When we look at architectural ornament in the categories of heraldry and emblems, we  find  abstract compositions that no longer imply a physical connection, as was the case with human, animal, and bird forms. Instead, we see a miscellany of items: plums, crowns, flowers, shields, weapons, and other things associated with aristocracy.  Such things make up the vocabulary of heraldry, which  was systematically established throughout Europe in the twelfth century to meet the demand for emblems of respectability and  proclaim the importance of feudal families. Tracing family genealogies  and devising coats of arms were its principle tasks.

Over time the aristocracy of business and commerce subsumed that of humans. Companies and corporations commissioned heraldic crests emblazoned on shields, which were displayed on the buildings they owned and occupied.

Although company logos have now replaced heraldic crests, we can still find examples of the old-fasioned heraldry on pre-modern buildings. The  terra cotta plaque shown below, which appears on a building at 101 The Embarcadero, is an example of such heraldry. The client is not identified, but the decorative elements imply prestige, even royalty, as in the fleur-de-lis, the royal lilly of France.

101 The Embarcadero, San Francisco.

Below, the “M” for Matson, an internationally known shipping line, is rendered in rope. The facade of the company building at 216 Market Street building is embellished with nautical symbols such as anchors, dolphins, and shells. Portraits of the Matson steamships appear in cartouches.

216 Market Street, San Francisco.

The bronze plaque on the building at 233 Sansome Street is an heraldic tribute to the firemen who may have occupied the building.

233 Sansome Street, San Francisco.

The former Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company building of 1925, designed by Timothy Pflueger, has a  bell framed in a rondel suspended above staff-like elements often used in heraldry as symbols of authority.

134-140 New Montgomery St, San Francisco.

The bell was modeled by the sculptor Pio Oscar Tognelli who was employed by the Gladding McBean terra cotta manufacturing company in Lincoln, California. This factory produced terra cotta ornament for buildings, particularly on the west coast,  from the late 19^th through the first decades of the 20^th century. The Gladding McBean company’s history traces the growing popularity of terra cotta.

The factory’s location in the small city of Lincoln followed the discovery nearby of an extensive deposit of pure white kaolin clay,  which partners Charles Gladding,  Peter McGill McBean,  and George Chambers leased from the owner, George Towle,  in 1875 for the production of vitrified  sewer pipe. The dramatic growth of west coast cities in the latter part of the 19^th century gave this product a bright future.

A two-story headquarters building was constructed in 1884, the year the company began production of architectural  ornament,  to advertise terra cotta’s advantages over other materials such as stone. It once stood at 1358 Market Street in San Francisco but is long gone.

Terra Cotta was less expensive to use for architectural purposes than stone for several reasons. It could be glazed  and textured to mimic different  kinds of the more costly material  from warm buff-colored sandstone to cool gray granite. And because terra cotta was lighter than stone the amount of structural steel needed for the building frame could be reduced, which also lower costs.

Architects  favored terra cotta because their designs could be modeled at full scale and reworked,  if necessary,  before they were cast. Despite the need for skilled labor to make the molds, once made, these could be reused more or less indefinitely. The standardization provided by the use of molds guaranteed accuracy in repeated ornament,  saved money through speedy execution,  and avoided the need for site work by expensive skilled labor.

To reduce costs further, it was common practice to construct tall buildings using stone on the ground floor and perhaps the second and third floors if they were visible from the street. But the upper floors were often clad in terra cotta or cast stone colored and textured to imitate the  stone used below.

“Shapes of Clay,” a company publication, described the process by which an architecct’s drawing was turned into reality.  In the factory drafting room, the drawing was keyed to show the location of the ornament. A shop drawing was then made following the architect’s  drawing and submitted to the architect for approval. Full size working drawings were made with allowance for shrinkage, and every piece was scheduled. At the factory, staff artists modeled the ornament in clay and plaster. After approval by the architect–often by means of photographs taken in the shop—the model was sent to the plaster shop where final molds were made. The publication recognized the creative efforts of the staff sculptors, adding that they were always under the supervision of the architect.

The lion and the unicorn appear on either side of the clock above the entrance to the former Royal Globe Insurance Company’s building of 1907 at 201 Sansome Street. They are part of a British coat of arms used here because the company was based in London. The lion’s solar stateliness is paired with the unicorn’s lunar purity to signify the union of opposites. The purity symbolized by the unicorn’s single horn explains its otherwise mysterious association with the Virgin Mary and monastic life.

201 Sansome Street, San Francisco.

A mythical beast, the unicorn has the head and body of a horse, the tail of a lion, the legs and hoofs of a stag, and a twisted horn in the center of its forehead. In this composite form the unicorn was revered in Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Hebrew, Sumero-Semitic, and Chinese cosmologies.

245 Market Street, San Francisco.

The ram, another sun symbol, also appeared in many cultures. As Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, the ram signified the beginning of a cycle or process of creation. A symbol of the masculine generative force, the ram was mainly a sacrificial animal. Its horns signified solar and lunar power, honor, and abundance. The ram shown here, looking out through the branches of a California live oak, is a High Sierra bighorn sheep. It appears on the wall of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company building 245 Market Street in San Francisco

The bull and the ox share many attributes. Both were sacrificed during harvest rituals to insure the renewal of the earth and its powers. The sculpted skulls of oxen, called bucranes, were decorated with garlands of fruit and flowers. Featured in the friezes of Doric temples, they represented the real heads of the sacrificed animals that were hung on the temples during the seasonal rites.  One wonders if their later use, as seen below on the Kohl building at 400 Montgomery Street, was intended as a reminder of the ancient rituals carried out to create wealth and prosperity.

400 Montgomery Street, San Francisco.

The grizzly bear, a California state symbol, is often represented but not always in a ferocious state. Indeed, the bear shown below above the entrance to the former Pacific Gas & Electric Company building at 245 Market Street, who peers down through sheaves of grain and produce grown in the state seems more worried than threatening.

245 Market Street, San Francisco.

The next bear, stepping easily over San Francisco’s skyline in a rondel on the building at 315 Market Street, is clearly a threat.

315 Market Street, San Francisco.

1000 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco.

This affable bear atop his column in front of a former Cadillac showroom at 1000 Van Ness Avenue seems to be welcoming the public with a smile.

University of California’s College of Agriculture, Berkeley.

Located on the UC Berkeley campus, Hilgard Hall was built in 1917-1918 to house the University of California’s College of Agriculture. Designed by John Galen Howard, the building was richly decorated with friezes of sgraffito–scratch in Italian–created by applying two coats of plaster in contrasting colors and scratching through the top layer to create a very shallow relief with a colored background. The friezes celebrate the rewards of tilling the earth and feature medallions framing depictions of barnyard animals that appear above swags laden with the products of agriculture.

Like humans, buildings talk about themselves, but architectural detail, or ornament, once so common, is no longer used around doors and windows, sections of walls inside and out, ceilings, etc., or even understood. Modernism replaced ornament with a different vocabulary of details involving straight lines, right angles, and clean edges. Still, since we admire buildings from the time when ornament was popular, it seems that revealing the meaning of decorative motifs would broaden our understanding of what they are trying to tell us and increase out pleasure in passing by them. They contribute to the urban texture of our cities.

Architectural Ornament Collage by Sally Woodbridge

The collage above is composed of details of well known buildings in San Francisco, which you may not recognize because. as fragments taken out of context, they don’t really belong together. Their locations are indicated by numbers; some may be neighbors.

But what is architectural detail? The word “detail” is rooted in the French word “tailler,” “to cut” plus the “de,” which means “apart.” So details are small, secondary, or accessory parts of larger things. Ornamental details such as wreaths, garlands of fruit and flowers, medallions with humans heads, continuous bands of waves or chevrons, lion heads, scrolled leaves, and varied moldings do not appear randomly on buildings; they are deliberately placed. They mark the location of floors, define edges, and call attention to windows and doors.

The design of buildings has much in common with that of clothes. The holes cut in fabric for the head, arms, and legs have always offered opportunities for decoration. The various approaches to cutting cloth, making seams and finishing edges have helped to create distinctive styles. In both clothing and architecture the pendulum of fashion swings back and forth between the lavish and the simple. Indeed, it seems that human beings are driven to ornamenting whatever they design and produce.

Before written characters morphed into signs that represent sounds, much early writing was pictorial. Today we have logos, short for logograms, that are modern, often decorative, hieroglyphs. The $ sign is perhaps our most familiar symbol. Many motifs used in architectural ornament are highly compressed visual abstractions like logos that would take up too much space if they were fully explained.

Despite the many learned histories of architectural ornament, new theories about its origin and use continue to appear. Many ornamental motifs we see, for example, on older buildings of our commercial centers were originally symbolic, but their meanings have been lost and the loss of meaning has rendered them mute.

However, the public’s interest in buildings that have the kind of small scale detail and texture that were familiar features of the discontinued historic styles has grown. Were these forms created simply to delight our senses or do they express aspects of the buildings’ structure and its purpose? Or did the use of humans, animals, flowers, fruit, and scenes have a didactic purpose?

This article is not intended to be another learned history of architectural ornament. Its purpose is to provide a context for increasing our appreciation of the buildings that furnish out urban environment.

The text is divided into the following chapters:

1. HUMAN FORMS,
2. ANIMAL and BIRD FORMS,
3. HERALDRY and EMBLEMS,
4. PLANT FORMS, and the most decorated features of buildings:
5. ROOFS, COLUMNS, WINDOWS and DOORS.

350 Mission Exterior. All images are by SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL LLP unless otherwise credited.

Glassy office towers are not new to downtown San Francisco. One of the oldest, the Crown Zellerbach Building at 1 Bush St., was designed in the late 1950s in the newly established San Francisco office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Its design referenced the New York firm’s Lever House, built in Manhattan in 1952, which became a landmark of the Modern Movement in the U.S.

Typical post World War II high-rise building Photograph by Morley Baer

The post World War II boom in high-rise office buildings filled US downtowns with boxy skyscrapers encased in largely glazed walls. But over time these towers lost their currency and became stereotyped as “refrigerator cartons.”

Unlike the flat “curtain-walls” of the Modernist office towers, the current glazed exterior cladding for towers, which often have irregular shapes, may be prismatic, as is the case with 350 Mission St. Instead of serving as  mirrors of their surroundings, such buildings become vehicles for refracting and reflecting light. They shimmer and change color with the daily passage of sunlight and shadow. This is good news for us spectators who see the buildings from the street or freeway or the surrounding hills.

350 Mission Curtainwall Detail

The shimmering effect seen in these images is produced by arranging double rows of glass panes so that the panes in the upper rows are slanted inward while the lower panes slant outward, thus producing the appearance of a woven surface that reflects and refracts light.

Parapet atop 350 Mission Street building

The building is crowned with a parapet equipped with a layer of galvanized mesh, cyclone fencing, laced with translucent nylon strips that absorb and diffuse light in a soft way and also enhance the night illumination. The parapet also conceals window-washing equipment and a novel amenity, a rooftop dog-run for the building’s canine population.

The rooftop with the parapet and dog-run

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.

I wondered why and set out to discover the answer. To do so I needed to learn about all the stations. In particular I needed to study Glen Park station. This is what I learned.

The BART system was planned in the 1950s and designed in the 1960s. The stations opened in the early 70s. It and Washington DC Metro were the first two systems in the nation and being pioneers of municipal transportation they had to make up their own rules. BART’s approach of employing different architects to design stations resulted in the variety of architecture that is absent in the DC system.

Different architects had different ideas for the design of stations. As with all things artistic some designs have worn better than others. Unlike other art forms, or even other architectural forms, BART stations have had to endure the test of time both aesthetically and physically. Glen Park station has passed both tests.

The station takes basic components of a station (platform, concourse, superstructure, surroundings and the means to get from one to the other) and translates them into a story about the BART system and its construction that relates to the building of monuments that have characterized human aspiration throughout time.

At the platform level, one of the deepest platforms in the system, jagged stone blocks cover the retaining walls. They are stacked like engaged columns that reinforce the feeling of being in a manmade underground tunnel. The roughness of the blocks suggests that the tunnel has been carved out of the solid rock within the earth’s core. Yet the place is not claustrophobic or oppressive. The stacked blocks lead the eyes upward where there is light and air. The roughness of the blocks is neutralized by the use of polished slabs of marble and granite for vertical cores and benches.

In the transition from platform to concourse the station’s walls shed their stone blocks to reveal rough-hewn concrete. The roughness of the concrete recalls the most basic and monumental of construction types. Vertical striations in the concrete reinforce the direction from the tunnel below to the street and sky above.

At the concourse level, one of the most compact in the system, the treatment of the surrounding walls and the use of a glass roof create the feeling of being in a monumental vestibule or, perhaps, the ruin of an ancient temple. The rough-hewn concrete walls continue to this level and characterize the exterior of the superstructure. But within the concourse are over 100 panels of polished marble that embellish the walls. They enrich the room with a finish that contrasts with the rough walls below. Yet they also complement each other; the stone blocks, the rough concrete and the polished marble are different expressions for the same element.

The use of different finishes enriches the experience of going from the platform to the concourse —from the earth’s core along rough walls to the refined room at the top. Capping the concourse with a glass roof highlights the experience of moving from the underground to the light and air above and back again.

From a distance the station appears to emerge from the BART system below. Its emphasis on vertical transformation acknowledges that the vast underground network is the core of the system and the station is merely one entry point. Design and finishes together support the theme of the station rising from the rails and platform up to the concourse and street, its perimeter walls like shards of concrete pushed upward through the earth.

The excellent design of Glen Park station secures its place in the history of architecture, however it is the use of durable and refined materials that insures that it will appeal to future generations. Based on my experiences I found the station to be an architectural achievement and agree that it is the crown jewel in the BART system.

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.

Since southeastern San Francisco is changing dramatically, how will its transformation affect the city as a whole? Will people travel the same routes to the same destinations that made the city famous in the past? Or, will a new city center in Mission Bay turn the old familiar city into what we may call the “museum city.” This transformation will not rob the historic city of its charm and importance, but it may no longer have the dynamism that will characterize the new center.

When San Francisco is depicted in the public’s imagination, its important geographic centers are typically those that were established in the 19th century and remained dominant through the 20th century. They are: the financial district in the blocks around lower Market Street; the commercial areas focused on Union Square and in recent years extended to Mission Street; the hills named Nob, Russian, and Telegraph; and other well known residential neighborhoods: Pacific, and Presidio Heights, the streetcar suburbs such as the Mission and the Western Addition, and the Richmond and Sunset districts, automobile suburbs that began to spread across the city in the early 20th century.

In recent boom times real estate development for office space crossed Market Street, and a new cultural center coalesced south of Market in the 1990s in what is now called SOMA.

Both SOMA and the Central Waterfront district to the south have experienced more or less steady development of market-rate and affordable housing with related commercial activity. The completion of the baseball park in 2000 spurred growth and attracted attention further south to the Mission Bay area.

Yet, the idea of living and working in the barren southeastern flatlands so unlike the familiar and glamorous traditional city to the north did not appeal to most San Franciscans.

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

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