Crocker Modern

My wife and I made our first visit this morning to the new addition to Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum. It's one of those architectural projects that's supposed to define Sacramento in a bigger way. Usually, that means you're obligated to like it - to go with the civic flow and avoid death by a vote of your peers.
  We know what we like - and often it's not modern design - and we liked this museum.

(See the guy taking a self-photo with his girlfriend and the Crocker name) 

The Crocker has forever been housed in an old Victorian mansion belonging to Edwin Crocker, attorney for the Central Pacific when it built the Transcontinental Railroad across the U.S. in Abraham Lincoln's time. The new addition opened in autumn 2010 to stories like this in The San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times and another in the Architecture Reviewed Blog.  Project architects Gwathmey Siegel & Associates have their own Crocker page.

Here's more pictures from inside: (I didn't take any in the galleries, which were open and spacious. The place was crawling with security who looked like they'd frown on that. The links above, though, have plenty).

Monuments To Our Ancestors Revisited: The Pony Express

The weather has been great here in Sacramento in recent days, allowing for long lunch-time treks in search of exercise and sightings. Yesterday, a co-worker and I walked to the river, trekking past the city's monument to our Wild West ancestors who rode on the short-lived, historically-resonant Pony Express.

Sacramento was the end of the trail - or the beginning, depending on the direction - to and from St. Joseph, Missouri.  A year ago I wrote about loving monuments to our ancestors. These statues give a nice flavor to cities. Below is the monument in Old Sacramento. Cheers to 18 months of crossing the West at top speed with the mail. (Brings to mind that famous line from Seinfeld's Newman (the Postman) : "When you control the mail....you control Informattion)."

235 Years of Federal Architecture

Here in the United Sates it's July 4 - the 235th birthday of our young nation. It is still a rather terrible economic time here, an era when it's almost insanely popular to criticize the federal government.

But this is also a holiday to celebrate our federal government's historic good taste in architecture. The country is filled with federal buildings that add to the ambience of many a downtown. They're not all gems. But this one, in particular, in downtown Sacramento, makes my day each morning I trek past it on the way into the California EPA building.

   This is the city's federal post office, stately in its park-like setting, a great old 1933 building now listed on the Register of Historic Places. Any government that could build like this is something worth celebrating today. I turn again to Dan Flynn's 2000 "Inside Guide to Sacramento" for a description:

"This building's blend of Neo-Classical and Renaissance architecture, suggesting government strength and stability, must have been a reassuring sight in a city wracked by the Great Depression. Gladding, McBean & Co. provided the terra cotta ornamentation, as well as the simulated granite veneer above the first floor. The exterior lion heads appear to be roaring at the lion heads facing from the library across the street. The long lobby features shiny terrazo floors and a gilded, coffered ceiling."   

 Here are some more scenes that look especially soothing in the soft daily sunlight of 7:30 a.m.

Great entry:

Access to Giants

I don't travel enough in these days of tight money and less time. So this blog isn't often about the wonders of the world or the bright lights of the great metropolitan areas.

 But as spring takes hold here in Northern California there is more time for walking during the lunch hour, for enjoying the sights of downtown Sacramento. I confess to loving this accessible old city. The founders had a good appreciation of classic Greek and Roman forms - and filled a lot of the downtown grid with powerful pillars, domes and columns.

Even an average guy out walking, or waiting for the #66 bus back home after a day at the office, can feel part of something bigger and richer than himself. I don't own these buildings or negotiate important deals inside them. But I can walk alongside them and be moved by their grandeur and classic elegance. I can feel the excellence they represent a century after they went up, and how well they speak of a time now gone.

It's a little hard to explain. But this is the great perk of working in a city with some classic architectural stature. Even the simple act of taking a stroll leads to a powerful sense of having access to giants. I do often have this feeling of being in awe of my surroundings. Sometimes it is a small lovely street scene, and sometimes the way the sun strikes the 25th floor windows of an office tower.  Surely, the designers of this classic, timeless beauty - all of them long gone now - would appreciate these small words about great work enduring. These are more than buildings for work and commerce. These are monuments.

Update July, 2011: One recent Friday afternoon I found this building opened for an event. It was my first time seeing the interior. I am guessing a wedding. Check out this ceiling! You have to go to Europe to see this kind of work. Access to Giants, indeed.

Government Town

One of the great things about living in cities is the accidental discovery of design features that jump right out and say: "Surprise!" Above is a parking garage mural in California's Capital, tribute to your typical government bureaucrat. He's perfect. I stumbled onto this guy a few days ago, appropriately, during a lunch-hour walk while on jury duty. (Gun possession case. I served as an alternate jurror on a one-day case that produced a jury deadlock and mistrial).

 Our government man above was just the beginning.  Here below are more of my favorite things about decent architecture - murals that light up what's otherwise a blank wall. (These adorn a county government garage):

  

"That Woman Has Been Sitting There Forever."

Credit, and hail to the artist, John Pugh, of Los Gatos, California.

As long as we're on the subject of murals, here below is another I've often admired above a pawn shop on Sacramento's downtown J Street. It's not complicated, just a nice neighborly scene involving coffee and generations. (Note the cat in the right window). Artist is unknown.

Finally, below is a beach town take on the mural concept. This is in downtown Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles of San Francisco:

Close up

 The context 

Pacific Rim

I met Ted Lee, chairman of San Francisco-based Urban Land Co., about a year ago in Hong Kong. I was in the city for an International journalism convention and he was there to help promote better understanding across the Pacific - having lived through what happened between Japan and the U.S. in World War II.

  I was introduced to him as a real estate and land development reporter in Sacramento, where he happened to have developed and built a vital part of downtown Sacramento's redevelopment - the Chinatown Mall.  At the time it was called the Chinatown Renaissance Project.

   Lee told me about growing up in Stockton, a city about an hour south of Sacramento, and learning the fundamentals of real state and urban planning at Harvard and UC Berkeley. It was from Lee that I learned first that Asian governments had steered clear of Wall Street's subprime junk on the global market and thus, hadn't stumbled badly when those investments went to hell in 2008.

  A few weeks ago I walked through the Chinatown Mall on a lunch break and took the pictures that follow. The Mall is a distinctive part of the downtown Sacramento landscape - and gives the city a nice aura of being on the Pacific Rim when Europe is ailing and all signs in California and Asia point to the Pacific Century.

Public Square

The last pay phone in California (not working)

I Street Gate

I

I have the sense that Chinatown Mall is an older generation's idea of China. It contains a traditional Confucian school and a temple, and a statutory tribute to the founder of modern China, Sun Yat Sen.

Here's a similar memorial to Sun Yat Sen on the grounds of Hong Kong University.

Darth Vader

In almost 10 years of lunch-time trekking in the neighborhood of this downtown building in the background, I have never known quite how to feel about it. The locals do; they dubbed it "the Darth Vader Building" almost as soon as it opened in 1989 as the biggest focal point in the Sacramento skyline.
  Officially, it's named Renaissance Tower. I doubt one in 100 people in town know it by that name. I had a job interview once  on the 21st floor. The views were stunning. This building also reflects the sun beautifully and kaleidoscopically in the morning and evening sunlight. Yet it always manages to look a bit shabby and dirty as if the dark windows need perpetual cleaning.
  I'll salute the architects for trying something bold in glass, especially in a city that's fairly conservative with its design standards. But one always has the feeling here that if they could take it down, many locals would. One exception is a writer for The Sacramento Press who saluted its 20th anniversary in 2009. 

Interestingly, while Googling around for this item I discovered two more city towers nicknamed "The Darth Vader Building, in Seattle and Boston.

UPDATE 4/15/2011

 Since writing this post I've been paying more attention to this building, watching at different times of day for light and play of the sun. Here are a couple more shots of the Renaissance Tower known as Darth Vader. The first is around 1 p.m. and the second about 4:45 p.m. Thanks for the chance to revisit: