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San Francisco, California
And the last thing you wanted is the first thing I do
We’re back in San Francisco for A’23 and it feels like I never left. It was only last Fall when I walked these same streets and rode these same trains and wandered the Moscone Center as a Greenbuild attendee, a smaller and very different conference. In case you’re not familiar with A’23, it is the annual AIA Conference on Architecture, which was previously known as the AIA Convention. It nomadically travels from city to city, and I’ve been going to these so long that sometimes the cities have started repeating themselves. Still, there are always new tours or keynote speakers or things and people to see, so (for me at least) it always makes sense going, if I can.
We start the slideshow with the first tour that I took, an all day tour of three private houses designed by John Marsh Davis, an architect associated with Bruce Goff and his American School. The tour was led by an architect who literally wrote a book about Davis, and the owners all shared their personal interactions with him and the experiences they had in his houses. He actually lived in all three of the houses that we visited, so the connection between the architect and buildings were even stronger than you might normally expect.
The tour, ET111 Wood Expressionism: The Design Legacy of John Marsh Davis, started at a house in the hills of Sausalito, then included a bus trip (over roads most definitely not designed for a bus) until we reached this house on Stinson Beach, the most spectacular of the three we were fortunate enough to visit.
This is the fifteenth AIA Conference (or Convention) that I have been to, and I usually attend at least 5 or 6 tours each time, meaning that if I actually added up all of the tours I’ve been on, chances are damn good that I would be well over a hundred by now. Since I have been on so many of these tours, I have developed the following set of rules:
1.- Book early. Good tours sell out fast
2.- Only sign up for tours that you can not do on your own
3.- Always select tours of private homes if offered
4.- Be mindful of scheduling, tours always run late so don’t expect that you’ll make the next event if you don’t allow extra time
5.- The AIA often screws things up, try and be calm and not get stressed over their mistakes
So while I really didn’t know all that much (if anything) about John Marsh Davis, rule #3 had me select the tour and once again. Rule #3 proved right. ET111 Wood Expressionism: The Design Legacy of John Marsh Davis turned out to not only be the best tour I took during all of A’23, it is probably in the top 5 of all the AIA tours I have ever taken. Well researched, well presented, special access to private spaces, and even a free lunch (that the tour guide paid for because A’23 forgot about lunch, see rule #5 above). The pictures below are from the third house that we visited, also in Sausalito and only a block away from the first, even though we went out and back to Stinson Beach in between. This house (currently lived in by a one time late night television band leader) was exceptionally small but you can’t tell from the photos, Davis used and located mirrors exceptionally well. In fact, so well that chances are you won’t be able to find them all in these photos.
I don’t have all that much free time at AIA Conferences anymore. I usually know other attendees, so I try and meet them whenever I’m not on a tour or at a keynote or at an event or not asleep. The schedules have been increasingly busy year to year to year, which I guess is ok considering I was just in San Francisco not all that long ago. That said, I still tried to use what free time I had to see something new, something I hadn’t seen before. Which explains why I got myself all the way out to the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi. The cathedral is memorable and hard to photograph. By “hard to photograph,” I mean that from certain angles in photos the building can just look weird and off kilter, which it doesn’t (always) look like in person. So if you’re not already familiar with the building, these hard to get photos don’t really explain the building particularly well, but they do look pretty good.
These pictures are from my second day at A’23 and the first full day. AIA Conferences start on Thursdays and run through Saturdays, although they open a day early for tours (and probably other things) on Wednesdays. Most people don’t show up until Thursday, and by Saturday morning (the last day) the place is already a ghost town, although I’m usually still there trying to do a tour or something.
Back to the actual pictures at hand. These are from RT202 Office to Residential in San Francisco’s Mid-Market: 100 Van Ness, which in its title alone pretty much completely explains the pictures below. And like a lot of residential buildings, the amenities and apartments may have been nice, but the views, especially from the rooftop deck, were spectacular.
