DryStoneGarden

I almost included this in my post about the Richard Serra sculpture at the Stanford museum, but it seemed like it should get its own post. It’s Stone River, one of several Andy Goldsworthy pieces in the Bay Area. The others are Drawn Stone at the De Young museum and Spire in the Presidio. This one is my favorite of the three. I love the snakelike form and the stylized coping stones. Vertical coping stones along the top of a wall are common, especially in Europe, but I’ve never seen them quite like this. It’s all built from rubble the university saved after the earthquakes of 1989 and 1906, 128 tons of stone, 320 feet long.

The whole thing is set into the ground with the top of the wall at grade. Because the color of the stone and the dirt match so closely, it sort of feels like someone took a big scoop of dirt and compressed it into the stone for the wall. I like to see how far I can get walking along the top (not very far).

This finger of stone sticking out into the mudflat (click on all of these to see them bigger) is a memorial to one half of the Bay Area’s largest and most ambitious drystone structure. It’s in Oakland’s Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, which is a rather random park, if you’ve never been to it. The park is out in the middle of the port surrounded by industrial activity, there’s a ton of lawn which no one ever uses and in fact the geese have turned into something that no one should ever use, and and there are a bunch of big landscape elements that reference the history of the port. The shade structure in the photo below is one of those. There’s also a concrete path that marks the footprint of a giant 19,000 square foot building that they took down. And there’s the rock structure that commemorates the port’s north training wall.

The harbor’s north and south training walls were two long jetties designed to ‘train’ the tide. Unlike a typical riprap jetty made of haphazardly dumped piles of rock and designed to absorb wave or tidal energy, each rock in the training wall was fitted by stoneworkers to give the wall a smooth face that would accelerate the water instead of slowing it down. Back in the 1800′s, Oakland’s harbor was shallow and it tended to fill with silt and ships could only enter it during high tide. The idea of the training walls was to channel the tide’s energy so that when the tide went out it would suck all the silt out with it, reducing the need for dredging. The walls were started in 1874 and took twenty years to build, with some impressive stats: 310,000 tons of stone, 500,000 square feet of wall, 20 feet wide at the base, 8 feet wide at the top, 6 feet above the low water point. The north wall was 9500 feet long, the south wall 12,000. Apparently the walls worked; the signage says the port’s activity went up 2000% after they were built.

The south wall is still there, but they took the north wall out in 2001 when they widened the channel so bigger container ships could use it, and they used some of the north wall’s rock to build this memorial. I didn’t do all that good with my photos of it (there’s a better one at Oakland Geology) and I might try again some time when the tide is in or try to find a good place to see the south wall, but, honestly, I think the appeal is more intellectual than aesthetic.

It looks a little better with some sun flare drama. You can see the contrast between the training wall’s fitted stone and the riprap’s rough faces.

Overall, though I said it was random, the park is also pretty cool. The ships and cranes and machinery right next to the park are all impressive. There’s a habitat planting with some natives struggling against weeds, with a path out to a great view of the Bay Bridge and the city. The water area of the middle harbor is being converted into a mudflat, slowly getting filled with the silt from dredging of the channel. It’s a good place to see water birds.

And the park is a great place to see the sunset. Information and a map of the park is here, a historic photo with the training walls visible on the left side is here.

My last post on Joshua Tree is from Barker Dam, aka Big Horn Dam. The park is a desert, but it received more rainfall a hundred years ago and homesteaders tried raising cattle there. A couple of ranchers in the area made a seasonal reservoir, first a rancher named Barker in the early 1900′s, then William Keys fifty years later. Personally, I thought it was a little weird to see this empty reservoir and rather jury-rigged dam in the middle of the desert. Keys was the kind of guy who would kill someone in a dispute and then make a stone marker to commemorate/brag about it afterwards, and some of that shows in the design and craftsmanship of the dam. But the birds seem to like it and the visuals are interesting and it’s a stone structure on the national register of historic places, so here it is.

The reservoir was done in a couple of phases; the bottom nine feet are faced with rock and the upper six feet of concrete were added by Keys in 1950. He made a sign in a smear of concrete to commemorate/brag about this too.

The concrete had rock dumped in between the forms to save money. You can actually make a pretty nice wall this way if you place the rock a little more carefully and scrub more concrete off the faces off after you take away the forms.

Behind the dam there’s an interesting pattern of bathtub rings. Apparently the reservoir still fills to the top, flooding twenty acres during the wettest time of year.

There’s a second, lower dam below the main one, full of cattails living off the seepage.

And a cattle trough below the second dam. All in all, a funky little area.

While I was at Salt Point, I visited the Sea Ranch Chapel just north of there. The chapel’s a fantastic building designed by San Diego architect James T. Hubbell, commisioned by two sea Ranch residents who wanted to create a ‘nondenominational sanctuary for prayer, meditation, and spiritual renewal.’ I love the form and the blending of materials.

The design was inspired by the drawings of a local artist and is said to be based on winged forms. It also has a bit of shell motif going, though it’s of course abstract enough to offer a variety of interpretations. Personally, I think it resembles a brugmansia flower.

The Hubbell website says the supervisor on the project had experience as a boat builder, which makes a lot of sense; the framing looks like it’s for a boat, and the finished building looks somewhat like a sea vessel sitting on a cradle of rock. The moss rock (aka Sonoma fieldstone) is actually a facade over a cinder block wall, but the batter makes it look structural.

The section and the construction photo are from the chapel’s website, which also has a nice aerial photo of the building.

The interior is as striking as the exterior, with a flagstone floor, stained glass windows, and lots of beautiful woodwork. The windows and the wood made the building feel warm, even though the sky still had its coastal morning haze.

It’s all very compelling and a steady flow of people visited while I was there, drawn off the highway to investigate. You don’t really see many buildings that combine rock and wood and glass and metal in such a unique way. Really well done.

Altun Ha

Hmmm, I meant to post this sooner. Our Belize vacation already feels like it was a long time ago. As I mentioned just after we got back, we spent most of our Belize vacation on a small island, hanging out, sometimes snorkeling but mostly just sitting in a hammock. At the end of our trip we did one true sightseeing thing, we went to the Mayan ruins of Altun Ha.

Anita and I have both been to Mayan ruins before, but not for about ten years. Altun Ha is a good one. The entire site is about 25 square miles, mostly focused around two main plazas that are cleared and excavated, with pyramids as tall as the trees. The name means Stone Water or Rockstone Pond, named for the limestone wells. It was settled around 250 BC, with the first buildings going up around 100 AD. The population got up to 10,000 people at it height; it was abandoned around the 10th century. Now there’s just forest around it and it would be hard to imagine a lot of people ever living there if it weren’t for the big stone pyramids.

The Other, Adjacent Plaza

Mayan ruins are great, and I of course was interested in the stonework. Each building was built over about a one hundred year period, sometimes directly on top of previous buildings. During the Mayan times the stone would have also been covered with stucco and painted.

More detail photos than anyone really needs to see are below. (more…)

A little before we left for Belize I finished a project in Walnut Creek that I’d been working on for a while. No garden is ever truly finished and there are still a few things to do in this one — redoing the handrailing, painting the wall — but I’m not the one responsible for that phase so I get to call it done. Much of this project was done during the period of heavy winter rains in December and then there was a long delay while the light fixture for the wall was decided on and then fabricated. Landscape lighting generally gives more immediate gratification than any other aspect of landscaping, but we had a hard time finding the right fixture for this one. There are tons of lantern-style lights designed for eight-foot-high stuccoed walls, but not many for a three foot retaining wall of stone.

Some photos of lighting (which for some reason has attracted the biggest flurry of spam that I’ve seen in a long time) are below. (more…)