Glenn Robert Lym Architect AIA/PhD

Two years ago I wrote a piece on the six documentaries I was working on. All but the 6th are now complete and online.

tracesf.com/2012/10/on-making-documentaries/

The 6th, is a film on the City Hall that San Francisco started building for itself in 1871. This last Spring I showed a preliminary cut of the film to 3 critics. And two months ago, I received a research grant for this film from the San Francisco History Association. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this documentary will be finished within a couple of months.

After a 3 year gestation, this film on the development of the lands south of the original settlement of San Francisco around Yerba Buena Cove / Portsmouth Square is finally done! Go up to the pull-down “Videos” tab above and look for HERE5.

The creation of the CAD model from the 1852-3 US Coast Survey took many hour in of 2010 to 2011.

The more I delved into sources and imagery, I found myself drawn into rich sub stories – wonderful places for debauchery and amusement; immense engineering feats; thousands of private, speculative land deals; and the intense Federal involvement in growing a city critical to country’s domestic and foreign policy.

Unlike the other HERE videos, parts of HERE5 have had the benefit of being worked on for a series of public lectures, beginning in the Fall of 2011 at CounterPulse; Streetopia at the Luggage Gallery on Market Street; and the Randal Museum’s Natural History Lecture Series. Preparing these lectures focused my work. And the wonderful Q&A that followed all of them, gave me new insights into what it was with which I was working.

One of these insights was the realization that the development of South of Market and the north Mission District were intrinsically tied to early land modification inventions used to expand Yerba Buena Cove into the Bay and to create Golden Gate Park out of a dune field. These were all pre 1880’s developments, and they were all of a piece.

Another insight was a sudden understanding that the development of South of Market and the Mission were the flip side of the development of Golden Gate Park. These were developments of the same San Francisco dune field. Golden Gate Park was created out of the western end of that dune. South of Market, the Tenderloin, Union Square, and the north Mission District were created out of the eastern end of the dune. The former created a “special” place. And the later created a profane, industrial town and slum, ultimately destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake Firestorm.

In putting “HERE4 – Lives Lived Through Architecture” online, I changed how my videos were served on the web.

Earlier, I could not obtain data on the number of people subscribing to these video through iTunes.  I also could not get data on how many people total saw the videos, whether via iTunes or through my website or through a direct search.  With the server changes, I now have access to this data.

From December 2011 through January 2012, the iTunes RSS feed has been queried 7120 times.  Assuming that iTunes causes each subscriber to query this file once a week, that amounts to perhaps around 550 iTunes subscribers.

And in that same period, HERE4 has been seen individually around 700 times, and downloaded as a part of larger, multi-file downloading around 10,500 times.

These are nice numbers to know.  But what they mean is not clear to me.

I have no data on whether people actually watched the whole film.  I do have a handful of comments from viewers, who liked the film.  Yet I now realize that the number of these comments, compared to the number of potential people who clicked on it is substantially different.

Having more data now makes it clearer that I do not yet have an understanding of the impact my films on viewers.

I was asked by Chris Carlsson of Shaping SF and FoundSF, to speak and show off parts of the 3D CAD model I’ve been working on of early San Francisco topography, roughly 1850 through 1890. So on Wednesday night, November 9th, 2011 at 7:30pm to 9:30pm, me and my CAD model will be the focus of “Above and Below San Francisco Streets—
In Search Of Eradicated Landscapes”, held at CounterPULSE located at 1310 Mission (at 9th) in San Francisco.

San Francisco in the 1850’s – Video Teaser

We’ll go into the CAD model and fly around the topography of early Market Street, Union Square, SoMa, The Mission, Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights. I’ll focus on a couple of interesting places within this landscape, places such as the big sand mound at Market and Kearney, Russ Gardens and Hayes Marshes, The Pioneer Race Track, and the Building of Woodward’s Garden among others. This should be fun, and I hope to get a lot of feedback and information from everyone who is there. This material will be part of two upcoming HERE videos, one on the evolution of SoMa and The Mission, and another on the 1871 San Francisco City Hall.

Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest

In the meantime, I have been working hard on HERE4, which is tentatively titled “Lives Lived Through Architecture: The Personal Residences of Bernard Maybeck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Thomas Jefferson and Frank Gehry. This should be online by the Holiday Season 2011. It is an hour long. I was frankly floored at what I found. Could I have imagined that there would be underlying similarities in the personal homes of Gehry and Maybeck or in those of Philip Johnson and Thomas Jefferson? No! But if you wait long enough, I think you’ll have an intriguing adventure exploring the complicated lives of these architects from their 20’s through to the end of their lives and the unusual homes they built for themselves.
Frank Gehry’s Venice Compound

It has been 10 months since I blogged about delving into the sand dune history of the South of Market district of San Francisco. In that time, I’ve been putting together a 3D CAD model of San Francisco as seen in the 1852-3 US Coastal Survey Map. This has been an intense stop and go effort that involved figuring out the quirks of that otherwise august survey, finding my sophisticated CAD program’s un-documented limitations, and working through dead ends in the bizarre documentation of an Italian survey mapping CAD plug-in. The basic 3D topo map is finally done.

I’m just finishing populating that 3D model with a couple of abbreviated models of signature buildings from that era including the adobe Mission Dolores complex that stretches from its current Dolores Street location out over what is now 16th Street.

Another, later building is the sprawling “New” San Francisco City Hall built between 1873-1897.

Now, I can move on to take this 3D material and the reams of research notes I have on these subjects, and script of HERE4 and HERE5 – on the filling in of San Francisco and the construction of the old, New City Hall. Along the way I hope to cover the Emeryville Shell Mound and deal with how audacious it was to propose building Market Street.

The third episode in my HERE series is now online. This video was set to be the first in this series. Its first pass was completed before HERE1 and HERE2 were even started. In doing this first pass, I learned a number of lessons and techniques that translated into making HERE1 and HERE2 better efforts. So I shelved the Maybeck video until now.

My interest in delving into the Maybeck houses began a decade ago when I offered it as a tour through my daughter’s high school silent auction. We drove around, looked at and talked about these five houses from the outside. It has taken my making this video for me to come to terms with what I believe Maybeck accomplished in these homes.

Maybeck’s opus and career still confound me in its ups and downs. He begins as a young, idealistic architect in the early 1890’s, slowly befriending Charles Keeler who he meets on their daily ferry boat commutes between San Francisco (work) and Berkeley (home). In the mid 1890’s he is working as the director of the Architectural Section of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art atop Nob Hill.  Eventually Maybeck tells Keeler that he will design Keeler’s new home for free.

Around this time he meets Phoebe Apperson Hearst and eventually persuades her to underwrite an international architectural competition for the Master Plan design of the new University of California at Berkeley. For these efforts, Maybeck is Mrs. Hearst’s advisor, and hence removes himself from competition eligibility.  Mrs. Hearst likes his work and commissions Maybeck to design her Wyntoon estate which will be the largest residential commission that he will ever receive.

A couple of years later, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurs.  The five houses in HERE3 can be seen as a part of the residential, post-quake rebuilding effort and a part of the continuing growth of San Francisco. All but the Castanada house are complete by the time of the 1915 Pan Pacific International Exposition that was sited on what is now San Francisco’s Marina District.

It has seemed to me that Maybeck’s architectural practice subsides within 5 years after the quake. In a massively rebuilding San Francisco, he receives only the residential commissions noted in this video and a small, but charming set of bookstores. He receives no large San Francisco commercial or public commission, though in this period he does some of his best East Bay projects. By 1913, he is working for architect Willis Polk as a draftsman. Polk has large downtown office buildings and huge Bay Area estates (e.g.. the Caroland’s estate in Hillsborough) on his drawing boards. Polk is also doing the bulk of the upcoming 1915 Exposition. Apparently overwhelmed, Polk holds an internal competition in his drafting room for the design of the Palace of Fine Arts building.  Maybeck wins that competition. Thereupon Polk gives that commission to Maybeck.

In my re-editing of the Maybeck video, I have been intent on delineating a clearer understanding of the impact I now see Maybeck having made in his San Francisco houses. Along the way, I have found two additional Maybeck San Francisco homes, if you do not count his residential neighborhood centers. One is in Forest Hills, designed in 1917 for Dahlia Loeb, later added onto by other architects.

Another resides on the ridge of a hill near the Masonic Avenue home, designed in 1917 for Alice Gay.

During this San Francisco work, Maybeck moved his own home from the cottage he remodeled in the Berkeley flatlands in the 1890’s to a hillside home he built on a large plot of land he purchased in the Berkeley Hills. And a decade after the San Francisco homes, his own home was destroyed in the 1922 Berkeley Firestorm. What he rebuilds on his hillside after that fire is quite different from what preceded it. This difference will be the subject of a future HERE episode that looks at the post mid-life homes of several architects.

The YouTube download statistics for HERE1 and 2 are interesting. Internet interest is significantly higher for my analysis of the evolution of Golden Gate Park than for the analysis of that Park’s new Museum structures. HERE2 downloads are more than 2 times greater than for HERE1, even though HERE2 has only been online for less than a month, compared to HERE1 which has been online for 4 months.

Humm, maybe public landscapes interest people more than public buildings?

Maybe people feel their interests more strongly rooted in a chunk of their landscape than rooted in buildings of which they feel no ownership?

In preparation for future episodes of HERE, I’ve been immersed in the literature of singular, historic places in the Bay Area. There is a wonderful amount of online resources – from original manuscripts of excavations at the Emeryville Shellmound – the largest shell midden structure in the western US – to a book by a young 19 year old fellow who hired on as a sailor and writes about his visit to San Francisco Bay in 1835. I’ve found myself mesmerized in a world long ago, a world somehow connected to what I know in my own life.

The other day, after one of Chris Carlsson’s SF History Bicycle Tours (ShapingSF.com), I looked at burritojustice.com, following a tip from Chris. I have always wondered where the Mission District Valencia Hotel was located – the wooden, four story hotel that sank and collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, killing about 10% of all San Franciscans killed by the quake itself. The wonderful burrito analysis combined old survey and property maps together with a Google Earth analysis to show that the Valencia Hotel stood where a masonry brick auto shop stands now, right on top of land that not only had the old 18th Street Creek running under it, but also had been filled to a depth of maybe 40 feet.

Over lunch, a friend clued me in on the new KQED video series, “Saving the Bay”. Episodes 1 & 2 cover conditions from eons ago up through 1900. I’d been aware of the impact of the impact of the American period from 1848 onward.  Of the Spanish impact from the 1770’s onward, I had been only peripherally aware of its disastrous impact upon the native peoples.  “Saving the Bay” depicted massive land modifications that also occurred due to Spanish introduction of mono-crop agriculture and large scale animal husbandry.

The showing of the two HERE videos this past Wednesday night at the American Institute of Architects San Francisco Chapter Gallery went quite well. Erin Cullerton of AIASF masterminded the setup and Joe Armin who used to be in my office volunteered to help the the staff set up.

I released the video on the de Young and the California Academy of Sciences to the internet first, as it is the most succinct, punchy and overtly architectural of the 3 videos that I have worked on so far. The episode on the history of Golden Gate Park is more interesting on a deeper level. Yet its arguements are more complicated and subtle, so I released it on the internet second. However at AIASF I showed these videos in the reverse order. Each was followed by a lively and engaging Question and Answer period.

HERE2 – A History of Golden Gate Park depicts the long struggle by San Franciscans to develop their burgeoning city by creating a huge park set in distant sand dunes miles from the heart of the early city. It was politically and technically an extraordinary undertaking. There are fights about whether the park would be nature oriented or building/amusement oriented. Landscape would be created only to be torn down for buildings which in turn were torn down for meadows, gardens and treescapes. In the end, I came to realize that in building Golden Gate Park, San Francisco had created a myth for itself -that underlying the City was bucolic nature. The real origin of the City as a set of sand dunes, a few lakes and a bunch of salt marshes was banished from it’s citizens’ mindscape. The culture of San Francisco was rewritten as a woodland ancestry, not one made of sand.

As the lights went up during this first video’s Q&A session, I realized that the audience comprised a nice age range from recent graduates to senior masters of the subject matter. I was very pleased that landscape architects Tito Patri and Drew Detsch were there. And it felt like a EHDD Friday Slide Show Party with Peter and Jan Dodge and George Homsey there. Several people connected with the de Young and the Academy of Sciences were in the audience.

Several of us talked about our experiences as children, coming to the park periodically for open and inexpensive access to the grounds and museums. In comparison, today the museums feel remote and places of special events with a high ticket cost. Audience members noted that with the decline in public and private financing of these institutions, the museums have had to transform themselves into media draws to command substantial ticket revenue.

As you know, in the HERE1 video, I do not take a stand about whether the de Young or the Academy of Sciences is a better building – I simply look at their differences. Yet as the Q&A discussion progressed, parts of the audience argued for their own favorites. So I asked for a show of hands of who liked each museum. About 1/3 voted for the de Young while 2/3 voted for the Academy of Sciences. Yet the reasons underlying this vote were complex. People who liked the Academy of Sciences talked about its approachability, and its gentle setting in the park compared to an abrubt and awkward sense of the de Young’s placement. Yet people also felt that once you had been to the Academy, it was as if you have seen everything, so the compulsion to return is not great. And on the other hand, people commented that the meanders within the de Young led to memorable and varied visits. The de Young’s ambiguous character seemed to bother and puzzle people, yet ensure repeat attendance.

At some point, we touched on the decline of the park’s landscape. Whether through a raising of the soil at the Concourse which led to damage of its a thick bosque tree cover or the death of the park’s first generation trees, people pleaded for a solid underwriting of the park’s maintenance efforts. And yet there is the spector of climate change, bay water tide rise and questions about future water resources. Seeing as the park is man made and must be continuously watered, would its underground wells and the City’s Sierra Mountain based water systems continue to be available?

But it was 8:30 PM, time to head out into a warm San Francisco spring evening and have good drink with friends.

For those of you near San Francisco, there will be a public showing this month of my first two videos – HERE1 and HERE2 – on Wednesday evening, March 24, 2010. I’ll show them in high definition and in reverse order.  We’ll start with HERE2-a history of Golden Gate Park. This should set the stage for HERE1-an opposition of two new museums.

I’m really looking forward to the Q and A. Somebody is sure to comment that the California Academy of Sciences is a sustainable structure set down amid a non-sustainable park!

Several architect friends have commented on HERE1 in emails or during coffee encounters at Brainwash, the local watering hole. One said “Your complex way of seeing, weaving the pros and cons, is inspiring: its the encounter itself that we learn from and excites us, and over time, not the fixed “opinion”. Thank you!!” – blush, blush… thanks Mo.

This will all take place at the AIA offices in downtown San Francisco. It is co-sponsored by AIASF and the Harvard Club of San Francisco. For tickets check out:

www.aiasf.org/calendar/cal_detail.cfm?cid=5732

or

www.harvardclubsf.org/article.html?aid=174

It is early in 2010. And I have just uploaded a new version of www.lymarch.com. The first version went online around 1997.  At that time, I was so excited to have found a new web site design program called NetObjects Fusion. With NetObjects Fusion came a neat way to write a whole website in which text and pictures could mix and align in interesting ways that did not have to conform to correct Swiss design.  They gave themselves a big anniversary party on the lawn in South Park here in San Francisco.

The early version of my website was called “Stories from a Practice of Architecture”. It was my first writing about architecture in sometime, since I had stopped largely doing that two decades earlier after my book “A Psychology of Building” published by Prentice-Hall. I would now be my own publisher, or so I thought. Well that didn’t quite happen.

Being now an architect in business for myself, I did not seriously consider the implications of what writing about my own work would be in the context of trying to get more work. Rather than apply analytic parameters from an impartial standpoint, I felt I had client interests and privacy to protect. My Stories separated out into a few philosophical pieces followed by a series of stories that served as a gallery portrait of my work from viewpoint of only two parameters – residential versus public works or dense urban designing versus more spread out suburban designing.

Today I still like the philosophical pieces better. They have evolved in the “Preliminaries” section of the Stories, an idiosyncratic set of commentaries that I think point to important understandings about buildings and architecture. In this new version of the site, the rest of the stories have been updated with new projects and newer and larger photographs and plans. But I have not delved more critically into the projects. I find that I talk more frankly and more interestingly about my work in the context of public lectures and interviews.

In the past decade there has been a shift in architectural analysis towards a more upfront, down to earth discussion of the creation of architecture.  Polemic, formalistic concerns have started to give way to straight forward observations of the relationships between architects and their clients, communities and builders. With the release of the private papers of Frank Lloyd Wright to the Getty Museum archives, have come several major new studies of his work. One of the best of these is the remarkable design study of Fallingwater called “Fallingwater Rising” by Franklin Toker, published by Knopf in 2003. And in the last decade, with the emergence of Frank Gehry, has come his example of an architect who speaks dangerously from his mind and heart with little reservation about withholding his comments about clients and community circumstances.

Coming from a Chinese American background, with it’s emphasis on understatement and publicly not “rocking any boats”, it has taken me a long time to find the power of a revealing, honest public telling to further working relationships and design circumstances.

A decade ago, NetObjects Fusion gave way to GoLive. Then GoLive gave way to Dreamweaver which now no longer supports the wonderful graph paper like graphic compositional power of NetObjects and GoLive (complex embedded tables). Along with this progress has come my own increasing inability to work directly on my website. I now require specialist expertise. I am lucky to have had the recent help of a Java and CSS expert – Adam Gillett (www.adamcgillett.com) – who used to work for me in an architectural capacity. Yet I refuse to give up the graph paper, so I have kept one of the office’s Macs deliberately running out of date version system software in order to use an out of date version of GoLive.

Not everything has been lost to progress. I am writing and annotating this blog on the run from my iPhone.  And a client now ventures to his construction site with the full set of our construction drawings on his iPhone.

www.lymarch.com should feel more visual with its slide show and larger pics. I’m still an analytical guy, so words remain, something most legitimate architecture firm websites seem to find offensive – minimal text and beautiful, Flash sites are fashionable these days. And finally my site has a uniform site navigation system.  With the inclusion of this blog and a series of short videos, I am trying once again to see if I can tell some Stories that are architecturally interesting.  With the HERE videos, I am beginning this effort by not focusing on my own work, but on what I see around me in San Francisco.

Last year, I was contacted by a couple who bought and retired to the first house that I designed (and built) in rural New Hampshire some 36 years ago. They are probably the 5th owners of this 4 acre hillside property. We talked over its construction and the alterations that had been made to it. I was stunned to learn that the woods that had enclosed the house had been cut down to create a hillside meadow for a previous owner’s horses.  The house now exposed and singularly tied to its rock strewn knoll.  I was encouraged by a sense that its new owners had a feel for the home’s original intent, despite its current circumstances.

Recently, I’ve had several requests by authors to use drawings from my “A Psychology of Building” – the line drawings that I did depicting the evolution of Carl Jung’s lakeside getaway lodge in Bollingen, Switzerland.

It’s nice to know that parts of what one has done are still fresh and alive.