Martinez Commons, U.C. Berkeley

The University of California at Berkeley is known worldwide as one of America’s leading centers of higher learning.  It boasts an impressive faculty with more scientific discoveries and patents by its researchers than just about any other university in the world.  The Berkeley campus is situated in the heart of the dense and diverse City of Berkeley.  Sandwiched between The Bay, a greenbelt regional park and equally dense adjacent cities, there is hardly any free space for expansion.  The net result is a housing market that has been impacted for decades.  The University’s task to provide housing for its undergraduates is a daunting one.  The University has little land of its own and usually must acquire land from private sources.

About 50 years ago the University acquired the Anna Head School, a private girls’ secondary school located in the South Campus area.  The school occupied most of a city block and consisted of a very well worn collection of early 20^th century Bay Shingle Style buildings.  U.C. Residential and Student Services decided to take about half the property and erect a much needed dorm dedicated to sophomores.  The University wanted a modern building that could meet the needs of 21^st Century students and at the same time, make as small an environmental imprint as possible.  They selected Behnisch Architekten to design the building.

Behnisch’s plan was a multi-faceted structure that integrated a wide variety of student functions and innovative dormitory types into one building. The first floor of the building was designed for meetings and student services with large, open lobbies that could double as concert or lecture spaces and smaller offices for counseling or tutoring.  The dormitories were divided between standard multi student dorm rooms and two level loft apartments with built-in kitchens and living rooms.  The architects wrapped the building in powder coated metal panels that subtly  changed color as they moved up the building and a reclaimed, renewable hardwood that mirrored the existing shingle style buildings on the other side of the courtyard.  20 tons of lumber was harvested from the site and milled for interior finishes and benches.  Several historic trees were saved and became a major part of the landscape theme.  The building has no air-conditioning and heating is provided by roof-top thermal solar panels that circulate hot water through a radiator system.  (Berkeley has a mild, Mediterranean climate.)  Each floor of the residential units has multiple study rooms and lounges so that a student can work in a group just down the hall or escape his room to a well furnished and comfortable lounge.

A broad swath of design teams worked on the project to bring it to life.  EDHH became the project architect overseeing the project’s construction and completion.  Andrea Cochran and Associates did the simple but effective landscape work.  IBE, Sandis, and Loisos did various parts of the engineering and lighting.  The end result is a classy, highly energy efficient building that sits comfortably on a difficult site and provides a broad range of sorely needed services for the U.C.B. student community.

I have been working on the book, Rural Modern, for the past six months or so and am very close to wrapping it up.  The book is an anthology or survey of regional Modernists who have used vernacular or historical architecture as jumping off points to create a dramatic, and vibrant regional Modernism.  Originally, my focus was California, but my publisher asked me to broaden the scope of the book by reaching out to architects beyond the Golden State. The end result was a short odyssey around the United States looking for great residential architecture that fit the theme.  With the help of Kate Carboneau, a native of North Carolina and big architecture fan, and a handful of helpful architects in the southeast, southwest and Pacific northwest, I have compiled a great collection of houses.   Each house was selected for its regional uniqueness and uncommon design.  I especially enjoyed the architects from the southeast with their genteel manners, understated approach and wonderful projects.  It could be that the sun just shines a little too brightly here in California and casts an undeserving shadow on good architecture in other parts of the U.S.

Shenandoah Valley house, Carter Burton Architects

File Sizes and Formats for Digital Images

The digital cameras and capture devices in use today by most professionals are quite capable machines.  Ironically, they can collect much more data than you can ever see, print or display.  Some digital sensors capture color at 16 bits, which means that it can resolve 65536 shades of luminosity for each pixel.  The problem with this high quality image is that it can neither be displayed in any practical way nor seen by the human eye.  Likewise, some sensors can produce images can produce a 60 megapixel image. That translates into a 180,000,000 byte image for your computer to munch on.  These are the sensors that were originally developed to read a license plate from outer space and have been retrofitted to attach to some cameras.  Returning to earth, most of us need to work with images that are big enough for offset printing and scalable for web use.  Image quality is defined in three ways:

• Total pixel size, HxW in mega-pixels or kilo-pixels
• Resolution per inch in PPI or DPI
• Color space:  sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998), Pro Color, CMYK

Paradize Valley house, Arizona, Will Bruder Architects

The easiest to understand is the first one.  It is a simple measurement of the image, Height by Width in pixels.  An image that is approx. 5000 pixels by 3000 pixels should be large enough to take care of all of your photographic requirements, from a double page spread in a book to a wall mural.  The second image requirement has two numbers you should know: 300 ppi and 72 ppi.  PPI is pixels per inch and 300 is the standard for printing and 72 is the standard for the web.  Do not send your printer a 72 ppi image and expect him not to pitch a fit.  Likewise, don’t try to load a 300 ppi image on your web page and expect it to load.  Almost all image editing software will give you this information when you open the files.   Today, most images live in either Adobe 1998 or sRGB color spaces.  There are books written about color space by very smart, geeky characters who know when to use what where.  Simply put, Adobe 1998 is for the print world and sRGB is for the web.  There is some crossover and some cameras will ONLY shoot sRGB, but in the world of pros there is a distinction.  sRGB is a smaller compressed space with brighter colors and a much smaller range.  Adobe 1998 is a softer, much larger color space that printers like to work from.  We always output to Adobe 1998, and then convert to sRBG when making images specifically for web or desktop computer use.

Seaberry Ofc. bldg., Durham, N.C., RND Architects

The logic in working with these sizes and formats is as obvious as cropping and image.  It is easy to chop something off, but much harder to add it back.  Always keep you archived images in 300 ppi resolution and in Adobe 1998 color.  You can easily make lower resolution images for web use from these images, but you cannot reverse the process.   Preserving original image quality is a task that requires attention and diligence.

I have known Dan Smith since our student days in Architecture school at Berkeley half a lifetime ago. He was a good looking, sandy haired guy then and he still is, although most of those hairs are now silver. While he finished his degree in architecture, I took off to live and work in Asia returning only to take a different career path. Dan, on the other hand, was part of the green movement in architecture even before it had its current moniker. Alternative building techniques and energy saving methods were somehow part of his DNA. At the same time that he was designing conventional buildings, he was constantly looking at alternative designs to construct buildings from earth friendly materials like rammed earth and straw bales. Ecological building has gone in and out of fashion several times since the 1960s, but Dan Smith has been singular in his approach to create buildings that leave the most minimal carbon footprint.

Sonoma Farm House, Daniel Smith Associates, architect

Over glasses of iced tea and some scrumptious chicken wrap sandwiches at a local café, Dan discussed a few of his latest projects and some of his pro-bono work in third world countries. He is just finishing up a home in Sonoma, California for a family who wanted a very green building. Using the farm houses and aging chicken coops of the surrounding farm community for design inspiration, Smith created a collection of simple gabbled structures linked by covered walkways, gardens and a pool. Smith used a solar-thermal system to heat the pool and house water and then developed a subterranean heat sink that would hold the heat for several weeks at a time. He was also able to integrate some geo-thermal trenches in the needed hillside restoration and connect the output to a heat pump. These combined systems not only heated the pool, they also provided much of the main house’s radiant heating and supply all the domestic hot water. An old pool on site was covered and converted into a rain water cistern which provides … the water for toilet flushing and much of the garden irrigation.
Smith believes that when you design a green building, it should take on the character of all of its internal energy creating and saving systems. Rather than hide the photo-voltaics, they should somehow become part of the design. He talks about his hybrid electric car and admires how the designers built the car around the concept of its power plant. The Louis Sullivan dictum,” form follows function,” comes to mind. Smith has designed and built four net-zero energy houses and has records of their performance. He is currently working with a developer to incorporate these concepts in a larger, multi-family scale project of thirty units.

Sonoma Farm House, close-up , Daniel Smith Associates, architect

The other side of his practice is developing housing for third world countries that is livable, economical and safe. Traditional masonry houses in many third world countries have a nasty tendency to fall down under seismic stress killing their occupants. Along with Marty Hammer and others he has designed and built very economical and safe structures using alternative concrete blocks and straw bale construction in Haiti, Mongolia, and Pakistan. His office has also experimented with a wide variety of potential building materials that can be used economically in poor countries. In Pakistan, he worked with a group to innovate a seismic straw bale wall that is sheathed in a clay plaster coating with recycled nylon fish netting as reinforcement.
Daniel Smith is one of those architects working on the edge of design experimenting with building techniques, materials and energy use that could very easily become mainstream practice for the next generation.

Everyone likes a good story and people have been telling them to each other for probably as long as people had the ability to talk.  Modern technologies have just made the ancient art of story telling a little easier and certainly more accessible.  Film, video, and multimedia have given many of us the ability to tell stories that can shoot around the world in viral fashion informing, humoring, educating and entertaining us in ways we never imagined just a few short years ago.

As part of the commission to write and photograph the book: California Cool: Modernism Reborn, Images Publishing asked me to produce a short video about the book that he could use on his website and general marketing.  My goal in writing the book was to give architecture and architects a human face.  I had close to 25 contributors, all with different stories to tell.  Photographing architecture is one thing, but creating a video about it is quite a different task.  I knew what I wanted to do and had a general idea of format (thank you, Ken Burns) but I also knew I needed to collaborate with a videographer with the tools and experience to produce a professional level video. I turned to my friend and colleague, Eric Sahlin, a professional videographer and media producer who had recently left Adobe Systems.  Sahlin had produced a number of videos at Adobe that were embedded into the Adobe website.  They had the level of sophistication and polish that I was looking for.

Interview with Steven Ehrlich from video

A deal was struck, arrangements made and we were on our way.  I selected five architects to interview, mostly on the basis of their verbal abilities and comprehensive knowledge of the subject.  The plan was to mix interview footage with pans, tilts and zooms on existing stills and “B-roll” footage shot at various architectural offices and a few of their project sites.  Each of the interviews had some loose scripting, but my role as interviewer was to prompt the architect to talk about his role and his vision.  Other than the fact that one airline misplaced half our equipment for a day, the shooting went well and we returned to Oakland with five hours of footage that we were going to condense into five minutes.  Editing five hours of interviews actually took longer than the interviews themselves.  All of the “dead-air” and momentary pauses were cut out and a simple coherent statement was cobbled together from hours of verbal meandering.  Live interview footage was inter-mixed with shots of their work and workplaces. Eric found an upbeat soundtrack that he carefully laid underneath the dialog giving it an audio uniformity.

Architecture really does tell a story about society’s values and aspirations. In some ways, architects have an obligation to articulate that story.   Our video is one small attempt to do just that.

It was our family’s annual trip to the hills of Marin County to have dinner with the in-laws, or more correctly the mother-in-law.  My father-in-law Dick Beeler, a colorful character in his own right, died prematurely years ago while taking one of his daily swims in San Francisco Bay.  Dick was a writer and publisher of a group of small magazines serving the farming communities of California.   Lois, his second wife, has lived in the same house that Dick built in 1959 ever since.  For someone with an architectural focus, visiting the Beeler house is a step back into mid twentieth century modernism.  The architect Beeler hired created an almost perfect replica of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House 22.  The only significant difference was the fact that he chose to frame it in wood instead of steel.  A visit to the house brings up visions of Danish modern, hoop skirts, skinny black neckties and episodes of Mad Men.

The Beeler family in Kansas City, ca. 1920

Lois, in her mid-eighties, still enjoys living in this hidden architectural relic, entertaining friends and neighbors and living an active senior citizen lifestyle.  She cooked us a lovely holiday dinner while my wife and sister-in-law caught up on family friends.  Lois had recently had some work done to the garage and in the process found a collection of family photo albums, slide collections, scores of reels of film and some amazing vintage 1950s camera gear.  She asked us to take a look and see if there was anything there we wanted.  I was stunned.  Out came bag after bag of family history.  The photo albums documenting my wife’s family from the early twentieth century on were copious and illuminating.

Dick Beeler's high school swim team

Dick Beeler led a short and illustrious life. He grew up in the mid-west, went the University of Texas where he was a star swimmer. He was selected for the 1940 U.S. Olympic team which was to be held in Finland, but was cancelled because of the outbreak of the war. He joined the army and like so many other soldiers returned to California after the war to start his magazine business. I met Dick toward the end of his career when he was editor of The California Farmer. I knew him as an engaging man with a quick wit and sharp pen, in much the same genre of Herb Caen or Art Hoppe. What I didn’t know was that he was also quite a photographer. I suspect that in the early years of his magazine business he did a lot of his own photography. His collection of family photos went from mediocre Kodak moments to quietly insightful shots of his children and the mid-century world they lived in. Those priceless albums induced a wave of nostalgia and awe.

Dick with his brother and sister ca. 1940

Snapshots are literally 1/60 of a second of a person’s life captured. That happy face can often hide a lifetime of sadness and woe. Yet the snapshot is also has an iconographic quality that has long been revered and feared by both primitive and modern peoples. Snapshots can speak volumes. They give us a random but useful history of a person, a family, a society. On some level, they tell us where we have been and who we are. Archivists and film makers have used snapshots to recreate entire epics; think Ken Burns. The snapshot is not a narrative but an associative document. We look at the snapshot and let our minds create the story from the visual clues it provides. The snapshot allows us to remember; it allows us to touch the past, if only for 1/60 of a second. Will future, digitized “Kodak moments” find their way into photo albums to be discovered generations hence, or be lost forever in the ether of cyberspace? Only time will tell.

Walking on to the conference grounds early on a clear warm fall Saturday morning, I felt somewhat intimidated.  I was interested in getting the pulse of the world of architecture, but I did not want to be an outsider looking in.  That fear was quickly dissipated.  A warm pat on the back arrived at the first coffee break.  It was one of several dozen clients that I would connect with over the course of the weekend.  Virtually every architect that I had worked with in the past two years was at the conference and most were in good spirits.  The conference committee had scoured the country and put together an amazing group of speakers who talked about architecture, the environment, how things are built, how our cities will evolve.  I was impressed by the breath of disciplines they corralled in one weekend.  I thought the best way to tie this together is just to write about three presenters.

Studio Gang, The Taipei Pop Music Center

Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects, Chicago

Jeanne Gang is really quite amazing. She is a multi-disciplinary architect who thinks and acts BIG, from high rise towers in Chicago to redesigning whole cities from Cicero to India.  What makes her work interesting are the questions she asks.  Putting people first in her designs seems to be her overarching design principle. She was just awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, only the fourth architect to be so honored.

Matsys Design, S_Window, London

Andrew Kudless, Matsys, Oakland, CA

Kudless is a conceptual artist who studies organic forms and builds large constructs based on these forms.  His work ranges from collapsible paper lamps to designs for vast underground cities all based on an organic morphology.  His objects are very scalable and have the potential to be integrated into large building components.  He is definitely and “outside the box” thinker.

Matsys: Manifold Installation at the AA Projects Review, London

Dr. Dickson Despommier, PhD., Columbia University

Despommier is a parasitologist who has wandered afield and become a leading researcher and advocate for indoor farming.  Modern plant research has discovered that plants actually only require about 5% to 10% of the visual spectrum of light to grow.  This can be provided economically by LED lighting opening up the possibility of true indoor farming in urban environments.  Old factories in rust belt cities can be turned into productive indoor farms producing 10 times the crop output of their land based cousins. By consolidating labor and transportation, these new farms offer up exciting possibilities for dormant urban space and could solve food shortage problems later in the century.

For anyone interested in design solutions and visionary views to solve the world’s problems, the Monterey Design Conference put a lot on the plate for one weekend.  I often think  of us who went to architecture school thirty years ago holding out the hope that we could, through good design, solve some of the world’s problems, or at the very least, not fill it up with ugliness.  It is encouraging to know that a handful of visionaries are actually trying to do just that from a multi-disciplinary approach.

Hotel Bristol Lobby, San Diego

This year we worked extensively with one medium sized boutique hotel organization, Greystone Hotels,  shooting most of their properties. They waited close to four years and then finally decided it was time to update all of their photography.  Buildings get remodeled. Hotels target different client bases.   Marketing strategies change.  A great photo can be an invaluable marketing asset in any venue.

Hotel Bristol Bar, San Diego

Using digital technology, we can not only enhance what we capture, we can substantially change the environment.  For example, on the ballroom shot taken at Hotel Bristol in San Diego, we did not have enough linen for all the tables.  We were able to clone additional tables and then add them to the image.  The day we shot the ballroom space was gray with unremitting cloud cover.  As a precaution I shot a skyline shot the day before and conveniently stripped it in.  It was a seamless production.

Bristol Ballroom

Shooting hotels is fun because the people who work in the hospitality business are all about creating fun spaces for guests to enjoy.  Working with dedicated hoteliers and restaurateurs is almost always a positive experience.

Component Images of Photo-merge, Sunol House, Swatt Miers Archts.

One can debate the virtues of film versus digital and there are advantages to each medium.  With film, the object was always to create the perfect image because trying to improve it after the shutter had closed was difficult if not impossible.  With digital cameras, the object seems to be to collect as much raw data as you can so that you can reassemble the image in post production. The perfect image we all lust for is something that happens much later.

Sunol House, Photo-merge Assemblage, Swatt Miers Archts.

Recently I shot an assignment for Swatt|Miers Architects that called for some major computer doctoring to create images that could not have been done any other way.  The photo-merge concept has been around for a long time and subsequent software improvements have made it much more robust.  Adobe has incorporated a fairly good photo-merge tool in later versions of  PhotoShop.  Today, even point and shoot cameras come with some rudimentary merge software. The key in the process is to have the camera rotate on the nodal point of the lens and lap the images so that the merge tool can “cut and paste” from each image to make the composite.  The image you see above was composited from four individual shots and stitched together by the P.S. merge tool.  Short of bringing a man-lift on site and parking it precariously on a significant slope, there was no way to get this view of the building.  What is most remarkable is the rectilinear correction that the software created.

HDR Composite Images, Sunol House, Swatt Miers Archts.

HDR or High Dynamic Range imagery has also been around for a long time.  In the film era, the likes of Ansel Adams and yours truly mixed Pyrogallic acid developer to suppress highlights and extend tonal range in black and white film.  No, I am not as old as Adams, but I did mix my own chemicals back in the days of black and white and used the same formulas he used to control highlight density in my negatives.  Today that same effect is achieved in digital photography by creating multiple exposures of the same shot and then using sophisticated software to blend the lights and the darks into a pleasing composite image.  In the image above was created using NIK tools HDR Efex Pro and PhotoShop.   There are a variety of techniques one can use to get to the same place including hauling a ton of strobe lighting to the site and lighting the scene with several thousand watts of light.  But that does take time, an assistant or two and serious effort. HDR doesn’t work all the time and cannot get you out of a black pit, but with a deft hand and a favorable environment, it can produce some pleasing results and certainly speed along a day’s shoot.

Final HDR image created from composites

A few years back when we were still shooting film, doing eight shots in a day was about the limit.  In today’s digital world we are closer to twenty.   The digital revolution has lightened photographer’s equipment cases and moved much creativity from the camera to the computer.

One of the few positive aspects of this terrible recession is the fact that I have had the time to touch base and have lunch with some interesting people that I have known and worked with over the years. Randall Whitehead was a young lighting designer who walked into my studio twenty years ago looking for great stock shots for a book he was writing on residential lighting.  We were able to supply close to half the book’s images and helped out on subsequent projects.   Alas, Randall became a renowned designer and lecturer and our lives drifted apart.

Private residence, Carmel , CA Wm David Martin, A.I.A.

After a significant hiatus, Randall has come back into focus.  We had just photographed two wonderful houses in Carmel Valley for David Martin, A.I.A. and Randall had done the lighting.  On a sunny spring afternoon, I visited him in his Potrero Hill studio in San Francisco to share lunch and talk shop.   18^th Street is one of those hidden San Francisco commercial streets that has a truly timeless urban character, with family restaurants wedged next to grocery stores and dry cleaners.  We slipped into a packed lunch place an ordered up a surprisingly tasty fare of American food.  Aside from the tattoos on the waitress’ arms, we could have been in Iowa.  Arnold Palmers and Tuna Salad sandwiches with a side of curly garlic fries filled the alimentary needs of the afternoon.

Private residence, Carmel Valley , CA. Wm David Martin, A.I.A.

Whitehead has been as hurt by the recession as much as anyone.  His speaking engagements have shrunk from 24 to one or two a year.  His consultancy work has also been struck with a dearth of jobs.  But the eternal optimist shone through over lunch.  Whitehead had important information to share for everyone in the design industry.  In a short 45 minutes he penciled out how the lighting industry is on the cusp of the greatest changes since the introduction of the fluorescent tube.  Lighting in both residential and commercial buildings will be completely different in a very short time, he said.  Manufacturers are bringing to market revolutionary lighting prototypes that are energy efficient, pleasantly color balanced, and GREEN.  A new type of fluorescent fixture, CCFL lamp, http://www.lightronics.com is being developed for residential use.  It has a base 2200° K color balance and is dimmable.  A dimmable LED that changes color on dimming is in the works. You can find them at: http://www.pharox-led.com/cms/us/home And finally, a compact fluorescent lamp is being manufactured that has no mercury and can be recycled. Here is the source for green fluorescents:  http://www.vu1corporation.com/

As the economy slowly revives and new buildings are commissioned, lighting both inside and out will have an entirely different look, one that is necessarily more energy efficient, greener and easier to look at.  Next to transportation, buildings are the second largest consumer of energy in the United States and lighting is a major component of that use.  Making lighting more energy efficient may save our planet, and making it more pleasant to look at may save our sensibilities.

Last week I was asked by Steinberg Architects to photograph a California Junior College Athletic Center at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley.   The project was an upgrade and renovation of a fifty year old facility badly in need of a facelift.  Arriving early in the morning and expecting few people, I was surprised to find nearly every space filled with a huge cross section of the Pierce College community doing the things necessary to keep them healthy and engaged.  From exercise classes for seniors, to ballet and karate classes for college kids, to exercise classes for the severely handicapped, to championship college sports teams, nearly every constituency was represented.  This was a community college where the adjective “community” actually meant something.

Dance Studio, Pierce College

The State of California is broke and it will take a number of years and some very clear thinking in Sacramento before we will dig our way out of this financial hole.  That being said, the State’s community college system is an incredible bargain for both the State and its students and one that continuously reaps benefits for a broad spectrum.  I think politicians and citizens alike realize this and will continue to fund and support this vital asset.  Preserving and extending the life of the physical environments of these colleges will be a State priority in the coming years in spite of our dire economy.  This is money well spent.

Yoga Class, Pierce College

Digital 101: Some technical notes on shooting in difficult spaces.

Gyms, pools, and locker rooms were not designed for photography.  Shooting in these environments can be challenging.  I remember trying to shoot a basketball game in film a number of years back using available light with almost disastrous consequences.  Today’s sophisticated digital cameras now have sensor speeds that can go to 6400 ISO.   Using remotely triggered strobe lighting and high ISO settings we can illuminate large spaces, and stop action.  The digital noise created from the high ISOs can be meliorated by using Photo Shop third party software plug-ins.  Using a universal white balance tool, a pleasing color balance can be had under almost any lighting condition.

Digital cameras and imaging software are changing the face of architectural photography in a dramatic fashion.  We can now photograph spaces with real people doing real things and create images much closer to how our eyes perceive the environment.

State Championship Women's Volleyball Team Practice