Month: January 2022

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Released 44 Years Ago Today

Sumeria: Golden Tears (1978)

This was one of the more…bizarre…releases from Alec Costandinos. It tells the story of an alien traveler who lives until he finds true love and then dies by crying gold tears.

Hey, it was disco. It was 1978.

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A Repost from 2017 (Since We Were Recently Discussing Groovy Houses…)

Dream Houses

Having spent half my working life in the architectural profession, it should come to no surprise to anyone that I've designed my fair share of personal "dream houses." Dozens. What might be surprising to learn is that I've never actually been a home owner.

I guess it stems from the very real refusal to settle down when I was younger. I loved the ability to pack up and move every six months if the desire struck me, and as much as I would've loved to have actually designed and built a home of my own, it was just never in the cards.

I was living in San Francisco when I finally started to get that urge to settle, and while I wasn't making bad money, there was still no way I was ever going to be able to get a down payment together in the amount needed to buy a place. Moving out of The City wasn't an option; as my friend Kent was fond of saying, "Why would anyone want to live just outside the pearly gates?" I'd rather continue to rent in San Francisco itself than own in Pittsburg.

And that financial situation hasn't changed simply because we're now back in Arizona. But that doesn't mean a boy can't dream.

Some of my dreams rarely progressed beyond basic sketches:

This particular one was inspired by an advert for the American Plywood Council (or something similar) in one of my dad's architectural magazines when I was a wee young thing. The magazine is long gone but the image was forever imprinted into my memory.

This one—a small beach house—grew out of a triplex apartment development I had the pleasure of working on shortly after I moved to Tucson in 1980.

I can't tell you how many house plans I've actually designed for myself since the architectural bug first bit in middle school. As my skill level increased, if my ideas got beyond the basic sketch stage, they burned with such intensity that I had to at least start a set of construction documents—if only a handful of those projects actually ever came to fruition with a complete, ready-for-a-bidding set of drawings.

Some of my first truly personal (i.e. not copied from another designer, a local builder or a magazine) designs were a series of desert houses originally inspired by Obi Wan Kenobi's bungalow in Star Wars and the lower floor of the tri-level house my family lived in during my high school and college years.

Buried four feet into the ground with massive concrete walls to keep out the heat, this design motif resonated with me for years, eventually coming up with several variations…


At one point I even went so far with this theme as to design an entire apartment complex (small scale floor plans and exteriors only, I'm not that driven) on the then-vacant land on the southeast corner of Grant Road and Wilmot Avenue in Tucson—but I never really developed a good way of integrating multiple bedrooms into this particular ouvre—which obviously limited its appeal.

My move to San Francisco in 1986 inspired a new design aesthetic. I loved the Victorian row houses with their multicolored gingerbread trim, but I was equally impressed by the modern, contemporary variations on the theme that many local architects were utilizing.

This 3-story house was the vehicle by which I actually taught myself AutoCAD. I became so engrossed that I was literally moving objects in my dreams by calling out their cartesian coordinates!

In the mid 90s, I returned to my desert house design, armed with a new aesthetic gleaned from living in a 1920s-era Victorian for several years. The massively thick concrete walls remained, but the barrel vault roofs were gone and much more wood was incorporated along with an almost steampunk feel for the interior details.

I don't remember what prompted me to do it, but a couple years after I tired of that exercise and had started contemplating leaving San Francisco and returning to Tucson, I pulled out a plan for a small house I once dreamt of building in in the northeast part of the city, at some undetermined point along the Catalina Highway before it actually started up into the mountains. I'd completed a lot of work on this plan already before moving to San Francisco—back when I was still doing overlay drafting with ink on mylar, but since I was now comfortable working in the virtual realm of AutoCAD, I decided it was time to transpose it into bits and bytes.

As you can tell, I tend toward smaller houses. Even this multi-structure design isn't really that big. And this one's builder-ready. Not only did I do the usual floor plan and exterior elevations that I do with all my projects, this was one of those instances when I did it all: foundation, roof framing, electrical, mechanical, and interior elevations. It was designed for a lot that gently sloped away from the street with an unobstructed view of the Catalina and Rincon Mountains. Sadly, while the land in that area was mostly untouched when I first envisioned this house in 1985, it isn't any longer. My last visit to Tucson confirmed my fear that the area is now completely built-up and there are no more unobstructed views of anything except your next door neighbor.

And that brings us to my latest bit of mental masturbation:

This is the house we're currently renting—with several changes. It's the first time I've created a dream house based on a remodel, and I'm liking how it's progressing. It started out as an innocent "what if" between Ben and I, but now it's developed a life of its own and has morphed into a full-scale architectural exercise. As I've written before, it's been an interesting excursion into the deep recesses of memory, pulling obscure AutoCAD commands from the dusty crevices of my head and continually surprising myself that I still know how to do this stuff. It's also become my go-to "happy place" when I'm laying in bed awake and trying to fall back asleep at 4 in the morning…

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A Repost from 2018

A Disturbing Realization

As most of my readers already know, I lived in San Francisco for approximately sixteen years, encompassing my late 20s through early 40s.

The other morning, while laying awake at 4 am, memories of San Francisco started bubbling up. I don't know if it was my age/hormone level at the time I lived there, or whether it is something about The City itself, but going over my memories of San Francisco I came to the disturbing realization that the vast majority of those memories—okay, pretty much all my memories of life in San Francisco—revolved around getting laid or trying to get laid…under the guise of looking for true love, of course.

Naturally, during my time there I worked. I made friends. I went to movies and plays. I took photos, made art, read books, acquired new skills, spent way too much money on way too much stuff, and explored the natural beauty of the Bay Area. But it seems all that was nothing more than background noise amid the unrelenting need to connect.

I would like to think that I fell into that lifestyle over the course of several years, but if I'm being totally honest, I have to admit it started almost the minute boots were on the ground.

While I did date and had several serial boyfriends, the smorgasbord of carnal delights and availability of potential sexual partners literally anywhere in the City is no doubt why so many refer to those 49 square miles as "Disneyland for Adults" and none of those relationships actually lasted. "Cruisin' the Streets" is more than just an old Boys Town Gang song. You could connect with someone on the subway, waiting for the bus, on your lunch hour downtown, walking home after work—and either go right to your/their place, make plans to meet up later, or duck into an empty stairwell for a quickie; literally anywhere. Buena Vista Park, North Baker Beach, "the whispering bushes" and the southern convenience station at the polo field at the western end of Golden Gate Park, the Hyatt Embarcadero, the 1808 Club, the Shaklee building, the 11th Floor of the Russ Building, The Playground, the Sir Francis Drake, Mike's Night Gallery, the Sheraton Palace…

You get the idea. There was a lot of action going on in The City. All. The. Time.

Inspired to start keeping a record of my life in San Francisco after seeing Prick Up Your Ears about a year after my arrival there, my journals read like an embarrassing, depressing erotic novel, full of saucy but ultimately empty encounters, littered with the names of men of whom I now have no conscious memory. (Oh, to have had cell phone cameras back then!)

I can't help but think that in the wake of 9/11 and the added security everywhere that followed, most of those locales have long since been locked down, but I know how industrious and creative horny men can be, and despite the authorities' best efforts, trysts will still happen somewhere.

Before I moved to San Francisco, when my friend Kent (who had arrived about six years earlier) once related how he stopped to have sex with some guy he met while on the way to a date with another, I was appalled. I could not understand how such a thing could happen, much less that anyone would actually partake. Note I said before I moved there…

While that particular scenario never happened to me, it was apparently not that uncommon, and I had plenty of other equally lascivious encounters during that decade and a half to make up for it. To this day I'm still amazed that I made it out alive, somehow remained STD/AIDS free, and didn't end up with a police record.

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Groovy Houses/Teenage Dreams

Inspired by this link over at Mostly Words, I started thinking about houses that inspired me when I was a teenager; inspiration that led in no small part, to my career in architecture.

The first of these were what eventually became known as Villa Spies in Sweden:

(Click on any to embiggen)

Villa Spies is quintessential late 60s/early 70s future chic. The majority of the photos above came from the magazine where I initially saw it and fell in love with the place: House Beautiful (January 1972). I had a heck of a time tracking it down after all this time. The only clue I had in my rapidly fading memory was it being in one of the magazines my mom subscribed to, and it arrived before we moved to the house where we lived during my high school and college years. That helped narrow it down considerably, and  I eventually located it at the Phoenix Public Library and then set about obtaining my own copy. (How did we survive before the internet?)

The second home, the Woolner House, crossed my path about the same time. This one was harder to track down than Villa Spies because I wasn't sure if I'd seen it in one of my mom's housekeeping magazines or in one of my dad's architectural mags. Like Spies, I eventually tracked it down in one of my mom's old mags at the Phoenix Public Library, but stupidly forgot to record exactly which magazine it had been in, so obtaining my own copy is going to be more trouble than it's worth. I also seem to remember a completely different photo spread than what I found at the library, so it's entirely possible it was covered by more than one publication.

 

I also found quite a few pictures online…

 

As well as finding a small spread in Architectural Design…