The Brower Center at Oxford and Allston Streets.

The recently completed David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley is a memorial to a major figure in this country’s environmental movement. Brower served as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club from 1952 fo 1960 and later founded such environmental organizations as Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute. He inspired a generation of environmental activists, some of whom now work in the building at the intersection of Allston Way and Oxford Street that bears his name.

Thirty some national and international groups occupy 24,000 sq. ft. of office space on the building’s upper three floors. Their mission is to foster collaborations, engage new people in advocacy and facilitate cross-sector communication and partnerships.

Although the work of the building’s tenants is a story in itself, the subject of this article is the Center’s building design and its structural system, which were created to insure that the physical embodiment of Brower’s legacy would be a state-of-the-art expression of his life’s work. The building is on track to receive a LEED platinum rating—the highest possible—from the US Green Building Council.

Plans show the shape of the site and the Brower Center's rounded facade derived from the street corner it faces. Plans of the Oxford Plaza housing are shown on the right.

The building’s site is unusual in that the corner it faces has a rounded edge. This feature prompted the architects, WRT/Solomon E.T.C., to design a rounded façade that enables a more natural flow of space than the typical right-angled street corner. Pedestrian traffic flows from the building’s entrance on Allston Street past the Center’s ground-floor restaurant, Gather, to a gated open space between the Center and the apartment complex, Oxford Plaza.

The building’s façade suggests a temple form with engaged columns set on a raised base, a slightly projecting attic story above, and a cornice, which departs from the classical type by continuing the solid array of photovoltaic panels on the south side with a slatted trellis that follows the roof line and rises as it curves around the eave from south to north like an upturned hat brim.

View of the Brower Center from a building across Oxford Street.
Both photographs on this page are by Tim Griffith.

The panels’ downward slant on the south side moderates the greater amount of daylight entering the building from that direction and reduce heat gain in the summer; their upward tilt on the north side increase the admission of light to meet the seasonal greater need. Measures like these have made the interior nearly 100% daylit.

In respect to materials, the metal used for the façade is zinc, which requires less energy to mine and work into forms than aluminum or steel. Its matt surface avoids glare. The window glass redirects sunlight and thereby reduces heat gain. Operable window sections allow changes in ventilation.

The concrete used in the building is 70% blast furnace slag in the foundation and 50% slag in the super structure. The use of this by-product of manufacturing steel reduces the building’s energy content and its “carbon footprint” by 40%. The Brower Center is the first Bay Area Project to use high-slag concrete on such a scale.

The BRIDGE Housing Corporation, a non-profit company considered by many to be the state’s foremost developer of affordable housing, has built more than 13,000 housing units since its founding in 1983. Although Bridge’s original focus was housing for working families, it has diversified and now has several affiliates and a staff of about 250, enabling it to handle every aspect of financing, planning, development and maintenance of the projects it owns and manages.

Although outreach to the community surrounding its projects has always been an integral part of BRIDGE’s approach to building housing in California, its scope has expanded to include the components of communities and to transforming existing neighborhoods.

This article focuses on the early history of BRIDGE, beginning with an account of its founding and its early projects, Holloway Terrace in 1985, and Parkview Commons in 1990. The recently completed Mission Walk development comprises two buildings on Berry Street in Mission Bay. The missing period of enormous expansion between 1990 and 2009 will doubtless be covered in the detail it deserves, but a blog post is not adequate for that task.

The impetus for starting BRIDGE in San Francisco, which remains its headquarters, was an anonymous gift of approximately $650,000 entrusted to the San Francisco Foundation in late 1980.

The funds were dedicated to creating affordable housing and came at a time when the Bay Area’s high costs of living threatened the stability of the workforce because its members were being priced out of the housing market.

The nine-page document that accompanied the gift contained the following statement:

“The donor has had and still has a strong interest in housing for persons and families of low and moderate income. However well intentioned, various federal programs, e.g., Section 8, have not delivered enough housing to either the inner cities or elsewhere to meet the enormous demand. This in turn suggests that what the private sector needs is a program for the construction or rehabilitation of housing for low and moderate income groups which would attract private investors interested in meeting a real national need and still make economic sense to investors and the business community.

Accordingly, this gift must be used to form a relatively small task force to study the problem, using all the academic disciplines from Bay Area universities at the faculty and graduate school level. Membership of the task force should also include enough experienced businessmen and bankers to avoid too heavy an academic orientation.”

The foundation asked Alan Stein, an investment banker, to chair the task force and select its members. Stein had come to San Francisco from New York City in 1971 to head the office of Goldman Sachs. In 1978 Governor Jerry Brown appointed him Secretary of Business and Transportation, which had ten departments, one of which was Housing and Community Development. Since the HCD department lacked a director at that time, Stein’s first task was to fill that position.

For advice in finding a new director Stein consulted Richard Bender, then dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Bender recommended a faculty member, Don Terner, who was an ardent housing advocate and had worked successfully in affordable housing programs in New York.

In 1980 Terner was appointed director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. He moved to Sacramento where he worked closely with Alan Stein and, according to Stein, educated him about the housing field by taking him to see projects throughout the state. Terner left the state government in 1981.

In 1982, to fulfill the donor’s stipulation that a task force be formed to administer the grant, Stein convened a group of people who were successful in various fields and interested in affordable housing. Rather than create another report, the task force chose to start building. The next step was to hire executives to run the operation.

Don Terner’s actions as Director of Housing and Community Development made him a leading candidate to head the organization. He had sponsored legislation which gave non-profit housing developers the first option to purchase surplus public lands and had also initiated legislation that included density bonuses that allowed selected developers to add up to 30% additional units to their projects, thus giving them extra units at no additional land costs.

Terner was hired to be the president of the new organization, which was then called Bay Area Regional Housing Investment and Development Group, later turned into the acronym, BRIDGE. A close associate and former student of his, Rick Holliday, was made vice president.

To raise the capital needed to start building units, Stein and Terner, supported by their board of directors, held fund-raising events for members of the business community. This use of the methods of private developers was a radical departure from the 1960s approach of community non-profit housing organizations which were oriented toward government funding and focused on individual projects.

A highly successful fund raising event in 1983 allowed the first project, Holloway Terrace, in San Francisco’s Ingleside Terrace to start; it was completed in 1985. According to Alan Stein, the success of this and other projects that followed came from diligent outreach to the projects’ neighborhoods, ownership of the projects and careful management, and the serious involvement of board members in the projects’ development.

The original task force members are Dick Bender, Gordon Chin, Ken Phillips, Tony Ramos, Alan Stein, Clark Wallace, Susanne Wilson, Gerson Bakar, Preston Butcher, Tom Flynn, Tony Frank, Dean Macris, Sunne McPeak, Ken Rosen, Mary Lee Widener. The picture on the right is of Alan Stein and Rick Holliday, 2009.

The Salvation Army’s Turk Street Center is that rare building which both honors the context of an historic district and stands out as decidedly contemporary.

The new building at 240-242 Turk Street was completed in July, 2008 after five years of programming and an intensive Planning Department design review process followed by 28 months of construction, which included the demolition of an existing building.

In designing a rippling facade of metallic bay windows the architects, Herman Coliver Locus, have capitalized on San Francisco’s vernacular building style and affirmed its functionality for the architecture of urban streetscapes.

Photograph by Tim Griffith

By coloring some of the window frames blue or yellow, as shown above, the architects sought to allow residents the possibility of identifying the location of their apartment and thereby lessening the anonymity of  the wall of windows.

The eight-story building has 113 apartments, 110 of which are studios with 358.5 sq. ft. Three are 2-bedroom units with 912.5 sq. ft.

The five-acre site is bounded by Union, Sansome, and Greenwich Streets and The Embarcadero. Buildings occupy only 40 percent of the site, which is divided by Battery Street into two sections. The office buildings on the western block are composed to create a view path to Telegraph Hill just beyond Sansome Street and up the well known Filbert Street steps to the hill’s summit crowned by Coit Tower.

The corporation’s low-rise brick buildings are configured with set-backs on each floor that create open balconies on their corners. The rounded corners have a rippling effect that relates the buildings to their landscaped setting.

Grouping buildings around the edges of the block allowed space for a central plaza to facilitate circulation between the buildings.The plaza’s centerpiece is a raised landscaped section that features a variety of water elements set in sculptural masonry forms.

A hard-edged concrete coping separates this section from the paved area around it. The composition is capped by a two-ton block of carnelian granite over which water spills into a pool below.

The plaza’s paving, inlaid with red, gray, and white granite blocks and divided into 35-foot-square diamonds, defines a path through the property from The Embarcadero to Sansome Street.

The path stretches like a carpet across Battery Street where a flight of stairs descends to the eastern park. The paved path then leads to a complex of office buildings in the southeast section of the block. Near the stairway a curved path introduces the informal park that serves as a foil for the plaza.

The hard edges and planar geometry of the plaza have yielded to artificially created grassy hillocks that shelter a stream, the counterpart of the plaza’s monumental fountain. Here Halprin recalled the Sierra foothills’ mining area where Levi Strauss sold his original work pants.

The stream enters the park near its southeastern corner from water mains under The Embarcadero. The rhythm of the water’s flow changes from rapid at the waterfall near the stream’s entrance to slow as the stream pursues its serpentine course through the park.

The water disappears under the street near the park’s northeastern corner.

Granite boulders set in the stream banks punctuate the stream’s narrative. Many of them stand-in for individual sculptures.

Near the northern side of the park the stream loops around, forming a small island bridged by round cast concrete stepping stones that recall those of stone in Japanese gardens. A willow tree trails its low leafy branches over the island where a pathc of lawn invites people to sit either singly or in small groups and enjoy the intimacy of this metaphysical still point in the world moving around it.

Soon after the completion of the Levi Strauss & Company campus in 1982 it became a tourist attraction. Indeed, outsiders were not aware that the plaza was Levi’s property. Company signs were discreet, and the open spaces were scaled for public use.  That the general public was not excluded from this privately owned property is a reminder of the civic generosity of this family enterprise, which conquered the world with blue jeans

Credits:

Buildings were designed by HOK with Howard Friedman and Gensler & Assocs.

Landscaping for the 3.2-acre site was designed by Lawrence Halprin

Long Now: Works in Progress by Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation and project manager for the 10,000 Year Clock.

This small book is about a big subject: the history of a 10,000 Year clock–its concept, its sponsors, its makers, and the evolution of its design. According to Rose, the original idea was to build a clock on a monumental scale that would be completely mechanical and would track time for 10,000 years.  The clock makers’ goal in creating the clock was to inspire and encourage long-term thinking.

While many people have advocated long-term thinking as a good use of our time, no one has proposed a length of time such as this one, which would seem to require another term to handle its recondite nature. No Matter. If we want the phrase “long term” to be taken seriously, it helps to attach it to a project that is well beyond us.

Photograph by Rolfe Horne

The book details the evolution of the clock’s design in words and graphics linked to the exhibition in The Long Now Foundation’s Museum in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center. Some of the exhibition’s objects represented in the book can be activated by staff members in response to visitors’ requests. In the case of the chime generator, the experience is particularly rewarding because the Tibetan bell gongs that sound when the generator is turned on seem to echo the Pythagorian “music of the spheres.”

In addition to the book, a high quality video on an iPod available at the reception desk provides another aid to understanding what the exhibition is about. In the video Alexander Rose narrates a tour of the museum divided into brief segments that are easy to follow.

The book also profiles the clock’s sponsors and makers. Danny Hillis,  the lead designer and clock project founder, has held the position of vice president of research and development for Walt Disney Imagineering, the research and development arm of the Walt Disney Company. In 1993 he made a proposal for the monumental clock, which the songwriter and composer, Brian Eno, named “The Clock of the Long Now.” An article by Hillis in Wired magazine, which suggested a clock that would last over 10,000 years, led directly to the founding of the Long Now Foundation in 1996 by Hillis and other futurists, including Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, Peter Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, and Mitch Kapor. Chris Anderson, Michael Keller, Rogerf Kennedy, Kim Polese, and David Rumsey joined the board later.

Other foundation works-in-progress described in Rose’s book include the Rosetta Project and the monthly seminars about long term thinking hosted by Stewart Brand. The series is now in its 6th year; its schedule is listed on the foundation’s web site, www.longnow.org.

Photograph courtesy of The Long Now Foundation

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the seriousness of the clock project was the purchase of a site in eastern Nevada adjacent to the Great Basin National Park. The high desert mountain site satisfies the clock sponsors’ requirement that its home be remote enough to make serious travel necessary and that the site itself be awe inspiring. T he property’s 250-some acres of private land extends vertically over a mile from the valley floor at 6,000 feet to the 11,000-foot peak of Mt. Washington. The white limestone cliffs harbor
historic mining tunnels, which may be used to house the clock in its final form.

Photograph courtesy of The Long Now Foundation

A rare stand of Bristlecone pine trees, some over 4,000 years old, testifies to the site’s potential for long-term habitation. The designers are studying the site to find the best way of providing access to it and to do the underground work of housing the clock.

Daunting as this task may seem, the clock makers are determined to carry it out. After the clock has been installed it will be maintained with, in Hillis’ words, “bronze age technology.” That is to say that the clock’s works will be so easy to understand that even untutored visitors to the clock, will be able to learn how to maintain it.

Naturally, this agenda will take time. But in the meantime interest in the project will be maintained by visiting The Long Now Foundation’s headquarters in Landmark Building A at Fort Mason Center.

Photograph by Curtis Myers

One place where your search will be rewarded is The Long Now Foundation’s Museum and Store, located in Landmark Building A at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center. The Long Now’s headquarters has been here since 2006. It is open—free–to the public seven days a week, and though the museum’s space is small, it is filled with engaging artifacts that recall the so-called Cabinets of Wonder popular in Renaissance Europe.

The exhibits show two of the foundation’s projects: a clock which, in its final form, will record 10,000 years of earth-time and the 10,000 Year Library, featuring the Rosetta Project, which has created a disk with 15,000 pages of text covering 2,500 languages.

The clock is a work in progress that began in 01996–to affirm the 10,000 year time span the foundation uses five digits for the years instead of four.  The first prototype of the clock has been on exhibit in London’s Science Museum since June 02000.

Photograph by Ralph Horne

The clock’s first tick occurred on 12/31, 01999. Because of local and national concerns surrounding the coming of the millennium, foundation members could not find a space to rent for the celebration and had to host a small gathering of about 20 friends and family members in their offices. The clock ticked twice, once for each millennium.

The museum shares the ground floor of the Fort Mason space with a reception desk and store, which sells books, souvenirs, and DVDs of lectures given by well known thinkers in the fields of environmental science, physics, art, technology, social science. etc. The speakers are futurists for the most part, who support the foundation’s goal of promoting responsible long term thinking.

The rest of the space houses the exhibits. No matter what the weather is outside, the interior seems bright, as befits the future. This brightness is not just a result of white walls and lighting; it is also produced by the light from the reflective materials of which the objects exhibited are made. Not just high grade stainless steel, but also monel, an expensive alloy made mostly of nickel and copper. You cannot create things to last l0,000 years on the cheap.

Most visitors do not see familiar things when they look around the museum, but labels and the explanations of the staff are very helpful. The store sells a very attractive, seventy-three-page book, Long Now, works in progress, by Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the foundation, that tells the story in words and pictures. (see review accompanying this text.)

Pictured above is the columnar binary bit adder mechanism installed in a cut stone boulder and topped with a planetary display called an orrery which, when activated, shows the phases and motion of the six planets of our solar system that are visible to the naked eye. The planets are made of a variety of natural stones such as yellow calcite for the sun and Venus, red jasper for Mars, Chilean lapis for the earth, and banded sandstone for Jupiter. This orrery is roughly 1/4 the size of the one that will top the final version of the clock.

The large photograph on the wall below is the clock prototype now on exhibit in the London Museum of Science.

A platform in the museum’s main space displays a mechanism called the solar synchronizer, which resolves the difference between absolute time and solar time. As the label explains, without the synchronizer this difference between the two ways of measuring time would result in the clock’s time drifting from year to year because of eccentricities in the orbit of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the earth’s axis. At noon, local time, a beam of light strikes the large lens, which heats a length of memory wire that contracts when it reaches a certain temperature. The contraction pulls a lever that strikes a bowl gong, producing a certain tone. In the future the lever will be attached to the clock, the orrery, and the chime generator.

Shown above is a ten-foot long model of the chime generator. Danny Hillis, the clock’s designer, created this machine to ensure that visits to the clock would be sonically memorable. The turning of the array of Geneva wheels causes a series of ten Tibetan brass bowl gongs to sound in the more than 3,650,000 combinations required to ring out a different sequence of tones each day for 10,000 years. Brian Eno, a foundation board member, worked out the sounds of the gongs. Eno released a  CD titled, January 07003, that explores the possibilities of the chime generator. However, he did not use these bowl gongs to create the music.

Above is a two-foot tall version of the first prototype for the clock carved in plywood. Hillis wanted a form that would honor mechanical computers and time pieces of the past. Geneva wheels like those in the layers of this prototype were standard components of clocks. The Geneva wheel is a mechanism that translates the continuous rotation into the  intermittent rotary motion that occurs in the ticking of a clock.

Photograph courtesy of The Long Now Foundation

In addition to the display of apparatuses related to the clock project, the museum also has an exhibit of the Rosetta Project. This micro-etched nickel disk has room for over 2,500 languages recorded in its 15,000 pages of text. Why would this disk be a desirable artefact?

It turns out that our digital age is rife with discontinuities–black holes–so that although our information storage capacity is vaste, historians are likely to label our time the digital dark age because the system’s constant technical innovation has been accompanied by the constant loss of instructions for use. Among the losses will be thousands of languages, perhaps 90% of humanity’s spoken languages.

The Rosetta Project addresses this issue by collecting, naming, and sorting linguistic materials. Results of this effort are displayed on a wall and accompanied by a sound dome, which allows viewers standing in front of the wall of written texts to hear examples of the languages in the collection. The web site www.rosettaproject.org, permits people to view the pages of the Rosetta Archive and correct, comment on, or submit materials.

Other components of the clock that represent steps in the process of its development are displayed with explanatory labels. Visitors should not hesitate to ask members of the staff for more explanations if their questions are not addressed in the labels. The exhibits in this museum wll take many of us into new territory; we need guidance to find our way.

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by Sally B. Woodbridge

THE HISTORIC SETTING

The outdoor theater is located at the end of a road leading from the entrance to the Grove at the intersection of 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard. From the street level the road descends down the steep slope into the ravine. The descent proceeds through a wooded terrain dramatically different from the orderly residential streets surrounding the park.

It was the contrast between the Grove’s wild landscape and the settled area on the streets around it that inspired Rosalie Stern to take the advice of John McClaren, Superintendent of Golden Gate Park, and purchase the property in 1931 for a public park in memory of her husband, Sigmund Stern.

The ravine had been a place for recreational entertainment since the mid-19th century. George Green arrived in San Francisco from Maine in 1847. Joined by family members, he subsequently purchased the land bounded by 19th avenue and Sloat Boulevard that stretched down to the beach. On the slopes of a sixty-four-acre ravine Green planted hundreds of eucalyptus trees. He and his son created a resort area with such popular features as a trout farm and boating pavilion.  In 1892, the Trocadero Inn was built on the north side of the ravine where it still stands and can be reserved for social occasions.

The Trocadero’s late 19th century cottage style with gingerbread and a generous veranda, shown below, recalls its hey-day as a party place. In front of it is a grassy picnic ground, and further along the ravine floor is the theater.

Following her purchase of the property, Rosalie Stern began a decades-long commitment to developing the park property to provide recreation and free concerts for San Franciscans.

A view of the meadow with the new theater structure and its metal canopy on the left.

EARLY CONCERT AND THEATER HISTORY

Finding the site’s natural acoustics to be excellent, Stern and her staff planned the first summer concert for June 19, 1932. One of the park designers, the architect Bernard Maybeck, designed a temporary fabric canopy suspended above a raised stage at the base of the southern slope. The meadow was lined with portable chairs.

Preparation for concerts was difficult and expensive. Portable seats needed to be placed, exit aisles had to be roped off, and temporary barrier-free access created. The rudimentary stage required time-consuming readjustment of each performer’s equipment and the cumbersome installation of a canopy to protect the musician’s instruments from the sun. The limited number of seats meant that many spectators sought precarious perches on the steep slopes, causing soil erosion and damage to the trees.

Yet, except for the creation of paths around the site and low stone walls built by employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) the meadow’s character remained unchanged until the 1950s when the city built a modest backstage.

Lawrence Halprin first visited the Grove in the 1950s when he came to watch his wife, Anna, dance.  “Even then,” he recalled, “it was kind of a mess, with a terrible set-up for the back-stage. And the people sitting on the slope would slide down to the bottom.”

A view showing the new terraced seating of stone opposite the stage.

Why make an atlas for designers? By definition an atlas is a collection of maps, charts, and visual plates that systematically illustrate a subject. Thorpe states that it was the visual nature of atlases that inspired her book because no matter how eloquent a text may be, design audiences are not engaged by printed words alone.

The book’s message is about how design in all fields can move toward the goals of sustainability; the integration of information about design and sustainability rewards users with a rich range of ideas, concepts, and facts presented in a sophisticated format that is itself thought-provoking. As with other kinds of atlases, the varied text does not converge on one conclusion. Rather, readers take what they need to make their own.

Ingredients, not recipes, presented with verve and clarity, make the atlas useful for the design disciplines. Economic and cultural elements of sustainable design, rarely discussed in the context of ecological issues, have their own chapters, which are divided into sections related to design issues. Although long-term sustainability is the objective, the 21st century landscape is the one within which design must perform for the foreseeable future. The most important concepts and ideas about sustainability are presented in terms of its ecology, economy, and culture.

The introduction defines sustainable development versus development as we know it. Sustainable development enables environmental and social conditions that support the well-being of humans indefinitely. To give meaning to the term, “indefinitely,” Thorpe invites readers to imagine designing a functional object that will endure and be useful for thousands of years. Yet, however inspiring this thinking might be, it is unlikely to take place unless an enlightened clientele for sustainable design appears to support and fund it.

Development without the modifier, sustainable, has implied well-being achieved through economic progress in tandem with industrial development geared to technological change, usually in the short term. Sustainable development functions like ecosystems, which support themselves over a very long time period with life-sustaining products and services. This development may invest in art forms and cultural norms embodying systems of belief that sustain our well-being even though the economic value is hard to quantify and less related to the ecological origins of sustainability.

The three main themes of the atlas, subdivided into related topics, follow:

ECOLOGY

Ecology’s key sustainability issue is the overwhelming of nature’s systems by human systems. The challenge for designers during the historic period of industrialization was humanizing machine-made, mass-produced products. Today’s challenge, harmonizing human and natural systems, will best be met by learning to see hidden connections between the two. We need a holistic approach to materials that will not limit their usefulness, and we need appropriate production tailored to needs instead of mass production in the one-size-fits-all mode.

ECONOMY

Technological acceleration has driven our economic goals not only in the private sector–the free market–where design is usually found, but in the public and nonprofit sectors as well. Designers have successfully expanded the market for the mass production of machine-produced goods by giving them consumer appeal. But just how this activity has increased our sense of well-being is unclear.

What is clear is that design has played a significant role in shaping the objects and images in our increasingly visual culture. The power of the visual images that stream our way is such that viewers routinely try to achieve what is shown to them as convincingly real no matter how fantastic it is.

CULTURE

Design’s success is often judged by its commercial success. Designers’ jobs may even be determined by whether their work meets marketing projections–never mind that this short-term focus puts an emphasis on ease of use that may actually limit the product’s usefulness. Commercial pressures have turned designers into pushers rather than enablers, a role they need to shed in order to support sustainable development.

So, how can design begin to change our dependence on the market-based means of well-being that stem from our reliance on the visual sphere of material goods? Many concepts that support cultural sustainability—a sense of time and history, open source design, and the acceptance of nature as part of culture–appear impractical when viewed in the context of commercial pressures. To move toward sustainable development, Thorpe advocates recognizing that the three systems of change–technology, policy, and behavior– interlock. Designers have a role in all three systems. They explore, invent, and apply new technologies in architecture, fashion, and products.

Feedback on designers’ work typically comes from sales: consumers either buy or don’t buy. Disgruntled owners of new products that don’t work satisfactorily must wait for the next versions; they have no way to register their wishes in advance except in market surveys, which are rarely broad enough to reflect all the audience’s concerns.

Perhaps we should have feedfront to make design less of a one-way stream and to engage users in the vital process of design. For instance, open source design, most familiar in the development of computer operating systems, allows users to act as designers by providing rapid feedback on imperfect prototypes. Thus designers may quickly see their work in newer and better systems.

Although the virtual form of computer-based design removes it from the field of physical artifacts, Thorpe points out that designers are increasingly involved in supplying information about form rather than the forms themselves. Design companies now exist that permit viewers to make online modifications of products they intend to buy by giving them a choice of, say, the shapes or graphic motifs for t-shirts and other clothing. Graphic design and photography make multiple contributions to design in other fields.

In the design of physical artifacts the ability of users to access construction and repair information could enable the interaction possible in open source computer technology. New features and components of physical artifacts could be backward compatible so that users don’t have to buy the new version to get the newest capabilities.

Which products/artifacts would benefit from the open source process. Thorpe’s answer is any artifact that has a reasonably large number of users. Still, a strong motivation is necessary for this level of engagement. Most of us probably don’t want to be involved in the design of our toothbrushes or safety pins, but other artifacts—bicycles, electronic communication devices–would likely generate the kind of interactive discussion our digitally connected society makes possible.

Thorpe’s last proposal for exposing design to other professions and perspectives and to make it less beholden to private sector patrons is to bring design as a profession into the field of sustainable development as in non-profit organizations, governmental, and educational institutions. Organizations devoted to sustainable development usually lack the tools designers have to combine human factors, technology, style, and function into an attractive package. Linking them would benefit both sides.

Designers should read The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, not only because it is a mine of information and ideas, but because the relevant issues are explored and weighed with admirable directness and a sense of urgency that should strengthen their convictions about what they profess and how to do something about it.

CODA

One large-scale application of the open source process could be design competitions for, say, public parks, and buildings. Since the innovative special features of competition entries are considered proprietary in today’s modus operandi, those owned by the various competitors will not be part of the winner’s scheme even though they might benefit the project. If such ideas were shared in a preliminary design phase open to all competitors, their approach would be more holistic even though the outcome would still depend on the varying talents and skills of the individual competitors.

In the design fields the prestige of authorship is tied to ownership. But when the projects don’t function as they should, authorship loses its appeal. Yet, though the winning designs often turn out to have flaws, the competitors discount the risk of failures because winning will likely bring more projects and maybe stardom. Even though feedback in the design phase might prevent flaws, the relative lack of concern for long-term validation of performance has meant that buildings are rarely assessed in respect to their success or failure after they are completed and occupied. If the assessment occurs at all it is usually triggered by litigation rather than interest in performance per se.

Although it is easier to credit a single author than a team that instigates and coordinates the design process, it is certainly more accurate to recognize the collaborative process that not only involves a bigger team of designers but also includes other professionals such as engineers in a variety of fields. Yet few things threaten designers more than the idea of surrendering authorship or artistic control.

Although Thorpe does not advocate the use of the open-source approach to design described above in her book, it occurred to me that it could play an important role in the field of architecture.
I hope readers will weigh in with their reactions.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland, established in 1962, was strongly influenced by the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council. Subsequently, the diocese took the name of its new cathedral, Christ the light, from the council document, Lumen Gentium (Light of All People.) The inclusion of the word, light, in the name inspired the architects at the San Francisco office of SOM to design the cathdral as the embodiment of light. Thus, the building now nearing completion on the west shore of Lake Merritt is wrapped in translucent walls that convey the impression of layered light.

Night photograph of the model from SOM In 2003, the design and construction process of the cathedral complex began on its 2.53-acre site. To provide maximum daylight year-round, the building was oriented southeast/northwest. The entrance faces Lake Merritt at the end of a walkway rising from the intersection of Harrison and 21st Streets. Inside the entrance, the baptismal font reminds visitors that baptism is the rite of entry to church membership. Seating for 1500 people is arranged in a semi-circular plan centered on the altar at the church’s north end. Space for the choir and an organ is located behind the altar along with a Eucharist chapel for eighty people. The chapel is separated from the sanctuary by a curved wall of wood blocks. A crypt is located on the floor beneath the altar, a common arrangement in many important churches around the world. Light is drawn down to the crypt through openings in the floor around the altar.

Graphic image from SOM The building’s plan is based on an elliptical shape formed by the overlapping intersection of two circles. (This shape, also called a mandorla, is most commonly used in Christian symbolism to frame the figure of Christ.) The interior, shaped vertically by the tilted-up sides of the ellipse, is enclosed by a wall composed of two structural layers. The convex inner layer is divided by curved glue-laminated wooden ribs into segments filled with laminated wood slats. As the wall rises, the space between the slats widens to increase the amount of daylight entering the building. The change of the slats’ angle relative to the floor also allows more views of the outside while reducing direct solar heat gain to the lower zone occupied by the congregation. This louvered layer ends approximately fifteen feet above the floor. The outermost layer is a curtain wall made of an aluminum and glass grid that protects the wooden layers from the weather. The curtain wall’s aluminum mullions continue above the roof to create a crown of finials The width of the space between the wall’s two layers decreases from twelve feet at their base to three feet at the top. The layers are interconnected by continuous tension members of galvanized steel rods and discontinuous compression members of tapered wood struts. This so-called tensegrity system, famously used by Buckminster Fuller in his spherical structures, enables each member to operate with maximum efficiency and economy

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library on the University of California’s Berkeley campus opened in March 2008. The EAL is the country’s first free-standing library dedicated to east Asian collections built on a university campus; it was named for Cornelius Vander Starr, an early leader in the insurance industry and founder of the American International Group (AIG), Starr attended UCBe as an undergraduate.

Designed by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, the building occupies a site on the north edge of the Memorial Glade that is part of the campus’s landmarked Classical Core. The library‘s rectangular form, tiled hip-roof, vertically proportioned punched windows, and granite cladding were mandated in the criteria of the 2002 New Century Plan and derived from the neo-classical buildings in the campus core area. The library’s location across from John Galen Howard’s monumental Doe Library made designing the building to harmonize with the tone of the core particularly important.

Yet, while honoring the criteria, the architects created a building that has more in common with the tenets of Modernism than those of Classicism. Notwithstanding the primary use of poured-in-place concrete and the exterior’s 3’-7”x 7’-10” granite slabs, the library does not convey the sense of a masonry building kin to its neighbors. The 2.25″-thick slabs are treated like giant tiles affixed to the concrete walls. The walls’ separation from the roof gives them a screenlike appearance, and the punched windows with minimal projecting heads contribute to the impression of thinness associated with Modernism.

The defining feature of the long south façade is not the grand flight of stairs that typically announced the entrance to a neo-classical building, but a bronze grille 110 by 32 feet designed in a variation of the traditional “cracked ice” pattern often used in previous eras in Chinese history. This and two other elaborate bronze grilles located on the east and west walls were cast in sand in a foundry in Hangzhou, China. Night illumination increase their magical effect

In addition to their aesthetic contribution, the grilles have the practical effects of lowering energy costs by reducing over forty-five percent of the direct sunlight entering the building and allowing office windows of different sizes to be hidden behind the south wall’s grille.

Cherry wood was used throughout the library interior, often in sections of narrow battens backed by a red fabric, as shown above. Floors are made of bamboo.

Photographs by Jonathan Reo