Above the city are layers on layers of different air, varying in composition, temperature, and thus density. At sunset, that makes for lots of scattering and color.
Tag: Bridge
Berkeley in a Box
In the sprawl of the greater Bay Area, with its networks of highway, rail, and water connecting major nodes, UC Berkeley remains a special location. The campus represents its own phase with boundaries where order parameters shift.
Rail Over Willamette
Portland’s networks of light rail and vertical-lift bridges give the downtown a particular industrial style; I like to imagine that this is pretty close to what 1917’s “City of the Future” would look like if partially realized.
New Span
New construction continues across San Francisco; from my perch across the Bay, I continue to watch the city evolve.
Watching the Gradient
Do you see the lone person, sitting on the hillside, on the right side of this image? People provide scale, but also something more in this context. In addition to watching the literal gradient of the sky at sunset, this picture is part of a set of images of the “civilization gradient” from wilderness to dense city center. I quite like the added layer of a gradient from the individual in nature to the greater mass of humanity in cities. Traveling between rural New York and the crowded Bay Area has made me more aware than ever of the contrast.
Municipal Dock
Seems like the dock goes on forever.
Between Berkeley and San Francisco
I spent this week BARTing back and forth from downtown San Francisco to “downtown” Berkeley for the American Chemical Society’s National Meeting. Bouncing between the familiar and the strange, all tinged with a general sense of familiarity, gave me a sense of dislocation, like an atom in slightly the wrong place in a crystal structure. Beyond meeting scientists and seeing old friends, I can think of one exciting new discovery this week: the new seat fabric on the BART is an enormous improvement over the horrifying cloth of yesteryear.
