And let the waves carry you away.

 

A Morning at the Symphony. The Davies Symphony Hall is a an interesting departure from some of our destinations in that it is a building designed around acoustical aesthetics as much the visual. Designing for sound is something I often associate with the acoustic tile that tiled every ceiling in my high school, beige miles of little holes, but designing the buildings that hold world class musicians demands something a more intense and beautiful.

Inside the hall is designed for experiencing the symphony. In addition to acoustics built into the architecture of the space, there are multiple methods of controlling sound quality. One method is the "laundry" panels, large cloth screens, that can be raised and lowered to absorb sound. Another method is the acoustical ceiling.

 

Sheets of plexiglass hang from the ceiling and can be controlled to direct the sound. Sitting in on such an early rehearsal was a unique opportunity. We could hear the conductor giving notes on how he thought the piece should be performed. It almost gave me flashbacks when he clapped out the beats, but he seemed a lot more jovial than any on my teachers. I was torn between wanting to sit closer to hear his notes better and trying not to relive traumatic emotions I associate with band. I decided to lean back, close my eyes and listen to both the skilled musicianship, but the astounding acoustics.

There are parts I miss about playing in band. The friendships you make while playing together everyday, the discipline and commitment, the trips. The trips were really fun. I miss the feeling of tension, apprehension, the electricity of stepping out on to stage, the stage fright that gives into practice confidence and the wave of relief and pride when it's all over. Other things I don't miss at all, scales, fighting for chairs, bowties and cumberbunds... Actually uniforms in general. There is such an emphasis upon unity when you are performing in a group. From the attire to synchronized movement to precise style of the triplets, the group flourishes under a hive-mind driven by the conductor (or terrifying teacher).

Music was sold to me as an art form, but after a certain level I had difficulties finding the personal expression that it once held. From there I moved on to music tutoring, trying to help kids have the same opportunities I had. It was more fun than playing, teaching, encouraging, prodding, shoving my students toward at least a higher level of music appreciation. Without the high pressure to meld as one, they added so much of there own personality. Maybe in a few years they would be stowing it the instrument cases with keepsake postcards and photos.

Arts & Crafts, Heavy on the Craft

 

  Walking up the UC Berkeley Frat row is an aesthetic immersion all of it's own. You can find no shortage of Cal flags flying from houses of varying upkeep, decks with Christmas light decor piled with bikes and surfboards, spray-painted rush signs, some remaining evidence of thirsty Thursdays, the stereotype of the college experience visually exudes so severely from a few houses, they practically give you beer pong flashbacks. But not all the houses are like this and it was obvious upon approach which house we were there to tour, the outlier, the Thorsen house which stands distinguished and determined despite seeming out of place. We could even catch a glimpse of our tour guide straightening the curtains in the dining room window, preparing to show us with pride this last stand of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The house is huge, 10000 sq ft, but originally built for just a family of four and servants. Now it holds members of the fraternity Sigma Phi, unexpectedly enthusiastic stewards of the property. The Thorsen house was bulit in 1909 and is one of the four "Ultimate Bungalows" designed by the Arts and Crafts era firm of Greene & Greene. In addition to the house, the Greens were also commissioned to design much of the furniture that filled the house and to do some of the original paintings that adorn the walls of the living room and dining room.

There were so many beautiful details in the house, it was difficult to choose what to discuss. Some of my favorite parts of the house were the exotic hardwoods used in the entry, the winding floral pattern that glows through the front door stained glass windows, the iron tie designs found in the pillars of the backyard. Click the thumbnails if you want to see more photos from the trip on flickr. It seems like in almost every picture there is detail that could easily go passed unnoticed, but together create something more than the sum of its parts.

 

There are a lot of influences that come together harmoniously in the house. Sometimes the mixing of themes and perspectives creates a tension in a piece, but the Greenes were masters of their craft and wove in each piece beautifully. There are the Japanese influences that can be seen in the front door and torii motifs that can be seen in the porch columns. There are floral motifs in the handpainted wall sections, the tiling around the fireplaces, and in the stained glass that subtlety bring the nature surrounding the house indoors, an important element of arts and crafts era construction that wanted to create homes appropriate to the location. Even the owner's love of boats is built into the house, with the dining room and living room both pointing out like the bows of ships breaking through waves and a large painting of boats dominating the hall space. Rather than being a distraction, the elements were added in subtle details that are surprising and beautiful when you notice them. Nothing fights for attention. 

Greene and Greene were masters of detail and craft, didn't cut corners, and their careful thought and attention is evident in even the locks of the cabinets, the grain of the floor, the boat on the garden gate.

Tea Ceremony in 8 Haikus

tea ceremony

enter, remove the world's dust

and enjoy your tea

kneel on tatami

listen to the tea kettle

watch the sparks and clouds

be in the moment

focus upon this time here

photograph later

each movement practiced

a ritual dance of calm

it's motion designed

beautiful objects

belongings of the future

lovingly cared for

green powder mountains

rest within a lacquer box

spoon by spoon it shrinks

black rakuware bowl

you see the imperfections

within you, wabi 

my apologies

for the quiet perception

my cough disrupted

At first the Tea ceremony seemed an adventure in time travel, to a place mostly forgotten in the pace of our culture, a retreat to a place of calm and strange juxtaposition. Where tea moved from shiny lacquer boxes to rough hand shaped bowls. The flammable paper walls and tatami mat floors held a hearth that could set the place ablaze. Careful and deliberate movements created a sense of calm and reflection. The entire experience was intensely detail-oriented in it's design from movements that moved the kimonos gracefully to the chabana that reflect the passage of time in a more appropriate way. I enjoyed a retreat from my normal reality.

But the second part, I'm sick, so about ten minutes in I felt the tickle in the back of my throat and what had been a time of thought and experience quickly dissolved into drawn out torture of trying not to cough. The quiet was the more apparent as I had nothing to muffle my cough behind. It seemed inappropriate to leave, not to mention difficult as we were closely packed, and even if I left, it had paper walls and would have accomplished little. I thought incessantly of the closet where my backpack held Robitussin but ignorant to proper etiquette about tea ceremony sick leave, I just prayed that my cough would pass. Prayed futilely. I understand that this seems silly to write about, but it's what I remember. Everyone was understanding, accommodating, but I think I missed a lot of what we were there to discover and I hope to one day get another chance to experience, sorry if I negatively affected yours. So, not my greatest Aesthetic Immersion, but they can't all be winners. The room was beautiful, our hosts knowledgeable and accomplished, and the information interesting, but the misery of sickness had a victory that day. Thank you for the tea, hope I'll see you again.

A kettle's-eye view.

In another class I'm reading the Tales of Genji so our teacher asked Ginny Dofflemeyer, a professor I've had twice before, to give a presentation that I found very enlightening as to the development of on Japanese aesthetic. In many pieces and within the concept of wabi-sabi there is an appreciation of asymmetry in the works. Early Japanese designs and layouts of cities and sites were often greatly influenced by the symmetrical designs found in China. Japan though is a very hilly environment which made such plans often time difficult to construct, especially for places such as monasteries, which by earlier edict had been required to be at the edges of towns and cities. More frequently in places where large symmetrical enclosures were impossible, smaller structures were created in multiple level spaces. Paths lead from building to building which created a flow, allowing experimentation with experience and asymmetrical spaces. As you follow a path, what do you see at each place, how do you control the next vista? Just one way Japan developed unique style from China.

Peru Valley Embroidery

 

Road to Ollantaytambo 2"x3" Hand Embroidery

This Week in Aesthetic Immersion: The Paramount Theater

Last Friday we took another jaunt on the 51 bus, but this time in the other direction down to the Paramount Theater. Once the premiere movie palace of Oakland, it's now a California and National Landmark, a stunningly preserved monument to the Art Deco movement and the golden era of movies. The Paramount was designed in a time where great emphasis was put upon creating an environment so distinct from everyday life that it would transport you away from that reality into "a momentary Shangri-La" during your movie going experience. I imagine walking in from the street and entering into this other jungle-inspired world of luxury and the exotic and I'm not sure I'm ready to watch a movie, rather than to stare at the ceiling, stairs, the sheer size of the Grand Lobby. That's what hit me, the space is big and unexpected, the giant neon sign outside only a teaser to the drastic shift in scale you're going to experience. So it's a hard place to photograph. Looking at my first shots, it was clear that I wasn't quite capturing the scale, the grandeur, the emotion of the environment. It seemed I was only able to show small pieces, trying to capture detail work, the big picture was lost. The space is what struck me, so it's what I tried to show by combining my photos and looking at this in my blog, I think you need to click them and see the pictures full size.

The Grand Lobby

My favorite part was the lighting. The "windows" in the lobby maybe not be real but recreates the light of  a golden hour that will last forever. Underneath the balcony seating is incredible fixtures that remind me of giant glowing space flowers. And the ceilings, they were one of my favorite parts, vast back-lit lace. Our knowledgeable tour guide Ken told us that it's possible to walk on these ceiling sections, although we the public don't have access. It would be incredible one day to see the theater from a different perspective.

The ceiling inside the theater. 

This one got confusing so it's not the best, 

but the ceilings were one of my favorite parts. 

Ken gave a us light show, click the link and 

see the whole ceiling change color.

The Paramount was designed during the glamorous era of the roaring twenties, but within a month after the property was bought the stock market crashed, bringing economic crisis that would last a decade. Paramount Publix decided to continue with construction as planned and the theater was completed in a remarkable year and five days, staying on budget by clever use of materials and planning. Despite the increasingly desperate economic climate, the Paramount opened with fanfare, celebrities and ceremony. It was forced to close its doors six months later, and sat empty and dark for decades. The best show in town waiting for a better day.

Always the best show in town

It was weird to walk around the theater and think about the Paramount sitting in disuse for so many years, slowly falling to the wear of time. It's a space where all the details were considered important and were carefully crafted, and after only a short time in the sunshine so to speak, they were locked up and ignored.

My last trip to Peru, I walked with some friends to the ruins of Pumamarka, an unrestored Incan site above the town of Ollantaytambo where we were living. It's a long hike but there are two ways to get there, you can walk a path through the forest or alongside the winding road. We chose the path, it's longer but far more adventurous, a well worn trail for the first couple hours, then a bit more intuitive for the next. There's not much back there, some houses, farms, gated yards, but the forest become denser as you retreat from town. And then suddenly a white-walled complex of large empty rooms, no glass panes in the windows that overlooked an overgrown courtyard, ready and wired for electricity but connected to nothing, an unfinished space that nobody was trying to complete so instead the forest had started its reclamation. Before the recession, when people still were traveling there had been the reason and means to create what I heard was suppose to be a luxury hotel, the largest in town, but then tourism slowed and construction halted. It sits in wait, decaying and more than a little creepy. 

An easily imagined timeline of a building's life might go something like: plan building, build it, occupy it (different groups may come and go), fix it occasionally, and when it's too old, tear it down and repeat. But architecture seems to reach for new heights and superlatives in times of building booms, attempting to create the most modern, or most lavish, or the greatest engineering feats. When the bubble bursts, mass abandonment. The Paramount was completed almost within the first year of the depression and stayed open only 6 months, that to me seems like barely making it. In this recession we experience the same phenomenon, except maybe worse. The entry Ruins of the Present from Bruce Sterling's blog (he is also the author of the Shaping Things book from History of ID) touches upon the lack of a word for uncompleted abandoned building projects that are the new trademark of the places that just a few years ago would see the same building as a symbol of progress and growth. They aren't ruins, but what exactly do you call a building that never gets used? Sculpture? The Wapato Jail in Portland, Oregon never accepted a single inmateafter completion, so is it still a jail? And what do we do with these creations?

When the Oakland Symphony bought the building in the 70s, they had to do a major restoration to bring the theater up to snuff, but it was given a second life. Now owned by the city, it is the home of the East Bay Symphony and is "one of San Francisco Bay's premiere performing arts facilities" -Paramount. We are lucky to have the Paramount around and today we can look at it as a beautiful example of American art deco, but I'm sure it wasn't looking so rosy the day they shut the doors in 1932. Things aren't looking great now for our "squelettes" but perhaps like the Oakland Symphony, it's artists that can save them.

Embroidery Projects

 

This was an ornament I made during the holidays, approximately 2.5'' diameter. Its backed with tie silk.