to follow it directly. Individual communications have the advantage of first-person credibility. Firm communications gain credibility by highlighting real people and by discussing the work with a specificity that rings true. On social media especially, it’s a mistake for a firm to pose as an individual. It has to communicate as an organization. It can also be a mistake for a firm’s top leaders to communicate “personally." Norman Foster presents himself idiosyncratically on Instagram, mixing formal events with casual documentation of his hobbies and activities. Often, someone’s filming him. He gets away with this because he's Lord Foster, a public figure. The rest of us—including the leaders of your firm, probably—are not.

What makes a value proposition compelling and credible?

For starts, communicate it well. Ask yourself who’s on the receiving end and what will draw their attention. Consider the purpose of what you’re communicating and where you are in the process of achieving it. Communication is a trajectory, and you can build on each step, shifting the emphasis to keep the recipient interested. Think of it as a conversation between the firm and the decision makers. Always ask yourself, “Who’s on the other end?” There’s an element of persuasion, but first of all there’s a need to engage, put a viewpoint forward, provide insight, and invite discussion. Bells and whistles have their place. Sometimes they’re table stakes, but it still comes back to the chemistry between human beings, signaled from the outset and cemented in real conversations that point to the possibility and desirability of working together. (Never pretend there’s chemistry when there isn’t. Life is short.) Posted by SMPS San Francisco as a "The Shortlist" feature, 30 January 2019.

Is architectural licensing necessary? (2020) Mónica Ponce de León, dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture, recently called for allowing graduates of accredited professional programs like hers to take the licensing exams without having to meet any experience requirement. That requirement, she argues, is “an exclusionary tactic … structured to perpetuate discrimination and inequity.”1 In Architecture and Labor (Routledge, 2020), Yale’s Peggy Deamer goes a step further, suggesting that architects decouple their profession from state registration entirely. Her call to “deprofessionalize” architecture—that is, to deregulate it—may strike architects as far-fetched, but here’s some breaking news: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, aka “the mini-Trump,” just stripped landscape architects, among other professions, of state protection of their titles and practices. Deamer, a co-founder of The Architecture Lobby, is focused on architects as workers and on the broader situation of architecture in the late-capitalist, Trumpinflected U.S. Issues of equity and diversity are high on her agenda. Those issues are salient to any discussion of state regulation. Architecture came into its own as a profession in the 19th century. As Deamer explains, it joined other “learned” professions in seeking to distance itself from commerce. State regulation of architects in the U.S. began with Illinois in 1897. Hoping to distinguish the profession from others involved with building design and construction, proponents of registration aimed both to protect clients from unqualified practitioners and to raise the profession’s status. In 1920, as part of an effort to coordinate the licensing process across the state boards, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) instituted the first standard licensing exams.3 As a learned profession, architecture was exempt from U.S. antitrust laws until 1972, when the American Institute of Architects (AIA) dropped its fee schedule to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. A second consent agreement in 1990 affirmed price competition and made any discussion of fees by architect bidders a felony. (German architects retain a fee schedule, Deamer notes, despite European Union (E.U.) rules to the contrary.) While billed as “consumer protection,” the U.S. 68

Department of Justice’s actions, taken initially against civil and structural engineers, were pushed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. General Services Administration to reduce the cost of those professions’ services. In 1979, California Governor Jerry Brown proposed to “sunset” the state regulation of architects, among other professions (law, medicine, and engineering were exempted). The organized profession and its registration board fought Brown, arguing by analogy to civil and structural engineers that public health, safety, and welfare were protected by their regulation. The board also substituted its own licensing exams for NCARB’s, emphasizing seismic and energy issues. In the end, Brown’s effort failed; none of the targeted professions was deregulated. Architectural regulation varies widely, as Deamer’s book and a 2012 study of women in architecture in Australia and Sweden by University of Queensland’s Amanda Roan and Monash’s Naomi Stead4 show. The U.S. and Australia follow the Anglo-American model that ties licensing to a combination of education, experience, and exams. In France, Germany, and Sweden, education and experience suffice. Licensing exams (and their associated fees), not experience, is the main difference between the two models. In Sweden, architects’ title and practice are not regulated by the state. Anyone can call herself an architect and practice as one. From their first student days, though, most architects join the Swedish Association of Architects (or Architects Sweden), “the professional association, union and interest group for Sweden’s architects, interior architects, landscape architects and spatial planners.”5 Graduation from an accredited program and two years of experience with E.U. firms allow practioners to be recognized by Architects Sweden as qualified in one or another of the related fields it covers. Roan and Stead’s 2012 study focused on “women’s position in architecture” in Australia and Sweden. It benefits from substantial data about the diversity of the architectural profession in the two countries. In an interview, Ponce de León decried the lack of data here: “Why has the AIA, NCARB, the NAAB, and even the ACSA, made it so difficult to find demographic data?” she asks, questioning if diversity is really their priority.6

Roan and Stead's 2012 study concluded that Sweden wasn’t Nirvana for women architects, despite a “context of strong social and political support for women and a loose regulatory framework in architecture.” In 2012, 51 percent of the members of Architects Sweden were women, and women and men architects’ salaries were “on par for the first ten years.” But pay diverged thereafter as more senior positions went to men and fewer women started their own practices. Some of the fields covered by Architects Sweden attract more women than men, potentially a factor in their higher numbers. Still, the growth of women studying architecture in Sweden suggests they will be the majority of architects in the future. Australian architects are registered by state boards overseen by the Architects Accreditation Council of Australia, which coordinates reciprocity with other countries and shares architecture school accreditation with the Australian Institute of Architects and the state boards. In 2012, Women made up 26 percent of Australian Institute of Architects members, half their proportion in Sweden. The title “architect” is protected, but non-architects can provide architectural services. In 1996, Susan Shannon argued that the current process of architectural licensure in Australia made it less likely that women architecture graduates would find suitable employment to gain needed experience or see the necessity to be registered. Instead, they are “more likely to see it as oppressive or restrictive.”7 Monash University Researcher Gill Matthewson's 2018 analysis of Australia’s 2016 census showed that women are a growing presence in architecture there. A higher percentage of women, 40 percent in 2016 versus 34 percent in 2011, are registering as architects. Of all women active in architecture, 57 percent were registered in 2016 versus 51 percent in 2011. And yet, despite strong graduation rates, women’s participation falls off with age. Compared to their male peers, women are slower to start their own firms and less likely to incorporate them or employ others. After age 30, they are more likely to work part-time. Between ages 40 and 60, women are less likely than men to work “longer than the standard working week.” Among architect employees, “men dominate the higher earning brackets.” Matthewson summarizes: “Whatever the measure used, women are present in strong numbers in the junior ranks, … but disappear from its senior levels.” This trend “has

weakened … but the pattern persists.”8 I asked Matthewson if she thought women’s participation in architecture would grow if the profession was deregulated, a step proposed by Australia's Productivity Commission in 2000, following an inquiry that raised arguments against regulation similar to those made by California Governor Brown in 1979.9 She responded: Self-regulation would mean less-formal means of gatekeeping, which usually do not work to women’s advantage, nor to the advantage of minorities. There is already some informality in the system in Australia that I believe discriminates. Formal credentials matter much more for women and the progress of their careers than they do for men. But registration is also to some degree disconnected from the everyday of architects’ lives and that is a big problem. But that could mean reform rather than removal. Women are already a sizable portion of the field. The issue is that they leave more than the men do. Would deregulation reduce that leaving? Hard to predict the consequences, but I’d be surprised if it did. It may make no difference but it could also exacerbate the conditions that cause women to leave: tightly held male cabals, ruthless competition, and the like.10

Matthewson also clarified that the registration process in Australia includes a single exam, a signed-off workbook, and an interview. “That makes it perhaps less of a barrier” than the U.S. process, she wrote.11 Ponce de León’s call to reform licensing, like Deamer’s call to scrap it, aims to shift architecture to a more inclusive and equitable place that’s better suited to contemporary practice and its possible futures. Deamer sees advantages in the Swedish model, which emphasizes education, simplifies experience, and eliminates exams, as well as advocating for architects as workers. Citing Anne Witz's Professions and Patriarchy (Routledge, 1992), Roan and Stead note that, Witz claims that professions, by their very nature, may be an exclusionary project. … She states that ‘credentialist tactics, the use of educational certificates and accreditations to monitor and restrict access to occupation positions, are one of the major tactics of professional closure.12

Education, in short, is as culpable as experience, exams, and licensing. Yet, as Matthewson argues, running that gauntlet may benefit the women and minorities who manage to do it. Deamer

points to Architects Sweden, because it’s a union in the Swedish sense of the word—that is, an organization that advocates for architects, broadly construed, aiming to secure for the women and men in the field reasonable pay and working conditions, act as a clearing house for R&D, and monitor events in the wider world with implications for its members. Reform is certainly overdue. Deamer devotes several chapters of her book to the way tech innovations have transformed practice. The pandemic has given this a gigantic shove, while simultaneously upending higher education. It’s highlighted inequities that were always there but are now almost embarrassingly front and center. But the push for deregulation is now coming from other quarters. While Florida Governor DeSantis held off from moving on architects, his action—which took place under the cover of the pandemic, like so much else perpetrated by Trump and his loyalists—was carried out, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, to “provide more opportunities for more citizens.” In an unintended echo of Ponce de León, the Wall Street Journal adds, “It’s all about removing unnecessary barriers that make it harder for people to enter certain professions”13 Given that professional licensing may help rather than hurt women and minorities, as Monash’s Matthewson points out, the Wall Street Journal editorial’s breezy endorsement is open to question. In the summer of 2020, Florida’s interior designers, who enjoy state protection in Florida, successfully organized to resist DeSantis.14 The preponderance of women in that profession supports Matthewson’s thesis: being licensed, which was hard won, certainly matters to them. With the heightened awareness of racism and inequity now sweeping universities and offices alike, taking the situation of women and minorities seriously is overdue. Ponce de León is right to make an issue of it. But, as Deamer argues, to be meaningful, reform needs to be holistic. If she points to Sweden’s union, part of its appeal is its ability to keep pace with and even lead change rather than content itself with rearguard actions. How the organized profession does this is a question The Architecture Lobby is pondering, as is Australia’s Parlour, a women architect’s advocacy group. The means will differ with context. Tertiary education has a similar need to challenge disciplinary boundaries and preconceived

ideas about practice. That’s a challenge Dean Ponce de León may want to take up. Notes: 1. Monica Ponce de León, "Hearing the Call for Structural Change," Princeton University School of Architecture, 7 June 2020. 2. "Florida's Licensing Breakthrough," editorial, Wall Street Journal, 16 July 2020. 3. Dana Cuff, "Historical License: Architectural History in the Architectural Profession," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 76:1, March 2017. 4. Amanda Roan and Naomi Stead, "A 'New Institutional' Perspective on Women's Position in Architecture: Considering the Cases of Australia and Sweden," Architectural Theory Review 17:2–3, 2012, pp. 378–398. 5. Per its website, saco.se. 6. Antonio Pacheco, "Mónica Ponce de León on the Future of Architectural Licensure," Archinect, 29 June 2020. 7. Susan Shannon, "Architecture and Equity: Education and Practice," Architectural Theory Review 1:1, 1996, pp. 48–62. 8. Gill Matthewson, Parlour Census Report 2001–2016, 23 October 2018. 9. Review of Legislation Regulating the Architectural Profession, Working Paper No. 1644, Productivity Commission, Government of Australia, 4 August 2000. 10. Gill Matthewson, email in response to my query, 16 July 2020; and her article, "When being female is weaponised against you...," Parlour, 13 November 2017. 11. Matthewson, email in response to my query, 16 July 2020. 12. Roan and Stead, op. cit. 13. Florida's Licensing Breakthrough," op. cit. 14 Joanna Thiger, posting on the Gresham Smith—an architecture and design firm—website, 16 July 2020. Written for Common Edge, 22 July 2020. Peggy Deamer and Parlour's Amanda Roan, Naomi Stead, and Gill Matthewson were crucial to its development. Antonio Pacheco's interview sparked my initial interest. In 1979, as a research consultant to the AIA/California Council, I was involved in the successful effort to avoid state deregulation of architecture in California.

Never been (2005) Like Alice Waters' take on haute cuisine, Donlyn Lyndon, et al's The Sea Ranch epitomizes a Left Coast view of the country home. "Living lightly with the land," his version of the mantra, picks up on the site's agrarian background. The premise of the development is straight from The Theory of the Leisure Class. What still captures our attention is the care with which the whole thing is done. With Larry Halprin in the William Morris role, Joseph Esherick and MLTW designed housing that fit beautifully into "nature" that's half real and half bespoke. While Esherick's hedgerow houses draw primarily on the landscape and old coastal barns, MLTW's more freewheeling condominiums—although they reference Fort Ross, the Russian fur traders' toehold down the road—clearly reflect their decade (the 1960s) and the urbanity of book's likely readers. Alice Waters spawned a generation of chefs and restaurants, some better than others. The original Sea Ranch architects have had a similar influence. Over 40 years, the place has bred a substantial number of very good houses along with some lesser ones, sometimes by very good architects. A fifth of the houses in the book could have been safely left out—and the Sea Ranch story could have been told convincingly with a dozen or so examples. But that would be a different book. This one's substantial variation on a few themes is worth studying for its details. The houses are often exemplary in their attention to how inside and outside relate, and in the ways the architects used space, light, and views to raise the ante of daily life. The book's visual appeal is like World of Interiors—a realtor's wet dream, really. One can imagine "As featured in The Sea Ranch" serving as an imprimatur. Does it make me want to go there? Like Richard Meier's Getty, it feels like too much sameness in one place, but it has great word of mouth. Mentioning the book to a friend, she instantly recalled the living room of a rented house there, fixed now in her memory. She liked the book, too. Maybe you had to be there. A review of Donlyn Lyndon, et al's The Sea Ranch, Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, that appeared in Architectural Record, April 2005. Editor Clifford Pearson substituted "fantasy" for "wet dream" in the published version.

Two Lectures: Lerup and Machado (2012) Lars Lerup at Wurster Hall

Playing to a big, friendly crowd, Rice Professor Lars Lerup acknowledged his Berkeley roots in a lecture on Wednesday night, 7 March 2012, centered on his new book on the Houston cityscape, One Million Acres & No Zoning (Architectural Association, 2011). Stanley Saitowitz, a self-described “Lerupean,” introduced the speaker by noting his impact at Berkeley as a teacher and mentor. Indeed, the hall was packed with his ex-students, Saitowitz among them. Like him, many are now fixtures in the architecture community in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Lecturing semi-extemporaneously, using book excerpts as a guide, Lerup walked the audience through his understanding of Houston as “neither a city nor a suburb,” best viewed and understood while moving through it. This reflects the perspective of time geography advocated by Torsten Hagerstand, he added, expressing his debt to the geographers. Polycentric and driven by what Lerup called "agglomeration economics"—location theory by another name—and subject to unwritten rules that have led inexorably to sprawl, Houston is nonetheless ripe for rethinking. Among its defects are the paving of its bayous (by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), its developers’ affection for the cul-de-sac, and the voracious nature of its urban centers, which as they expand constantly pressure the lower-density residential areas that surround them. Among Houston’s virtues are the tree canopy that shades many neighborhoods and helps the city breathe, and the dynamism that, with the addition of high-speed rail, it should increasingly share with other cities in the Texas triangle like Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio. Dynamism is a theme for Lerup. Swedish by birth but American by choice, he still has the successful immigrant’s optimism about his adopted country, now coupled with a genuine love for Houston. A “city apart,” it is best understood in a metabolomic sense, he argued. The way forward for Houston is to think of it as an organic whole, embracing its un-zoned self-management as a better means than zoning to build on its strengths and undo its defects.

Restoring Houston's bayous would acknowledge their inherent need to meander and the richness of their microenvironments. Undoing the cul-de-sac format of its subdivisions—the real building blocks of the city—and separating cars from houses could overcome the American tendency to create distance, instead knitting neighborhoods together as places for walking and encounter. In his introduction, Saitowitz mentioned the range of Lerup’s published work, including Building the Unfinished, which describes a through-block group of cottages in north Berkeley. Like a novelist, Lerup draws imaginatively on his life’s changing settings. In doing so, he makes certain points again and again: that the city is architecture’s real context; that architects, focused on the one percent as clients, have missed the much larger opportunities of the everyday; and that because a city is an organism, zoning imposes a false and reductive order on it, like paving the bayous. Houston is a force of nature, so it needs to be free to evolve as a living thing. Written for TraceSF, 13 March 2012.

Rodolfo Machado at Wurster Hall

“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 aimed to instruct, showing in detail how three of his projects moved from planning to completion, warts and all. After a short review of his work, Machado settled in to take a more detailed look at the three projects. Of the most recent, an addition to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he noted that the U.S. architecture magazines had declined to give it a serious review. It’s true that he designs against the grain of parametric form making. The first project he showed, the trapezoidal Olayan School of Business at the American University of Beirut, breaks free of the orthogonal nature of most of his work, but from its earliest days as an element in his campus master plan, it feels like handwork, untouched by a computer. Machado showed a watercolor detail from the plan that indicated how the sea would be visible as one walks down to the building. That detail was realized, he said, but a planned roof garden wasn’t—

the budget was cut, a big loss. This was one of the warts, mentioned to give students a sense of the real world in which his work unfolds. Deliberately contextual, the Olayan School’s stone-and-patternedblock façade was sourced locally. He explained how the façade evolved in response to the faculty’s desire for light and views, adding that local traditions, some centuries old, persist “and labor is cheap.” The result is a beautifully detailed building, especially compared to the stripped-down quality of 1960s-era additions to the American University of Beirut Campus, which he also showed. The second project was an arts-cultural complex in Silver Spring, Maryland, in an area that Machado described as “lacking context,” a victim of aggressive urban renewal (to the point of obliteration). Yet, planner that he is, he used the occasion to reinforce the area’s restored street grid and orient the new building to a revived pedestrian flow. This project also illustrated his interest in porosity—my word, not his, for the provision of multiple ways in and through, achieved or sometimes thwarted by security concerns. That impulse was one of the hallmarks of his plan for the UCSF Research Campus at Mission Bay, along with his innate concern for human scale and movement, attributes that were then systematically ignored by the university in application. “I haven’t been there in years,” Machado told me afterward. Good thing. The third project was his addition to the Chazen Museum of Art. The original, SOM-designed museum fronts a major campus promenade and view corridor. In the design competition, Machado anticipated the iconic tendencies of his rivals by sketching and then criticizing what they were likely to put forward to the jury. He had to address the difficulties of adding on to the existing museum, with its accentuated third floor, and the benefits of replicating that floor’s well-liked exhibition hall sequence. Disarmingly straightforward, Machado's addition creates a new whole that enlivens the plaza it now adjoins on both sides. It saves its symmetry for the top floors, which house the exhibition rooms and the bridge between the two buildings. From the entry to the promenade, the expanded museum appears as two symmetrical wings of a single building. From within the promenade, the two parts, new and old, feel related but very different, with the addition opening out to the plaza to provide a new entrance to the museum.

His appointed hour up, Machado stopped short of showing his latest projects in Buenos Aires. I would have liked to see them. “Next time,” he offered. Perhaps by then the man and his work will be back in favor. It seems crazy to ignore an architecture as thoughtful as his. While he eschews the methods and formal moves that are now in fashion, Machado’s work clearly has a method and a formal logic. Seen head on, in elevation, a view favored by some of his photographers, it can seem abstractly compositional, almost two-dimensional, but this is a misreading. In reality, it addresses place (in the present and future tense), human movement and engagement, and, in terms of the carefully composed façades, the micro-landscape of materiality, which he gives a dimensionality and variation reminiscent of the collages of Kurt Schwitters. Written for TraceSF, 3 April 2012.

Design Book Review (2019) In the summer of 2018, I learned from David Eifler, the librarian at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, that Design Book Review, the quarterly that Laurie Snowden and I founded in 1983, was digitized in its entirety by Google and placed behind a firewall administered by the Hathi Trust. Eifler also told me how it could be made accessible. I forwarded this information to David Meckel at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco — the person there with whom Laurie and I negotiated our gift of the journal in 1998. Meckel sent it to others, including Keith Krumwiede, CCA’s new architecture dean. He wrote back immediately: “I can’t believe we own this!” At that moment, the stars finally aligned, bringing DBR back from the dead. An event on 17 April 2019 at the Curatorial Research Bureau in San Francisco marked CCA’s launch of the digital archive. Now CCA Professor William Littman has given that archive a better portal. Looking ahead, CCA is planning symposia around DBR that I’m hopeful will involve the editors when Laurie and I owned and published it: Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho, a remarkable duo. Preparing for the launch event, Snowden and Littman posed some questions. Here are my responses.

You opted for an inclusive rather than a selective approach to design. Why?

One impetus for starting DBR was the volume of design-related titles, a considerable part of which was aimed at practitioners. We saw our audience as literate professionals, so we felt we should cover books aimed at them. In time, we became more selective to counter what we saw as a lowering of standards by some publishers, and to keep the DBR issues at a manageable size. But we still wanted to cover design broadly —the whole field, not just architecture. This reflected the ideals of U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, which sent its Design Department into exile at U.C. Davis in this period. Professor of Design Frances Butler was an early DBR contributor, so we were aware of this and opposed to it. What were your major dilemmas or controversies?

We took some heat for issues on the John Hancock Tower in Chicago and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, part of Richard’s “Buildings in Mid-Career” series. Some saw them as a sellout, but both issues have held up. An interview with Bruce Graham on Hancock was unintentionally funny, a bit like Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal. Our reexamination of postwar modernist icons, also 80

including the Ford Foundation and the Kimbell, coincided with the postmodernist and deconstructionist work and polemics then emerging. What determined the character of the magazine?

Editorially, Richard had a strong, lasting influence. Shaping and reshaping DBR was a collective effort, but Richard was able to connect ideas to people. He constantly came up with innovative themes and features. Early on, Mark Rakatansky helped us by enlisting contributors outside the Bay Area. Gordon Chun gave DBR a robust template that allowed for any number of departures, but gave us a fallback for issues without themes and for the many reviews that fell into categories. Gordon invited Zuzana Licko to design the feature wells of several issues — work that is immediately identifiable as hers, and yet fits easily with the rest. Just as we were exceptionally lucky to have Richard as our founding editor and later to have Cathy as his co-editor, we were very fortunate to start out with Gordon. Cathy's sister, Betty Ho, art-directed and designed DBR issues from 1993 to 1999. (Lucille Tenazas designed the cover of the “Home” issue, our last before CCA took DBR over. Yingzhao Li worked on CCA’s first issue before CCA took it over. Lucille then redesigned DBR, setting a new look and format for CCA’s issues.) To what do you attribute DBR’s longevity?

Our early losses were staggering—we were losing the equivalent of a Toyota Corolla a month at one point. So, getting it to breakeven was no small accomplishment. We ran DBR on a shoestring. Noticing that our newsstand sales often converted to subscriptions, we hired a Berkeley undergraduate to call bookstores, asking them to stock it. We ended up with a network of some 450 bookstores, plus distributors. One of them, which sold to Waldenbooks, was a goldmine while it was in operation. Our newsstand sales were substantially higher than our paid subscriptions. Our paid circulation was around 4,800 copies per issue. Thanks to Laurie’s sister Kathy Snowden, my wife, we had ad sales from the outset — and some remarkably loyal advertisers. We

also won multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. At different points, Bud Knapp, the founder of Architectural Digest, Dennis Cahill, the publisher of Architecture, and Hans-Peter Thür, the head of the Swiss publisher Birkhäuser, all expressed interest in buying DBR, but none of them followed through. MIT Press co-published DBR in the 1990s, an arrangement that ended messily. After we got it back, we did one issue before CCA took over. In short, we did what we had to do to keep it going. but we also produced one great issue after another, constantly rethinking the content. People liked it and kept reading. What did you gain by being based in Berkeley?

As Lars Lerup noted at the time, Berkeley was “a suburb of New York.” Yet it was far enough away from Manhattan to be out of the fray of the often-bitter feuds of that era. Our contributors were on both sides of various disputes, but they saw us as neutral ground. It helped that our cottage-industry credentials were real. Early on, our kids put stamps on the envelopes in which we sent the issues out. How did you decide on themes and special issues?

We constantly experimented. It helped that DBR was a book review and thus retrospective and anticipatory at once. The ideas came from everywhere, but less from other magazines and journals, and more from events like Le Corbusier’s centenary and from the zeitgeist to which we were attuned. John Loomis both guest-edited our “Other Americas” issue and raised money to pay for it. (It won an AIA national book award and had a lasting influence.) Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre were similarly involved editorially. We were open to that kind of collaboration and willing to plunge in. Were you influenced by other journals at the time?

We invoked the New York Review of Books if people objected to being edited. We admired the AA Files and sometimes ran articles from Casabella that Richard translated. The Dutch journal Archis and another from Denmark caught our attention. Some of our UK contributors wrote for Architectural Design (AD) and Architectural Review. Andrew Rabeneck, a former editor at AD who had taught 82

at the AA, was very helpful in opening doors. We also had crucial support early on from Spiro Kostof and Marc Treib at Berkeley, Kenneth Frampton at Columbia, and Bill Moggridge at IDEO. What can younger people get from Design Book Review?

It documented two important decades in design history, the 1980s and 1990s, in an unusually thorough way, grounded in ideas and drawing on people in the different fields of design who were well positioned to comment. As a consciously “cultural” journal, it always “looked up” to ask what else was happening. Hence themes like "gender" and “posthumanism” and a willingness to engage with transitions like industrial design’s embrace of tech and modernism’s dialectical passage through postmodernism and deconstructionism. It gave its contributors the freedom to range — it had some truly wonderful writing, which we encouraged and gave sufficient room. As written discourse struggles to get its bearings among competing genres, the online archive makes DBR accessible as a precedent. Note: In his acknowledgements to Buildings in Print (Prestel, 2021), John Hill wrote: It was important for me to read reviews of architecture books to ascertain how they were received upon initial publication, and in this regard Design Book Review...proved to be invaluable. The depths to which contributors reviewed architecture books in DBR is unmatched—before, during, or since. I posted my answers to Laurie Snowden and William Littman's questions about DBR on my Medium site (johnjparman.medium.com) on 18 April 2019. One hope following the online archive's appearance was to host a symposium at CCA that Richard Ingersoll would join. Alas, he died in Spain early in 2021.

The bicycle shed conundrum (2015) Pevsner’s buildings-versus-architecture distinction is back in play. A recent NYT op-ed piece1 by Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, “How to Rebuild Architecture,” led to a furious rejoinder2 from Aaron Betsky in Architect. In parallel, Architectural Review editor Catherine Slessor took Frank Gehry to task3 for dabbling in luxury goods. Contrasting Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum with a new primary school by Giancarlo Mazzanti, Slessor wrote that the latter “gets to the heart of what architecture should be: modest, socially minded and truly transformative.” These threads remind me of Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous distinction, “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”

Pevsner’s distinction suggests that Fondation Louis Vuitton is architecture and the primary school that Slessor mentions is not, but it has two aspects, scale and aesthetics. Lincoln Cathedral is meant to be visible, a landmark and destination. A bicycle shed is meant to be functional, but may also have aesthetic appeal. If it does, is it architecture? I would say yes—aesthetic appeal is how it rises out of mere strength and commodity (to cite Vitruvius) to provide delight. Bingler and Pedersen begin their op-ed by noting Bingler’s 88year-old mother’s dislike of an affordable housing project in Charlottesville, Virginia. While confessing that he likes it, Bingler says it’s indicative of the gap between architects and the public. Betsky retorts, “Good architecture can be startling, or least might not look like what we are used to.” Wallace Stegner makes the same point about nature—its “inhuman” scale can overwhelm us. (Thoreau viewed the “wildness” of the Maine woods similarly.) There’s an innate tension between the familiar and the new, whether it’s due to scale, appearance, or some other salient difference. Bingler and Pedersen also argue that contemporary architecture’s disconnection from the everyday condemns it to irrelevance. The term starchitect is invoked. Like Slessor, they see the world as two camps—the 0.1 percent and the deserving rest. What doesn’t pass

their litmus test of “common sense” gets lumped in the category of “fashion…indulgently removed from the real purpose of architecture,” in Slessor’s words. Betsky is right to resist, for two reasons. First, “common sense” too often leads to Poundbury or worse—dreadful New Urbanist concoctions. In an urban context, it leads to generic, market-driven density—the same towers and podiums endlessly repeated. (In this case, mass customization doesn’t even produce affordability. It’s like a skyline full of high-end cars.) Second, aesthetic progress is often bespoke, as Thorstein Veblen notes in Theory of the Leisure Class. A glance through history shows that “modest” has its own cult— remember that “dumb” and “ordinary” were often on the lips of an architect like Joseph Esherick in reference to his old-money houses. We accept that a bicycle can cost the earth, with a bamboo or carbon-fiber frame and other accoutrements that appeal to a minute fraction of bike riders, yet potentially benefit all of them if innovation finds its way down market. Betsky makes this point to argue for experimentation as a path to higher performance, while Slessor, Bingler, and Pedersen are mainly arguing against an “art for art’s sake” that ignores functionality. (Yet even frivolity has its uses. It produces masterpieces along with fluff. Even cathedrals have it.) In a panel I heard at SFMOMA, Betsky said of architecture that “it’s all art,” but his standpoint here is really Vitruvian. It maps to Pevsner’s in making aesthetic appeal the tipping point between architecture and buildings, but it keeps good-looking bike sheds in the picture while also admiring their commodity and firmness. As the writer Yukiko Bowman noted to me, ambition is in play here, not just aesthetics.4 This brings us to Pevsner’s invoking of scale. Is a bicycle shed architecture if the designer’s ambition creates something original? Or does its size eliminate that possibility? Consider the small church that Raphael designed near the Farnese Palace in Rome, or Tsien & Williams’ late, lamented Folk Art Museum. They suggest that scale isn’t the dividing line. Ambition, originality, daring—they also tip a building into architecture.

Notes: 1. Steven Bingler and Martin Pedersen, "How to Rebuild Architecture, New York Times, 15 December 2014. 2. Aaron Betsky, "The New York Times Versus Architecture," Architect, 23 December 2014. 3. Catherine Slessor, "Editorial View: Architecture has nothing in common with luxury goods," Architectural Review, 5 November 2014. 4. Yukiko Bowman, in an email to the author in late 2014. Posted on my Medium site (johnjparman.medium.com) on 18 January 2015, and prompted by a class that Eva Hagberg was teaching, but the details escape me.

Fifty shades of dismay (2015) I’m not a fan of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). There’s an Elks Club quality to it, and the people who work their way up its elected-leadership ladder often seem to be compensating for deficits elsewhere and/or preening on a bigger stage. Like other national organizations, the AIA reflects the localities of its membership. It has its Tea Party as well as its sophisticated urban chapters. The AIA recently declined to adopt an amendment to its ethics code, sponsored by Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR). that would have taken facilities for torture, execution, and prolonged isolation off the table for its architect members. (The San Francisco AIA chapter supported the amendment.) Explaining its action, AIA 2014 President Helene Combs Dreiling pointed to potential anti-trust and enforcement problems. “The AIA Code of Ethics should not exist to create limitations on the practice by AIA members of specific building types,” she wrote, quoting the special panel that considered and rejected the measure. It was the wrong decision. Perception meets reality In the court of public opinion, your rationale is worth less than zero if your actions belie your words. The aging roué Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in the dock in France, told the court that he was “busy saving the world” and unaware of the details of the sex parties he joined “only four times a year.” When a woman on the receiving end testified in detail about his party habits, perception and reality collided, leaving Strauss-Kahn nervously studying his watch and whispering to his attorney. Reading this in the news last week, the AIA’s flimsy, legalistic letter to the ADPSR came to mind. A few years ago, one of the American hikers that Iran detained and imprisoned, allowed to return to the U.S. on humanitarian grounds (she had cancer), took up the cause of banning prolonged isolation. Having experienced it herself, she correctly described it as torture. Ever since 9/11, but undoubtedly before then, the U.S. government has resorted to torture and summary, extra-judicial murder on the grounds of national security. We are all party to its actions, which are taken in our name by governments we elected. They are “busy saving the world.” Meanwhile, the federal 88

government and most U.S. states have death rows. Facing problems with lethal injection, a few are planning to revive the electric chair and firing squad. Becoming what we condemn The resolution that ADPSR put forward is a finger in the dike, but it’s our finger—our opportunity as a profession to speak out against powers that torture and kill, judicially and extra-judicially, without much compunction. The AIA’s refusal endorses these powers and ignores the wishes of many of its urban constituents. It privileges business as usual and displays cowardice and/or political bias. One precedent is Albert Speer. His defense did not impress the Nuremberg judges or history, and his condemnation is relevant to the AIA: the failure to act isn’t a trivial matter when issues of real import are at stake. Heidegger is another precedent, perhaps more relevant—a celebrated philosopher whose work was tainted by his dealings with the Nazis. They shared a moral blindness. As citizens, we’re exposed to conflicting narratives about how to confront real and dangerous problems that are often partly of our own making. Faced with them, how should we conduct ourselves? How should we live and work? There are no simple answers, but there are some fairly clear choices. When we abet state-sanctioned torture and murder, we risk becoming what we condemn. The AIA has turned a blind eye to the profession's complicity in these deplorable acts. I see four possible steps in response: 1. Chapters should endorse the ADPSR’s resolution and make it clear to their members that they’re holding them to a higher ethical standard. (The AIA, anticipating local dissent, made its code of ethics the only standard.) 2. Chapters should reintroduce the ADPSR measure and demand a new vote. 3. If the AIA refuses to vote it through, chapters should withdraw from it. 4. If none of the above happens, individual members should resign from the AIA or its chapters, depending on their affiliation.

Break down the walls A cultural sea change catches out the unreconstructed, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who try to live on as if nothing has happened. Individually and collectively, we are exposed daily to this often-visible dissonance. It can make us crazy or prompt us to act.

If the latter, then what’s needed is real debate about the shape this new world will take. Architects should be at the heart of it, pressing for reform up and down the line. AIA chapters, spurred by activism at their doors, should join them, because the AIA nationally is MIA. That the need to take concrete action on an issue this fundamental eludes it speaks to a moral blindness. If it persists, then it’s time to opt for a new organization with the requisite relevance and courage. Posted on my Medium site (johnjparman.medium.com) on 15 February 2015. It appeared a nanosecond before Michael Kimmelman wrote his take in the New York Times, and the late Kirsten Richards linked to both on ArchNewsNow, giving my piece unusual traction. Mimi Zeiger also wrote on this topic for Architectural Review. The AIA eventually adopted ASPSR's resolution.

Living in a material world (2020) “The true reality of an object lies only in a part of it; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to the material world in exchange for its existence in space.” — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, New Directions, 2017, p. 76.

Buildings fall into two broad categories — those that aim for this pared-down essence and those that make a display of the tribute paid. Bucky Fuller idealized the former, seeking lightness in the manner of Zeno’s paradox. His self-proclaimed disciple Norman Foster makes a fetish of the tribute, structure rendered as ornament. So-called minimalism, if mired in materiality, uses endurance as its building blocks or shrinks things — tiny houses, guestroom capsules, sleeping pods — hoping we won’t notice their solidity. Traditional Japanese houses, with demountable wooden frames and mats and screens that are ephemeral by design, are the exception. At a certain point, Fuller introduced time into his concept of lightness. His four-dimensional houses were as physically light as he could make them, but they were also intended to be lived in only when needed. If this idea is played out, everything might change. We can imagine a service economy in which a fresh set of clothes follows us from place to place, arriving in the night. For ultimate portability, even our shoes might change — espadrilles, sandals, clogs, or boots instead of shoes designed more exactly for our feet. We may retain one seasonal outdoor pair, shed each quarter. To extend Pessoa’s observation, this "lightness" also involves a sleight of hand, with an apparatus no less weighty for being external to the households it serves. As we cease to shop as we did, the mass goods we still buy come from warehouses in delivery trucks. Despite the threat of automation, workers handle this. Artisanal workshops, farmers/specialty markets, craft breweries, and individually owned restaurants and cafés are each locale's walkable counterpoint. How the great “houses” of bespoke goods find their place is not yet clear. Will they form networks of affiliates that produce bespoke goods and import them for their high-end clientele? If life is local and segmented, retail rents will fall back to earth. The food and beverage business might split between commodities and imports obtainable in bulk and what a region’s farms and vineyards raise to sell seasonally to local buyers through local shops and markets. 91

Warehouse retailing already reflects how politics affects trade. The urge to decouple from China reflects a clearer sense of the weight of the tribute. This can be extended to intellectual property, for example, which we’ve often handed over to gain access to a market we saw as vast and steadily wealthier. True, but also a market innately given to import substitution. Ironically, architecture was a leading indicator — the high-grade steel and tailored façades imported from Korea were substituted by Chinese products five years later. Now China is looking for other places to export its factories. Southeast Asia is pricing itself out, so Africa is the logical next choice — resource- and labor-rich. China will revive its countryside, recreating a docile, agrarian village cohort and tone down its restless cities. Only the bought-off, upwardly mobile middle classes will thrive in cities, served by an underclass of ambitious migrants. Industry will be tamed and pollution will be reduced. All that will move to Africa, which will grow fetid catering to this new colonial power. The big democracies — Brazil, the U.S., and India — resemble each other in their contradictions. Parts of them aspire to rise to a higher standard; other parts are mired in corruption and ignorance. But they can no longer hide their problems. They will either reform or fragment. Regions, if they control their own fates, face the same existential choice—work together or be divided and conquered. An oligarchy already runs ours, arranging for concessions to be made by others to the restless underclass in order to remain in power. Politicians negotiate this process, dogging the professional class with fees and taxes to mollify blocks of disaffected voters who blame that class, not the oligarchy, for their plight. National policies to tax the corporate sources of oligarchic wealth may undo this, with corporations finally made to pay the real cost of their local impacts. “Object” in Pessoa's sense should find wider application — not just to buildings or blood diamonds, but everything that trades on its surface appearance and keeps its workings hidden or unmentioned, whether it involves sweatshops, exploited labor, pollution, or profits that in a societal sense are unearned and even grotesque. The rest is too large, too out of scale with everything around it, to be ignored. We have to reckon with its true reality: the size of the tribute. Posted on my Medium site (johnjparman.medium.com) on 12 December 2020.

Occasionally almost autistic (2008) Anna Klingmann believes architecture has lost its connection to the "people and places that are the most important inspiration for everything that is done in design." While most designers think experientially, aiming to transform the everyday, but architects see their work as abstracted from the people and places it affects. Klingmann's Brandscapes surveys a century's worth of urban development, asking how it relates to and supports those who live and work in it. It's a singular reading that, moving at a gallop, misses almost nothing. Her critiques are nuanced rather than dismissive, always noting what she thinks the architect, theory, or movement got right. Her one real hero is Louis Kahn—admired for restoring "two vital qualities of experience that were expurgated by the modern movement, 'being' and 'context.'"1 She explains how Las Vegas's mega-casinos use the methods of filmmaking, emulating Jon Jerde. Attempting to make architecture experientially vital by generating it from a mixed program or an algorithm strikes her as occasionally almost autistic in its effort to isolate the design process from human engagement. Klingmann is stronger on diagnosis than treatment, but the gist of her prescription is for architects to take the everyday seriously and draw closer to the people who experience their work. She points to the research that drives other types of design, contrasting a curiosity about end users with architecture's hermetic stance. Missing in her polemic are those who really call the shots in cities—the political leaders, with their arbitrary power and frequent neglect of urbanity. When politicians see the "brand value" of an experientially richer, place-redolent architecture, we may see some demand for it. Notes: 1. Klingmann is quoting John Lobell's February 1978 Artforum article on Kahn and Venturi.)

A review of Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy, MIT, 2007, written for Architectural Record, March 2008.

Two lectures: Denari and Bousquets (2014) Neil Denari at Wurster Hall

Neil Denari reminded me of a jazz musician like Dave Brubeck, as I imagined him from the album covers, skirting the line between one genre and another while maintaining a businesslike demeanor. Attentive to details in a borderline obsessive way, he's also like Arata Isozaki (not quite so detail oriented) in the way he mines a particular formal move ("trope," as Denari put it) to the point of exhaustion. His theme was the coexistence of the concrete and the mysterious. In one example, this came down to juxtaposing a white element with a curved, thin wood-covered, darker one. Most impressive of his built work was his ultra-luxe condo "tower" next to the High Line at W. 23rd St., which I saw without realizing it was his. It's very good, projecting out over the walkway without intruding on it, unlike any number of upmarket wonders nearby that make the High Line their feature in a "seen-and-be-seen" way. Denari contrasted his work to "moral modernism" while discussing the High Line tower's graphic expression of structure. (The actual structure is set back behind the façade.) Moral modernism would want to express its structure in reality, he said, defending not doing so in the name of mystery. Later, he distinguished his work from parametric exercises done for plutocrats. (I paraphrase.) Zaha Hadid was mentioned, not favorably, yet he acknowledged that the High Line tower was also tipped to the high end, with no need to value engineer. This led to an explanation of the simplicity of a tower in China—using a single prefab panel instead of the High Line's multiple panels, one of which was truly bespoke. ("Only he could do it," he said, referring to the structural engineer in Buenos Aires who fabricated a particularly beautiful opaque one.) Denari showed a taller tower in Vancouver that's still under wraps and is chock full of micro-units that he also designed and furnished. It's different—Miesian but with notches that push the height and add corners and asymmetry. The tiny, highly transparent apartment reminded me of the Automat of my NYC youth: young people on display. (The critic Trevor Boddy wrote once that voyuerism is an issue in Vancouver, owing to the proximity of glass95

enveloped towers.) Denari showed several projects in Asia, noting a current interest in "responsive icons" after a client in Taiwan called for "an icon" in its competition brief. Responsive as opposed to responsible, he added, but the real contrast appeared to be to towers like the Gherkin that really work for it. Towers took up the last part of his talk and included an unrealized one that reminded me of Minoru Takeyama's nightclub towers in Tokyo. I asked Denari about them and he recalled that one of them was on the cover of Charles Jenck's book on postmodernism. "I show it to my students to tell them, 'Who says you can't do an orange building?'" he said. Like the High Line tower, many of Denari's projects have graphic elements woven into them. "I also studied graphic design," he explained. Joan Bousquets at Wurster Hall

Harvard Professor Joan Busquets is best known as a planner of his native city, Barcelona, where he has an architecture and urban planning firm. Busquets has written a number of books, one of which—Cities X Lines –formed the basis for his talk. X in this case means 10. He used the word tracks as a synonym for lines, but I would call them types of urban intervention. His talk focused on four of them—extending, decentralizing, transforming or restructuring, and re-qualifying or upgrading—using his work as case studies. Along the way, he noted that the Shanghai metropolis and the Netherlands are both developing 80 new towns. (This was part of a discussion of decentralization.) He noted that Toledo in Spain has the same urban pattern as traditional Arab cities. The blocks are subdivided into plots less than 20 square meters each, which leads to a fabric of three-to-four-story buildings. Discussing a project for Toulouse, he noted how the computer's ability to layer made possible a quantum leap in the richness of plans for new urban development, since every element (like the trees, for example) can be considered in detail by specialists and then reintegrated into the whole. He added, in reference to putting a train line that serves and passes through the center of Delft into a below-grade tunnel, how much urban planning owes to and learns from engineers.

He then compared Barcelona to two other gridded cities, New York and San Francisco. Barcelona's grid was a 19th-century extension of the historic city. As an aerial photo shows, it has a very uniform pattern of midrise, attached buildings on separate sites that define the street front and enclose a large inner open space. The pattern accommodates a remarkable variety of architectural styles without losing its coherence. He also showed the redevelopment of the harbor, parts of which followed the morphology of the waterfront. We may quarrel with the way some of it was implemented, he said, but the attention to context—mediating between the city grid and the harbor, creating a public beach, and solving the environmental problems that Barcelona had heretofore caused for the Mediterranean, like raw sewage pouring into it— made the area's redevelopment a success. Cities are complex, Busquets concluded, but we finally have the tools to contend with their complexity. If plans were simpler in the past, this reflected the real limits of the planners' understanding— their analytical tools were inadequate. Some bemoan the loss of this simplicity, but in fact we should be grateful to find ourselves with "fantastic tools" that can assist our analyses and our designs. Separate posts on my blog journal, Writing & Design, March and April 2014.

Who designed this? (2021) Ted Cohen's elaborate credits at the end of Signe Mayfield's recent monograph on him and his work acknowledge his understanding that even very small exhibitions are the work of many. As a collector, Cohen also upheld the primacy of objects and the vast care needed to exhibit them safely. Born in Oakland, California, in 1928, Cohen—who died of leukemia earlier this summer—was part of a generation of west coast architects, artists, designers, musicians, and poets whose work offered a counterpoint to east coast modernism. The struggles that roiled our cities were integral to this mix: injustices that were felt here, before and after World War II, often with a racist subtext. Not for nothing is it known as the Left Coast, and Cohen's work addressed this. A collaborative effort, The Object in its Place was helmed by Mayfield, for 21 years the curator at the Palo Alto Art Center, now on her own. Along with Cohen, it has contributions from curator Christine Knoke Hietbrink of the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, which will inherit Cohen's wonderful collections; directors Linda Craighead of the Palo Alto Art Center and JoAnn Edwards of the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco; and the residential designer and Cohen collaborator Gary Hutton. Mayfield weaves into its 172 pages a survey of Cohen's mature work; his own pocket history—in eight slides—of his field's evolution since 1599; and what amounts to a tutorial on contemporary exhibition design. There are numerous case studies and 45 lessons for the book's multiple audiences to absorb and apply. There's even an aside on exhibiting art in such healing environments as children's hospitals and sheltered workshops. Many of Cohen's lessons caught my eye. Their applications range beyond exhibitions. For example, Interior architecture is a silent partner in any exhibition design process. Salient architectural characteristics are best integrated within the exhibition design. By seamlessly blending such disparate elements into an overall configuration, the cohesive plan will help sustain the viewer's attention. To make small exhibition spaces appear larger, consider colors in lighter, cooler tones, which are generally receding. By placing smaller objects at the 98

end of a gallery, there may be a further illusion of the diminishing perspective in distance.

My cousin Laure de la Chapelle, classically trained in France as a textile designer and restorer—she helped restore a floor-to-ceiling tapestry that Marie-Antoinette installed at Versailles—expressed her disdain for a well-heeled museum in Southern California that restores old chairs in its collection using foam, not the original horsehair. One of Cohen's lessons is apropos: In furniture exhibitions, consider ways in which to highlight construction that is significant to the craft of the medium. Videos, sequential images of the makers' processes, and photographs of interior sections are suggestions.

My cousin might add that design students need to experience the process first hand. "How else will they learn how it's done?" Bookending Mayfield's deep dive into exhibition design is a tour of Cohen's Wunderkammer apartment, and a long conversation between him and interior designer Gary Hutton on the challenges of designing for private collectors. It reflects Mayfield's inclusionary spirit that her book addresses people who collect, and not just at a grand scale. It offers tips on how to make a collection add up to a greater sum. For once, Marie Kondo is not invoked. While Cohen's apartment might terrify her, she'll find some relief in his Lesson 28: Never underestimate the importance of using negative space in exhibition design. Negative space is as important as the positive space of the object.

I live a short train ride from the Oakland Museum of California where Cohen did much of his work. His permanent and temporary exhibits there came back to mind as I read Mayfield's book. In the 1980s, I saw exhibitions by Frank Gehry at LACMA and John Outram at the V&A. With the exceptions of Ralph Appelbaum and Joe Wetzel, I couldn't name another exhibition designer. Cohen's modesty—his sense of himself as just one of many who made each exhibition happen—is in keeping with a Bay Area sensibility that I see across a spectrum of creative people of his generation. The work is about something larger than itself: the art or objects on display, and the people who gather there to experience it. They come away remembering what they saw and how well they saw it,

akin to modest houses whose windows frame memorable views. Who designed that? The question is almost an afterthought. Such modesty put Cohen at risk of being overlooked. Hence this book. A review of Signe S. Mayfield, The Object in its Place: Ted Cohen & the Art of Exhibition Design, the Mingei International Museum, San Diego, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museum of Craft and Design, and Fine Arts Press, 2020. Written as a journal post, ARCADE, 29 September 2021.

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John J. Parman is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, Architect's Newspaper, ORO Editions' A+RD research imprint, and Room One Thousand, the annual edited by graduate students at U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is a visiting scholar. In 1983, he and Laurie Snowden founded Design Book Review, edited by Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho, and published it until 1998. In 1989, he and Richard Bender founded the Urban Construction Laboratory to address a range of urban topics. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden founded Snowden & Parman, an editorial consultancy, continuing their ongoing collaboration. Educated in architecture and planning, Parman lectured at U.C. Berkeley and California College of the Arts in the mid-1980s and again in 2004. He had a 40-year career in the field, with stints at EHDD, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and then at Gensler, where, as editorial director, he launched two of its flagship publications, Dialogue (2000) and the Design Forecast (2013). His team's work received the highest awards from Graphis and Arc International, and was twice a finalist for Folio awards for editorial excellence.

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Elizabeth Snowden's Pallas Bookstore & Gallery features rare and unusual art, design, and architecture books, artifacts, and ephemera; exhibits creative work in a variety of media; and mounts invitational events and performances. Opening hours are posted weekly on Instagram (@_p_a_l_l_a_s) or by appointment. Pallas is located at 1111 Geary in San Francisco, just west of Van Ness on the south side of Geary. (Details are at www.thepallasgallery.com)

Elizabeth Snowden and John J. Parman founded their eponymous editorial studio in January 2019. (Details are at www.spedit.net)

Subject Matters II

Articles inside

Living in a material world

The bicycle shed conundrum

Fifty shades of dismay

Design Book Review

Is architectural licensing necessary? (2020

Two lectures: Lars Lerup and Rodolfo Machado

Some notes on value propositions (2019

Design firms need a both/and ethos (2021

Aphorisms for architects (2020

Art Gensler's treatise of the firm (2021

Beverly Willis in the 1980s and 1990s (2021

In appreciation of Sally Byrne Woodbridge (2020

Another line of practice (2012

The architecture critic as activist (2005

The classical imagination (2017

My postmodernists (2012

Great Man theory (2016

The pursuit of the ordinary (1983

Joseph Esherick's houses (2008

Preface to Dinners with Chuck(2021

The rogue element (2016

Work as if immortal (2017

The Bay Region reconsidered (2006