Summer is the season of endless construction in Berkeley.
Category: Berkeley
Pelican
Statue located outside the graduate assembly on UC Berkeley’s campus.
Trickle
One of the forks of Strawberry Creek running through UC Berkeley’s campus.
Football Man
A statue of legendary Cal football coach Pappy Waldorf on Cal’s campus.
Berkeley Jungle
An example of Berkeley’s lush suburban vegetation.
Reflected Rings
Sculpture installation in the reflecting pool on the Hearst mining circle on UC Berkeley’s campus.
Football Superiority
Berkeley, despite have very little success in the sport of football, has more than one monument to the sport. The sport as it is played at Berkeley is a little sad but the statues are pretty interesting to look at.
Berkeley Still Life
Berkeley is a pretty surreal place; as I process that, I thought my 400th post on Decaseconds might be a great time to really show it. The yellows of the birch tree are so sharp on a foggy fall morning, amid the hard, stained concrete of the past and the high-tech Li Ka Shing Building (one of my first-ever posts) materials. Visual contrast, both literal and metaphorical, align with the conceptual contrast of a place that prides itself on being countercultural while also being the birthplace of many of the technologies and ideas that make our modern culture possible.
Berkeley Basement Window
A “random weekend shot:” from the strange little corners of UC Berkeley’s campus comes this shot of a basement window at night. The interplay between soft, smooth, diffuse colors from the frosted glass and the rough, inhomogeneous surfaces of concrete is so mysterious.
Beyond Berkeley
On a chill and cloudy afternoon, the sky hangs low over Berkeley and Oakland. Highly textured red tile roofs, ionic columns, industrial air handlers, all separated from the “mundane world” by a wall of trees: are these the “layers” of the Berkeley experience?
Descent: Latimer
This was a sight, descending the steps to the courtyard of Latimer Hall, that was once everyday and pedantic to me. Now, the sight of it is a powerfully nostalgic mix of strange perspectives and a dozen mishmashed textures and patterns: tiles and bricks and precast and cast-in-place and trees and bushes. In the long run, that red-green-and-gray color scheme means a lot more to me than I thought it did.
Beaux-Arts Trio
The ceiling of the gorgeous Hearst Memorial Mining Building demonstrates the drama of designing your building to mimic the dashboard of a steampunk tank. (Oh, was that not their intention?) Though I’ve posted photographs from inside Hearst Memorial Mining Building before (the past site of my co-author’s office), I don’t know that I’ve done justice to its ceiling before. That such rigid, “linear” materials as steel and brick and glass can be formed into such elegant, smooth surfaces continues to astonish me.
Miniature University Avenue
I’m fascinated by the effect that depth of field can have on our perception of a scene.
Garden Pools
UC Berkeley’s botanical garden is one of the best places to go in Berkeley on an sunny day.
Time-Space Material
I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.
Decaseconds 