Commencement ceremonies have ended and the campus is quieting down to a mostly graduate-student-based buzz. The Campanile stands tall and mostly quiet—except, of course, for when the bells are ringing.
Tag: Architecture
Shipping Container House
Photographing landscapes and structures (and being the son of civil engineers), I’ve become a bit of an architecture fanboy. The trend towards building with shipping containers, whether a do-it-yourself effort or a pre-fab corporate approach, seems particularly exciting. This weekend, I encountered this in-construction house built from three forty-foot intermodal containers. The owners added sloped roof, a permanent foundation, and windows and doors outside, but they liked the shipping container aesthetic and plan to keep all of the original paint and labeling outside. I find that look charmingly authentic.
Inside, however, there’s little hint of the structure’s more exotic origins. Though, like the exterior, the interior is still under construction, there’s a straightforward home inside the three long shipping containers worth of space.
Old Under New II
The Transamerica Pyramid is one of my favorite subjects, and I’ve lately enjoyed photographing it juxtaposed with older brick buildings.
Molecular Foundry
The Molecular Foundry’s enormous overhang looks alien up close, but the scale of the structure is really apparent with the lighting beneath the gravity-challenging bulk.
Unleash the Beast
My neighbor parks his growling, thundering Audi S3 in a perfectly-sized space. He carefully backs it in and tucks down the corners of the Audi-emblem car cover. At night, this machine comes to life. LED headlamps flare and the walls of the garage form a resonant chamber for the warm-up revs of the turbo engine. Hydrocarbons are injected, explosively oxidized, and exhausted; the beast is unleashed!
Sunshower Tower
Monster-smash rain storms the night before left me surprised when this Sunday morning broad blue skies and linear sunlight to reflect from every surface in Berkeley. The Campanile (a.k.a. Sather Tower) was looking particularly proud of itself.
Structure Husk
Since I left Berkeley, a major building in the downtown burned to the ground and the wreckage was removed. I don’t remember what once stood here. That correspondence—a building missing from reality and from my memory—seems fitting.
