The very normal-sized side door to this apartment house on Church is given proper entry status by an enormously over-proportioned broken pediment. Most delightful is how the thing weighs so heavily on the doorway it actually crops off the top of the door within. The architect might have squeezed a normal pediment at the conventional […]
What color are my white walls? It depends on the time of day. With white, the early morning light glows orange, cool evening light is a quiet blue, only grey winter skies suffuse the room with pure white. A warm color lit by cool northern light would look muddy and insubstantial; the same with a […]
Nothing quite drives the last nail into the coffin of an architectural movement like a tombstone-sized retrospective. Did Corbu even design a coffee table capable of supporting this 21-pound volume?
Perched on Dolores at Cesar Chavez is a house with the kind of cardboard cornice you see everywhere. But the fun thing about this one is the shamelessness of its pretense. On the south end, an ornamental bracket props up the unapologetically decorative end of the sham. The longer you look at this façade, though, […]
Boulee’s monument to Newton, seems also to have been influenced by ancient mausolea, as I surmised while exploring the roots of Mario Botta’s SFMoMA. This time a spherical top over a windowless cylindrical base, and again, rings of Cypress trees. There’s something in these arrangements that draws together the earth and the heavens, the worldly […]
Geof was one of three architects to present at Design Within Reach in San Francisco, July 21, 2011. The theme was “Modernizing Your Space”. Geof talked about modernism, history, and nature in his work.
This English Gothic church seems to use the Rennaisance technique of perspective distortion to enhance its presence on Church Street.
Every now and then I come across a book so enlightening, so thought provoking, so intelligently written, it makes me want to toss out a score of others on my shelves lest I be tempted to waste time on them.