I just turned 60, said to be the new 40. I’m not sure what that means. Probably something about how the next phase is going be different, and it may as well as be as fantastic as possible. That’s my plan for it. At the very least, the fact that it’s a ten-year birthday means […]
ArchiTalk: How Venice got its Mojo
It’s been too long since I got to go to Europe, so I settled for watching A&E’s “The Miraculous Canals of Venice,” a forty minute documentary available on YouTube and also as “instant viewing” on Netflix. It’s a way to get a dose of Venezia without having to even get out of your chair. […]
ArchiTalk: The Big Move
Getting to know the house I thought I knew We left our house of 29 years on West K Street and are now five blocks away in our house of three weeks on West 6th Street. My senses have been on overdrive noticing things about life in the new house. I’m ready for that to […]
ArchiTalk: The open house
Well, aside from some cabinet knobs and shower doors, the house that we’re having built is largely done, so a couple weeks ago it was deemed to be time to have an open house. Though my wife and I are not big entertainers, we like to do a good job with our open houses because […]
ArchiTalk: The House on Thimble Island Bay
I recently traveled three thousand miles to visit a house that I knew only from a small black and white photo on page 260 of the “Field Guide to American Houses.” I did it to satisfy an impulse. It’s not a famous house, but, like every house in the guide, it does have enough architectural […]
ArchiTalk: Coolest two minutes ever
How I was turned into an eclipse chaser I recently made an eight hour drive to Oregon with my family and a few friends to see the total eclipse of the sun. I knew that by positioning ourselves in the 70 mile wide path of “totality” we were going to get the full cosmic effect […]
ArchiTalk: Elsie Robinson’s Benicia (Redux)
Daily life of 1890s Benicia comes to life in hard-to-find memoir In 1883 a girl was born in Benicia, grew up there and came to make sense of the world from what she saw. At age 19, she moved to Vermont to marry into a family of strict puritans and years later returned to the […]
ArchiTalk: Dog is my copilot, a brief history of dogdom
Animals live with us in our homes and we think there is nothing unusual about this. That’s remarkable if you think about it. We are so fond of these animals that we even take them with us on car rides. I’m speaking, of course, about our canine companions. Cats are pretty cool too, and I […]
ArchiTalk: A little trip to Calistoga
It was a dark and stormy night… It was just an overnight trip to Calistoga with a few chores added in. We would pick up a light fixture we had ordered months ago from a little store we’d found up there. There would be dinner out in a cool building I’d been admiring. We would […]
ArchiTalk: The flawed buildings among us
That scaffolding you see along the sidewalk at the corner of First Street and West J Street is extra strong with metal I-beams at the top for a special reason. The grey plastered brick “Mason’s” building that looms over the corner of that intersection has been red-tagged as unsafe and cannot be entered because deep […]