DryStoneGarden

Before I set off on my bicycle, I hit up some of the landscape sites of Portland. The Japanese garden was at the top of my agenda, and it’s every bit as great as I had heard. Of all the Japanese gardens I’ve visited, Portland’s is the exemplar, filled with the carefully composed naturalism that Japanese gardens are famous for, plants carefully layered, views carefully framed, everything harmonious, suffused with careful deliberate subtlety. After a while, sitting on the benches, strolling the paths, pausing at the pausing spots, I did begin to feel somewhat like an actor hitting my marks, that everywhere I paused had been predetermined by the garden’s designers and that every view I looked at had been carefully composed to take my eye to a predetermined focal point. But the effect was genuine; I felt calm and harmonious. It’s the most expansive Japanese garden I’ve ever been to, the most subtle, and the most discretely meticulous.

The above Japanese Maple might be one of the most photographed specimens in the country. It’s perfectly pruned and sited on a slight rise so that you feel yourself invited to look up into its canopy.

All the paths were great. I like the way these contrasting stones are combined, with the larger, brighter granite pieces like stepping stones within the overall path. This path led into a tea garden with all of the classic elements, but it was closed to the public while I was there, so I wasn’t able to do the tea garden journey.

A wonderfully austere bench vignette.

Another nice pathway. A warmer piece of stone subtly marks the threshold.

Everything in the garden felt distinctly un-coincidental, like the way the herringbone pattern of the bamboo fencing echoed the herringbone of the bamboo leaves growing in front of it.

It was nice to get a bird’s eye view of the obligatory zen garden. There’s a much more interesting gravel and moss garden in another part of the garden but shadows made it not worth photographing.

It was great to see everything after years of knowing this garden only from photos. I’d love to see the garden at another time of year with better light, and I’m pretty sure I’ll manage another visit within the next couple of years. To see the garden in foggy, fall-color glory, check out this post from RhoneStreetGardens last October.

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These are my sketches from the coast. They were all done very quickly at the end of the day, sitting at a picnic table at camp or sometimes in my tent with a headlamp, recording some of the images that stayed in my head. A few show specific places such as the view of the bridge across Coos Bay or the sand dunes at Honeyman Memorial State Park, but most of them represent the kind of half-remembered amalgam views that make up the bike-touring experience.

— Update — I turned a few thumbnails into watercolors. Views of the road, rather than from the road, below.
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Somewhere off Highway 101 in Oregon

I just spent the last twelve days cycling down the coast from Portland to San Francisco, my first bicycle tour since Baja four years ago. I’m not much of a recreational cyclist and had only done about 50 miles of biking all year before setting out from Portland, but I do love touring. It’s such a great way to see the landscape. There’s been about a four year gap each time before my next tour, but I already have a few tours in mind that I want to do and I had a great time on this one, so hopefully it won’t be so long before my next one.

On 101 North of Gold Beach

The Oregon coast was great; I’d never been there before, so it was all new to me. The section of coast between Port Orford and Brookings was my favorite section of Oregon riding. Hiking in the evening in the sand dunes of the Oregon Dunes Rec Area was a highlight off the bike.

North of Westport off Highway 1 in California

California was more familiar to me. The route was entirely on roads that I had driven before, but it was great to do them on a bicycle. The ten miles through the redwood trees of the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway in the Prairie Creek Redwoods and the thirty miles of the Avenue of the Giants further south in the Humboldt Redwoods were probably the overall highlight of the trip. I’ve wanted to ride a bike through the redwoods for years.

On the Golden Gate Bridge back home

I took very few photos on the road. I did some drawings, but they were quick thumbnails for myself and probably not worth posting. For proper posts and photos about bicycle touring the coast, you can check out the blog of one of the tourers I met on the road. My rear wheel makes a cameo appearance in a photo of a temporary spoke repair he performed for on my bicycle.

For my own sake, to help me remember the trip in the future, the campsites are listed below the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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I recently made a series of postcard-sized watercolors of Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in Jessie Square, an exciting bit of architecture with nothing else like it in San Francisco. The original brick building is gorgeous in its own right, a PG&E substation dating from 1881, designed by Willis Polk, listed on the National Register in 1974, and taken over by the museum in 1984. A few years ago the museum renovated the interior and expanded the building by adding the skewed metal cube shown in my watercolors. The design is wonderfully executed, and though there’s a part of me that dislikes seeing a skewed metal Borg cube perched upon a beautiful historic building, a much larger part loves the way this particular metal cube perches on this particular historic building.

It’s probably the most effective addition I’ve seen for a building like this. As a treatment of a historic structure, it follows a template laid out by IM Pei’s addition to the Louvre, executing the addition with forms and materials that completely contrast with the original structure. There are a few motives for this. One is that there have been so many failed attempts at matching historic construction techniques that there is a reluctance to try again. It’s often too hard or expensive to find the right materials or builders to match the existing work. The second is that modern concerns such as earthquake and fire safety often require new building techniques that will create an underlying mismatch even if the look of the old structure is maintained. It’s dishonest to copy the look of the old building if the underlying structure does not also match. The third is that by offering a contrast to the old structure, people will be able to interpret which are the historic elements and perhaps maintain an appreciation or understanding of them. We don’t build brick buildings like this any more; preserving the building allows people a chance to connect with the era when we did. A fourth reason, perhaps less admirable but undeniably a factor, is that donors, boards, architects, and the public all like to see flashy new designs. You advance quicker in the design world if your works stands out and attracts attention instead of sensitively blending with its context.

These are all valid reasons, but they are sometimes a little shortsighted. These steel and glass additions don’t always respect the past, often they overpower it. I thought the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre was an eyesore when I first saw it years ago, and I stand by that judgement, even if the current consensus is that the pyramid was a success. But even if Libeskind’s addition shares some of its lineage with the Louvre, it’s so much more beautifully executed, with a complex presence that energizes the site. From some vantage points it dominates the scene, but from others it’s barely visible, peaking around the corner with its intriguing angles. And underlying everything, the structure wonderfully matches its use; it’s form really does match with its function as the home for the Contemporary Jewish Museum. There’s something perfect about joining the old and the new on a building that houses a modern museum for an ancient culture.

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A few years back, after a visit to the Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains, I included a link to a collection of photos by Rachel Sussman, a photographer whose project is photographing living things more than 2,000 years old. She has a book out now, The Oldest Living Things on Earth. Some amazing plants. I like to think that stonework should be designed to last 100 years, but 2,000 year old plants make that seem like short-term thinking. There’s a TEDTalk on her website, also worth watching.

Piet Oudolf documentary teaser from Thomas Piper on Vimeo.

There’s a Piet Oudolf documentary in the works. I’m looking forward to it; even the trailer is worth watching.

Another Oudolf video, about the Boon Family Garden in the Netherlands, and one more here.