by James HIll -

ISHI CAMP SNAPSHOTS IN WILDERNESS

byron wolfe ishi

In putting together the images for our last Ishi post, we came upon the photo reconstructions of Byron Wolfe including this fantastic image taken of a second trip with Ishi, 100 years after Ishi’s own, to the same swimming hole of the legendary campout of May 1914.

Calisphere’s Guide to Ethnographic Field Photos contains the vast photo documentation of 1914 camp photos by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and surgeon-archer Saxton Pope as they return with Ishi to his ancestral hideout and home.  Both specimen and friend, the  relationship of Ishi, the last California aboriginal, and his academic buddies from the University of California was complicated.

by James HIll -

ISHI CAMP SNAPSHOTS: HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS

ishi captured 355  ishi 2 at UC Museum of Anthropology 350

Ishi died 100 years ago, March 25, 1916–anthropology’s man of two worlds, the last stone age man, the last wild man, museum specimen, and closest friend.   Raised on the Ishi story, we commemorate this sad centennial with reflections on his friendships cut-short, his camping experience, his influence on modern archery, and beyond to his architectural influence and its own untimely end.

by James HIll -

LAST OUTPOSTS: VICTORIANS AND PENTECOSTALS OF THE WESTERN ADDITION

The First Apostolic Faith Church displays a Pentecostal purity of form in stark contrast to the ornament laden Victorians that populate the neighborhood. Cleansed of its Victorian ornament to a powerful austerity and a puritanical severity, the First Apostolic Faith Church at Pierce and Bush, top, provides an affordable and architectural alternative to the prevailing upper middle class styling common in Lower Pacific Heights in Western Addition’s upper end.  It represents one of many small and endangered churches still active as its supporting congregation is pushed out of the neighborhood to make way for a less evangelical population. 

by James HIll -

BETTER WURSTER?

Along with San Francisco’s  Bank of America Building and Ghiradelli Square, the Clark Beach House in elevation above and immortalized on PG&E’s heliodon machine left, counts among the most published and recognized of the work from the office of the architect William Wilson Wurster, one time west coast darling, and educational innovator as  Dean at MIT and UC Berkeley’s re-envisioned Environmental Design Department.  Known for his serious understatement and disdain for luxury and over-designing, his work remains largely disregarded today seemingly as a result.  With the One Percent currently under attack, the possibility for a resurgence of  modesty in home design seems better than any time since the Reign of Terror. 

by James HIll -

THE SIMPLE LIFE: DOWN IN BEDROCK

Strong forms and materials challenge comfort and simplicity.   Stunningly simple, heavily understated, this granite bench chills in the inhospitable snow of Yosemite Valley.

The bench is a monument to the geology of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and the gravitational forces that have scraped, scoured and shoved them for 40 million years in Yosemite Valley, in Hetch Hetchy, and as shown here, in the Emigrant Wilderness.  Harsh,  numbing, forbidding, exhilarating, the bench exhibits an elemental design logic, older than history, appropriate to a Sierra winter or home furnishings for Fred Flintstone.

Strong forms and strong materials have their powerful attractions despite their indifference to human comfort.  While comfort and simplicity remain our guiding goals,  architectural design  is not always about comfort, nor is simplicity always so simple.  An elegant goal, achieving simplicity from the myriad of materials and conditions required for modern construction is frequently a challenging and in this case weighty proposition requiring serious tools and strenuous effort.