London, GB | Formerly of New York, Buenos Aires, Fife, and the Western Cape. | Saoránach d’Éirinn.

2024 April

Bicycle Rack

We are so used to the functional ugliness of practical things in everyday life that people have forgotten we used to design useful things to be beautiful as well.

A look at the street furniture — lampposts, advertising pillars, pissoirs — of 1900s Paris and that which it inspired from Bucharest to Buenos Aires can provide a useful reminder.

Happily there are architects and designers who haven’t given up on the public realm. A fine example is this bike rack designed by B&L Architects of Charleston, South Carolina.

Charleston is probably the prettiest town in all America and the city elders have worked long and hard to protect that which makes it beautiful — not without challenges. (Watch Andres Duany on Charleston.)

I don’t know if B&L’s bike rack is going to be deployed more broadly in the city, but it looks gorgeous placed here beside the County Courthouse designed in 1790 by James Hoban.

As always, it is not turning the clock back: it is choosing a better future.

April 29, 2024 1:00 pm | Link | No Comments »

Burns Tower

Which is the oldest university in California? The Jesuits began teaching at the University of Santa Clara in 1851. In the same year, and in the same town, a gaggle of Presbyterians received a state charter to found a college that only began teaching the following year.

The Jesuits decided to crack on and start instruction before they could raise the $20,000 endowment the state required before a charter was granted whereas the Wesleyans went the other way round. That latter institution eventually moved to Stockton, east of San Francisco, where it is today known as the University of the Pacific.

When a university actually began operating seems a more appropriate foundation date than mere form filling, so despite its 1855 charter I’d say Santa Clara still beats the 1851 University of the Pacific.

Since that time, Pacific has claimed a few honours. It has educated students as wide-ranging as Jamie Lee Curtis, who left after a term to become an actress, to the orthodontist Arif Alvi who was President of Pakistan until last month. Jazz giant Dave Brubeck studied veterinary medicine here.

The campus’s Ivy League look with a California location has led to it appearing in many films, including ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.

In the late 1950s, the elders of Pacific were looking for a way to cut the university’s water bill. They decided building a 150,000-gallon water tower was the solution. But they didn’t want to blight their beautiful campus with an unsightly functional design.

They turned to architects Howard G. Bissell and Glen H. Mortensen who created the tower that has become an icon of the university and was the tallest building in Stockton for decades.

(more…)

April 19, 2024 1:57 pm | Link | No Comments »

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