One of SF’s most photogenic areas.

During the dot-com boom, the area South of Market Street (SOMA) in San Francisco saw rents skyrocket as legions of code monkeys sought to become the next Google. Most crashed and burned spectacularly in April, 2000 and the tech stock market has not remotely recovered in the decade since. Such are speculative bubbles.

Not that this was bad. The San Mateo bridge to Oakland is once more drivable thanks to the lane added too late for the boom and rents in SOMA have come back down from the nosebleed levels seen during the bubble, allowing artists and sculptors and generally creative people to once more return and make the place what it is. There are lots of great print and machine shops here, serving all needs from large posters, custom furniture, metalworking and photographic printing.

And what most typifies SOMA is a vital mix of old buildings made to look new again, vibrant colors, murals, local eateries and all of those great things that constitute a neighborhood.

You can get some sense of what I’m going on about by clicking the picture below, which will download a 3.2mB PDF to your computer. Suffice it to say that all the 22 snaps included were made on one dreary morning between rain showers earlier this week.

Best viewed on an iPad or in Preview on a Mac.

What a university should be.

It’s academic week here! After the sheer architectural awfulness of UCSF Mission Bay profiled earlier, take a look at Stanford in Palo Alto, CA.

The apocryphal story has it that Leland Stanford, his fortune in nineteenth century US rail secure, offered a large chunk of it to Harvard as an endowment. When this scruffy looking Californian was refused so much as an audience with the Dean he left in a huff and gave the dough to create Stanford in Palo Alto instead. His creation has become one of the very greatest schools in America, rivaling Harvard for academic excellence. (As an alumnus of the School of Engineering at University College, London, I have no axe to grind, and hereby proffer humble apologies to the many Harvard alumni reading this, just in case. I will be quite happy were our son to attend either of these great American schools – or both!) Today an engineering degree from Stanford is as certain a guarantee of fame and fortune in Silicon Valley as there is.

The architecture and environment could scarcely differ more from the horrors of UCSF. Just look:

Now which would you or your child rather attend?

All snaps on an Olympus C5050 and a Panasonic G1 with the 9-18mm Olympus MFT lens.

An architectural nightmare.

The architecture of a university campus seems to bear little relationship to its academic excellence. The raft of Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine at UCSF Mission Bay in south east San Francisco would appear to confirm that a welcoming environment and academic excellence are unrelated. Visit this soulless campus and you would swear that, even at lunch hour, the place has been hit by a neutron bomb. The public areas, such as they are, will be empty, the buildings remain standing. The ‘quad’, if you can call it that, is dominated by two fifty foot slabs of steel plate covered with graffiti and rust …. see the third snap below.

And it’s not as if the near constant construction at this huge campus is improving things. Whereas you can see some hint of originality in the brutality of London’s Barbican or the sheer silliness of Paris’s Pompideau Museum, their is neither wit, whimsy or originality in the structural steel passing for architecture at UCSF Mission Bay.

UCSF, Mission Bay.

Try as I may to inject some wit and interest into snaps of this architecturally arid desert, I fear I am doomed to fail. I don’t see myself revisiting this area any time soon unless, that is, I get a sudden hankering for a Nobel Prize in physiology, which is a long shot.

What were they thinking of here?

The reflections say more than this building ever will.

Slabs of rusty steel ….

Little sign of life.

A rare human being.

No, I am not making this up.

“Ugh!”, in a word.

How desperate a place is this to take your child?

This one must be the campus gaol.

Deserted. As usual.

All snapped over the past two years on the Panny G1 with the kit and 45-200mm MFT lenses.

A last flowering of beauty.

Before America embarked on yet another of its unending wars in support of the military industrial complex (though in fairness to the Land of the Free, while this may have been the last hot war they won the cause was not oil but freedom) the movement known as Art Deco came to its final fruition in the variant most often referred to as Moderne.

Any fan of late ’30s movies, especially musicals, will get an eyeful of Art Deco with its sensual curves and light touch. Moderne took this to a new high, incorporating nautical themes and yet cleaner lines. Few buildings illustrate the style better than the Portside building on the Embarcadero in east San Francisco.

The Portside Building at 38 Bryant Street, San Francisco. G1, kit lens @ 31mm 1/4000, f/5,4, ISO 320.

Portside overlooks the east bay and sees morning fog as often as not. For reasons which quite defeat me it is placed immediately under the Oakland Bay Bridge, and while the latter discloses far less of the Art Deco beauty abundantly on show in the Golden Gate on the other side of town, the period is the same. Portside was actually completed in the 1990s and is a recreation of the original Moderne style, seldom seen in San Francisco. Nothing wrong with recreation – you can bet the windows fit, there is modern air conditioning and the interior is silent as the grave according to HKS, the architects responsible. Still, I’m not sure I would want to blow a seven figure sum on a condo here knowing that the bridge above awaits temptation in the guise of the next major earthquake. ‘Penthouse, open sky view’ rather loses its appeal.

Penthouse view of the Oakland Bay Bridge. G1, kit lens @ 16mm, 1/320, f/7.1, ISO 320.