In The Clouds

     Even the blandest architecture in a city of government buildings takes on a new light at sunrise below a thick fog. This December morning in downtown Sacramento had a certain San Francisco quality about it.

State Capitol Christmas

California's historic Capitol Building is stunningly beautiful in its own right. This time of year a 55-foot majestic white Christmas fir adds still more elegance. Workers were adding final touches when this was taken while out walking. 

 Tree lighting ceremony On December 7 

(Photo Courtesy of The Sacramento Bee)

Design Trekker loves how these holiday trees light up our Capitols across the United States, including the big one in Washington, D.C. again this year. Check this Washington Post link for photos of the national Christmas tree in Washington, D.C., in recent years. (Especially beautiful: 2007 in a snowstorm). We'll be collecting some images from statehouses across the U.S. in coming days. The juxtaposition of classic columns and design with wreaths and trees really defines the word "stately."

Washington D.C. 

Courtesy wn.com

Mid-December Update: I walked to the Capitol on Friday, December 10, to take in the daily noontime p.m. holiday concerts in the Rotunda and took some updated photos from our California Capitol Christmas.

Columns and Wreaths on the Front Portico

View from inside The Capitol Building

Outside, looking West toward Capitol Mall

 Once more, toward the Capitol Building, with white picket fence
 (Note flags at half mast for newest soldier killed in Afghanistan)

Ghost Mall

 Almost a decade ago as a reporter in California I came across a great and original Web site, Deadmalls.com,, and later wrote a story about Dead Malls in America being redeveloped for new uses.
  Now I live in a California suburb with a different kind of mall: The Ghost Mall.
   This is Promenade, a mall planned for 20 years, started during the housing boom, redesigned as an outdoor "power center," and then left for dead when the economy crashed. Owner General Growth Properties fell into bankruptcy with too much debt to fnish this thing. It's an awful disappointment in a city of almost 150,000 where the major shopping districts are Kohl's, Target and Burlington Coat Factory.
  What's going to happen is anyone's guess. General Growth is coming out of BK. There's been some talk about making it an outlet mall. Maybe it has some value as an eternal monument to excesses of the early 2000s. I went out at sunrise on a Saturday morning. This is what you see out there on another failed strip of the American Dream.

Autumn In The Business Park

Some people go to Vermont or the Rockies for Fall color. Friday morning at Creekside Oaks Business Park in Natomas north of downtown Sacramento:

Courthouse Steps: A Splendid Echo Of The California Gold Rush

  Since architects designed Sacramento's Robert T. Matsui U.S.Courthouse and builders opened it in 1999, corporate lawyers, federal litigants and accused crooks of all stripes enter the front doors via a California Gold Rush fantasy on the outdoor plaza. Credit artist Tom Otterness, commissioned to provide public art for federal courthouses in Sacramento, Portland, Los Angeles and Minnesota. (Don't tell anyone: Doesn't he bear resemblance to Garth, the sidekick of Wayne Campbell in the 1992 movie, "Wayne's World?)"

   I have roamed this weird little critter-land for years, coming and going for courtroom dramas as a reporter for The AP and The Sacramento Bee. Now that I work a few blocks away I recently returned with a camera  to capture some of the little scenes (alongside this dad below).

Check out the little figurine behind dad's right leg above.
Below, you see she's the real photographer.

Forty-Niner!

Gold River

Salmon!

What I also like about this plaza are the scattered nuggets of wisdom about the law. The artist embedded dozens of sayings into the pavement, making a counterargument to our usual cynicism about lawyers. Here's a few favorites.

Here's the view looking up from all this: Nice.

The Ever-Imaginative Public Library

  Since the Birchard Public Library's "Betsy The Bookmobile" visited our Sandusky County homestead in the 1960s in Northwest Ohio I am a fan of libraries. I visit a library at least once a week in this awful economic downturn to check out free books, roam the stacks and read magazines and newspapers. Lunch is for looking at picture books of the beautiful Indonesian archipelago or browsing an account of Japanese invading Singapore in 1942. So, about a week ago I noticed arrival of a new library branch at the southern edge of Sacramento, the Valley Hi North Laguna Branch with a stunning glass wall facing north. (It was closed so I still haven't seen the view from inside).

 But that wasn't the half of it. The big surprise was The City of Sacramento's Shasta Park next door. It was filled with storybook characters and animals such as Peter the Rabbit reading books and using laptops. Well...let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

"And the Wight rabbit read that reading was good...and decided to learn to READ."

Note bookshelf below these two rabbits: I left clicked twice here and on the similar image above, and see copies of "My Friend Flicka," "Planet of the Apes," "Lord of the Flies," plus a dictionary and geometry text.

Swiss Family Robinson is one of one of the first movies I saw as a kid, based on a novel of the same name. 
                
                                              (This book is at least five feet high)

City Beautiful 1911

All over the world people complain of City Hall and the fools within. But here's a hats off to the builders of these old palaces, to the architects who realized that City Hall had to say something about gravity, importance and permanence. I recently switched jobs and moved into an older part of downtown Sacramento. All around my new location there's pretty good taste, which you will see more of in weeks and months to come.

This is Sacramento's old City Hall. I work in the decade-old California EPA building behind it. Here are some closeups of the design work I walk past each morning after leaving the #52 commuter bus and walking east up I Street. It's inspiring, especially in the early morning fall light just after sunrise. It's a bit like my memories of Rome, when I visited my uncle Norbert in the late 1970s and returned to work at a small newspaper in the early 1980s (Proving it does work to pitch a few coins into the Fountain of Trevi).

 Former legislative staffer Dan Flynn, in "Inside Guide to Sacramento," his great architectural guide to California's capital,  writes of the the 1911 City Hall building at 915 I St.: "The building's Beaux Arts style reflects the City Beautiful sentiments of the early 20th Century. The City Beautiful movement called for dignified civic buildings that were carefully positioned to provide striking vistas. The movement expressed the idealism of municipal government reformers during the Progressive era."

The architect was Rudolph Herold of Sacramento. A 2005 local history account provides context for why a city built on the fast growth and frequent squalor of the Gold Rush wanted to aim higher. 

(See Page 3 for 1911 City Hall portion).

Butterflies for 'The Butterflies'

All of us with children know the trauma of taking our kids to the doctor or specialist. It's nerve-wracking, and worse because we know how it scares our little ones to be in the country of doctors and medicine. That's why I'm taken with what Sutter Health has built into its new outpatient pediatrics center near downtown Sacramento.

I had a chance earlier this year to visit, to see how Sutter created a really nice kid-centered interior in its new center. It's a multi-million-dollar makeover of a 52-year-old former Libbys Cannery warehouse, one of the last remnants of Sacramento's agricultural heritage. I like almost nothing better in this world that an old building given new life. And this is one old Sacramento warehouse that's come a long way.

Let's get the words out of the way. The pictures tell the story here. Bright colors, beautiful ceiling features of butterflies and dragonflies and calm-toned waiting rooms to ease a bit of the anxiety. The mural below is named "Window Into Nature." The artist is Nikki Solone of Sacramento.

Colorful dragonfly:

Walking to waiting rooms:

A Toast To The Corner Store

Design Trekking friend Dave and I adventured aimlessly through an old downtown Sacramento residential neighborhood Friday, and marveled at the capital's proliferation of small "corner" stores. It reminds us of life before the massive modern proliferation of drive-to "convenience" stores.
Sam's Market, not far from the state Capitol building, is one of those corner stores. By all appearances this building is original "mixed use," long before the concept became newly popular in architectural and planning circles. The store is downstairs, the owner lives upstairs.

Bonus: There's a California-theme mural painted on the side wall:

Big Box: Target steps it up a notch

Of all the architectural designs to see on this earth why do we bother here to check out Target? Maybe it's because this is what we see day in and out in most cities. In 21st Century America, there aren't many Eiffel Towers, Chicago Water Towers or evocative Flatiron commercial buildings to marvel over. We count our blessings when a big-box department store does incrementally better than usual.

Consider this "big box" retailer in Davis, California. Davis, population about 64,000, is a University of California town, where even having a Target was a huge political divide. Many true believers didn't want it. They believed Target was an corporate abomination that would shred their cohesive little downtown district. Eventually, when Target won a popular vote to open up shop in town, it went the extra mile to design something less offensive than standard suburban strip.

I may be a pushover, but I like the lone palm tree and red brick facade below. It says to me: California.


I like the tower here, too, and the glass-fronted entrance. It looks like walking into a multiplex movie theater. Not architectural genius here. But for department store shopping it's not bad. (Note the glass corporate logo in the tower).

Bridges to Nowhere

Millions ask, "Design Trekker, where do you go to get away from spanning the globe, viewing the world's architectural treasures and felonies?" The answer is Cosumnes River Preserve in Northern California. It's a huge wild place south of Sacramento where millions of birds spend the winter and humans walk pedestrian footpaths and bridges into the middle of nowhere. I live 10 minutes north of the parking lot, where all urban cares fall quickly silent.

The place is designed for humans viewing birds. So the bridges are built to pedestrian scale, a gift to those who like to slow down and stroll. These small, lovely feats of iron and wood below span marshes, creeks and wetlands.

Through the cottonwoods:


Across the sea of reeds:



(Back from the hunt. I met this enjoyable gent from San Jose, out shooting with his son-in-law's Nikon):