Building a Bigger Monster: SF-88 Nike Missile Site

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In the eighth grade, I wrote a research paper about nuclear warfare. We were allowed to choose any topic and I chose to write about the invention of the atomic bomb, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the hand these weapons played in the Cold War and beyond. I do not know what drew me to the topic back then. I still have the same interest in it now, so I’m trying to flesh out why I find it more interesting, than, say, the American Revolution. I’ve always hated studying early United States history.  In comparing the two, the American Revolution seems gritty and physical, while the Cold War Era has a  sterility and inhumanity to it (strange how something as horrible as war can be characterized as being more or less humane than another).  If nuclear warfare had broken out during the Cold War, most of the killing would not have been by actual soldiers, but by extremely powerful bombs that could annihilate you in an instant. It feels like the goal of the Revolution was clearer than that of the Cold War. The winner of the Revolution gained the rights to rule the United States, but the winner of the Cold War gained the capability to kill and destroy the other country more? I am interested by the way in which the world became so twisted by the technology of atomic weaponry. The preposterousness of the ability to destroy the whole world many times over is evident now, but the fear of atomic war was very palpable during the Cold War, fueling ridiculous levels of scientific invention in attack and defense. We can only hope that by looking back at this history, we can learn to not to revert to that lack of humanity (though we still have these weapons, so perhaps not much has changed?)

            A physical legacy of this time is the SF-88 Nike Missile Site, one of the United States’ earliest forms of defense against an atomic attack from the Soviet Union. In the early 1950’s, Nike Missile Sites were secret stations throughout the country to defend against Soviet bomber jet airplanes. Today, the SF-88 site, located in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco, is the only Nike site in the country that has been renovated and maintained as a museum to educate visitors about some of the technology involved in Cold War defense. The sites had the capability of deploying radar controlled missiles that could meet their targets in a matter of seconds.

            SF-88 houses and maintains Nike Ajax and Hercules Missiles (unarmed and un-fueled) as well the computers, radar stations, and other objects representative of the Army Air Defense force that operated the stations (of particular interest to me was the regimental crests displayed in a case; symbolic crests feel like something from medieval Europe, not Cold War U.S., but then, what do I know about the Army?) Everything is designed and built to conform to the standard of United States Military Defense, categorized as Mil-Spec, to insure reliability and durability of materials and tools at the sites. In other words, things needed to function and not break in times of need, so they are made to withstand much more than their basic use. This is evident in the computers and radar stations, which are housed in hardy metal cases, in which everything can be closed and transported in single units. These things feel very substantial, with rounded corners, large buttons and switches, and clear, upper case text labeling the functions of everything. On the missiles themselves, panels to the inside are rounded, with screws that are flush with the side of the rockets. Inside the rockets, electrical wires are bundled and knotted carefully with waxed Irish linen (loose cables could cause the rocket and its radar not to function properly). The whole place has this type no-nonsense design, particularly in the magazine that houses missiles. Bright yellow and reds are painted to indicate exits, important tools, buttons and safety equipment, while the rest is painted in cool minty greens and whites. There is a kind of mechanical sense to the early computer, radar, and communication systems. The main computer has large gears to make it work and dials that indicate the time to interception. There are few screens (as there are in today’s computers) but lots of plugs, dials, levers, and buttons.

            The radar trailer seemed to me particularly representative of the way in which the Cold War was manned from behind machines. From these small, dark, windowless trailers, soldiers detected their targets, and aimed the missiles. The missiles were launched from a small underground room in the magazine. These sites were originally created because it was impossible to shoot down the newer Soviet jet aircraft with the gunners used during WWII, even those guided by radar. The new planes were too fast and flew too high for the range of the old guns. Using computers and communication systems to perform and confirm these actions, it is like the technology became an extreme extension of physical human capabilities. The system as a whole, involving many men, and lots of machinery, it is quite a monstrous entity. It seems like it would be easier to dehumanize your enemy when you are only one of many responsible for their destruction. But I guess that was always the goal: to make sure our monster was bigger and better than theirs. 

 The Nike Historical Society keeps this website which includes lots of great photos of Nike sites,  and detailed technical information about the machinery and almost everything else you can see at SF-88. 


The Woodrow Wilson Archives contain documents from the Cold War, to help disseminate its history that was previously top secret. This website is very useful in trying to understand the time; I wish I had known about it when I wrote my research paper back in middle school.

To see more of my photos, please visit my flickr site. 

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The Filoli Estate: a Turn of the Century Time Capsule

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              The Filoli Estate was built along the length of a valley. Approximately 25 miles south of San Francisco on land previously used for farming and cattle grazing, it was built in 1917 to be the country home of wealthy entrepreneur, William Bowers Bourn II. Today it belongs to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Volunteers and horticulturists maintain the 36,000 square-foot house, and 16 acre garden, as well as give tours and workshops relating to its property and history. The Estate is representative of the era in which it was made. Carefully preserved as it is now, it serves as a kind of time capsule into that time. It was built during the “Golden Age” in California design and architecture, in which many styles were combined and conventional rules broken in favor of creativity and expression.

            Two years prior to its making, in 1915, San Francisco hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. This was a world’s fair that was celebrating the creation of the Panama Canal and also signifying San Francisco’s recovery from the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906. World’s fairs are international exhibitions of manufactured products (I’m explaining it because I didn’t know what they were). They are hosted in different countries each year, and can serve to develop society by sharing ideas in art, industry, design, etc. Apparently, they are still held today (the next one is to be in Shanghai this summer) though I think they have less relevance in our time, because much (or most) of our daily lives involve surveying manufactured products from around the world. Why travel to another country just to see that? I’m sure the world’s fair of today has different significance, but in 1915, the globalized world we know today was just beginning. Among the things featured in the exhibition were the first steam train to have been bought by Southern Pacific Railroad (already somewhat of an antique at the time), and the first coast-to-coast telephone line with which someone could make a call from San Francisco to New York. These things feel archaic now, but at the time were new, and emblematic of the coming possibilities of communication and trade. This is relevant to my understanding of the Filoli Estate in that it gives a flavor of what the world was like at the time. Things that feel old to us now were new at the time.

            It is also relevant in that Mr. Bourn was involved with financing and planning of the exhibition. Filoli’s architect, Willis Polk was the lead architect of the Exhibition, and Bruce Porter, who planned Filoli’s garden, had paintings featured in the Expo. Polk was a famous architect in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked with Mr. Bourn on number of the Bourn's other properties. In my impression from reading about him, Mr. Bourn seems like he was a very ambitious, original and creative, using his money effectively in business, and in his support of the arts. In the creation of Filoli, Mr. Bourn was the ringleader to a team of artists and designers, and worked closely with Polk to create the estate.

            The house and garden were meant to complement each other. This happens in the layout of spaces, and in the architectural designs made by the buildings and plants throughout the garden. Both the house and garden are a series of rooms; rectangular and square spaces in which an environment is built. The main hallway of the house, called the Transverse Hallway, is a long north to south passage. This long pathway is repeated in the garden, along several long north-south paths. I think this lends to the formality, or orderliness of the garden. Almost all the paths in the garden are arranged north to south or east to west; there are not very many diagonal paths. The way in which it is arranged longer north to south reflects the length of the valley it is in, with the Santa Cruz Mountains stretching parallel on the west side. The way the plants are used in the garden makes them almost like architectural elements. In many of the spaces, thick bushes are sculpturally trimmed to divide spaces like walls would.  Throughout the estate, there are many tall and narrow Irish yews. These are also carefully trimmed and pruned frequently to keep a consistent shape. These feel like they act as columns in many instances, creating open but distinct passages (a particular example of this is in the “yew allee,” a north-south passage in the garden leading up to the “high place.”) Other than bushes and trees, flowers are also carefully placed and arranged in the ground and pots along the paths. In some spaces, the lawns are shaped around flower beds with particularly designed edges that feel very architectural. The self-guided tour booklet describes these kinds of details as “art imitating nature, and nature imitating art.” Towards the southern end of the garden, there is a space for the cultivation of cutting flowers for arrangements for inside the house.

            The house is a mixture of Classical European architectural traditions. This type of mixture was the stuff that was so new at the time. I think that while it feels old fashioned to me, it is also the kind of European influenced design that I am most familiar with, having grown up in the Bay Area. The house is a modified Georgian style. This is so, in that it is a rather boxy, two storied shape, and has evenly spaced multi-paned windows The house is laid out in a U-shape, with the servants section and kitchens to the left (if one is facing the entrance), and the grand ballroom and owners rooms on the right. This difference is identified in the windows: the left (servants) side has tall rectangular windows, and the right side has tall windows with arched tops. The center section is a mixture of the two, with arched windows on the bottom, and rectangular ones on the top. Doorways and passages inside the house were also a mixture of rectangular and arched frames, and many of the passageways in the garden had arched tops. Another distinct European style is the roof, which has Spanish tiles, giving the house a feeling of California. There were many more classical elements, my favorite of which is the series of balustrades which make up some of the fences directly behind the house. These are the supports that are meant to look like they were turned on a lathe, or made on a potter’s wheel. I like them, because I recognize them from several places in San Francisco, probably thanks to the fact that Polk (and architects like him) designed many of these places. They’re simple, but much classier than a white picket fence (nothing against white picket fences; I know I’d be much more comfortable living in a house not adorned with fancy balustrades, even if I like them in public spaces).

            This trip was useful to me in helping me to begin to understand this kind of architecture and design. It was also a rather roundabout but fun way to learn some Bay Area history. I used to feel that buildings with this kind of architecture contained too much history and flourish for me to understand. I would look at them and think, “Woah, that’s fancy,” and avoid thinking too much about it because it was difficult to understand. In trying to figure Filoli out, an exciting point was when I found that balustrades are called balustrades. It was cool to put a name and explanation to a thing that I had seen before, and had felt something about, but had not known what it was or why it intrigued me.

Since I am not very knowledgeable about plants and gardens, I found this garden geek of a blogger’s interpretation of Filoli to be informative and amusing. It also has lots of pictures of the place on a sunnier day. 

This site was useful in getting an overview of the architectural trends in the Bay Area at the time, and has a helpful listing of Polk's work. 

     
To see more of my photos from the trip, visit my flickr site.

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Made for Music: Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall

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    The Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall was created in 1980, to provide a year-round performance space for the San Francisco Symphony (previously the symphony had to share performance space with the SF Ballet and SF Opera in the War Memorial Opera House). It is located in San Francisco’s Civic Center, among older buildings that are of the Beaux-arts architectural style. The architecture of Davies hall is said to be a modern interpretation of Beaux-arts, so that it will fit in the other buildings in the Center, but still feel contemporary. Beaux-arts, as I understand it, involves an eclecticism of Classical European styles: columns, pediments, archways, flourishing details, etc. Davies Hall indeed reflects some elements of that kind of building, but I feel that the style is meant more to be reflective of the performance within.

       This is particularly evident in the lobby. The coloring and shapes of the interior and architectural designs look reminiscent of instruments that would belong in a symphony. The coloring in the lobby is largely white, with gold, silver, and a warm wooden brown accenting in the handrails, counters and lighting fixtures. The other color present is a velvety, deep maroon that is above all the entrances to the hall, and in the carpeting and seats inside the hall. The gold is like the brass instruments, the silver like the wind instruments (i.e. the flute), and the wood brown in the strings (violins, cellos, violas, etc.). The maroon paired with these colors has a kind of regality that seems appropriate for a music hall that performs mostly classical music. The walls along the lobby have a façade of lots narrow white columns that are sometimes interspersed with mirrors. These columns look, to me, like the strings of a harp or stringed instrument. The cables from which some of the lamps hung also felt reminiscent of the strings. The endings of the counter of the refreshments station looks like the top of a violin, or the bottom of a treble-clef in sheet music.

     The inside of the concert hall itself contains similar musical elements, but is also built to provide favorable acoustics for the orchestra. At the back of the hall, behind the stage, a pipe organ rises in the background. It's grand, vertical lines are mirrored in the panels on the right and left of it. The panels are lit from below, giving an impressive appearance. The balcony seating stretches across the hall, but isn't continuous. Separate, box-seat balconies stack on top of one another like a rising musical scale. Above the orchestra, there is an adjustable cloud of plexiglass sheets that can be lowered, raised, and tilted to correctly reflect the type of music being played (lower and closer for a small, quiet ensemble, or raised and far away for a loud chorus). While these exist mostly for the acoustics, their repetitive quality complements the multiplicity of the orchestra members, and the general shape the cloud makes is similar to the hemisphere of the stage. 

        This Friday, my class and I were given a tour of this building, and were also allowed to sit in on part of a rehearsal. Seeing music in the making made me realize some things about music as an art, and the reception of all kinds of art in general. I have seen symphonies before, and it always just seemed like the conductor was doing some fancy dance in front of a bunch of people who were doing the real work of making the music. Seeing the rehearsal made me see how this was not so. In a symphony, the conductor is rendering their interpretation (or own creation) of a song using a multitude of musicians. This seems a particularly difficult task, because he must conform the actions of many separate individuals to create one artistic vision. A conductor to his orchestra is like a painter is to his pigments. I guess we get it easy as visual artists, as our mediums don't have a minds of their own (even though it may feel like they do sometimes...) The conductor's creativity was evident during the rehearsal: the symphony would play, and when the conductor would feel something needed to be different he would stop the orchestra, and explain how he wanted it to be. While I couldn’t clearly hear what he was saying, he would sometimes sing out a stanza, “daaa-daaa-daa-ba-baaaam!” and distinguish that he’d like it to be played instead like, “da-da-daa-BA-BAAAM!” In my mind, I paralleled this to an artist drawing a picture. The artist will define the shapes, lines and values in a particular way so that it will give the form and meaning they desire. Whether it is visual or auditory, it is the manipulation of the perception of an audience through their emotional responses. A note can be played delicately and lightly, and perhaps give a feeling of airiness or sweetness. The same note played strongly and loudly might instead give a feeling of awe or discomfort. The same emotions could be applied to the quality of a drawn line. So I guess the reason it always seems like the conductor isn't doing too much during a performance is that he's already done the work of expressing his vision upon his symphony beforehand. During the performance he is directing the orchestra, but for the most part he can just watch with pleasure as his work is expressed to the world. This seemed evident to me in the expressions of the conductor in this video of Bruckner's 6th symphony being performed in Germany (this was the song we heard, but the conductor in the video is different). 

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The Thorsen House: A (Hand)crafted Masterpiece

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The Arts and Crafts movement occurred during the turn of the century (1800 – 1900) beginning in England, and later moving to America. It was filled with political ideals about the availability of handicrafts to be made and shared by poor and middle class people, not only the rich. It was a statement against the heavy use of machinery during the Industrial Revolution. The style was breaking away from the opulence of the Victorian era in favor of a simpler aesthetic. The visuals were influenced by nature, and had the goal of using natural materials so that the designs would mirror their surroundings. The ideal of creating everything without machinery was partly dropped when the Arts and Crafts movement came to the United States. The goal of creating handcrafted goods that would be available to the poor was unattainable, because the price of labor was just too much for them to afford. Instead, many things were made first by machine, and then finished by hand to keep the aesthetic. The Thorsen house in Berkeley, California is an example of a house built with the aesthetics of handcraft and influence of nature, but without the ideals of having been literally made all by hand, and of being available to all kinds of people.

            The Thorsen House was a custom home made for William and Caroline Thorsen, built in 1909 by the architects, Henry and Charles Greene. The Thorsens were by no means poor: Mr. Thorsen was a lumber baron from Michigan, and this was his retirement home in California. This style of house was appropriate for a family whose business was lumber: the wood is an important design element throughout the house, and is never painted over. Wooden “joints” are prevalent throughout the houses’ rooms, and many beams and columns are bound together with metal straps. Most of these elements are purely aesthetic, to make it seem like things are bound together by hand. An example of this is where there would be screws or nails, they have inserted wood pegs to look like it is the pegs that is holding it together. The house consists of many horizontal and vertical lines, with curves made through a stepping of these lines. There are no sharp curves, but long and shallow bends in the awnings and roofs. These kinds of lines lend even more to the hand made feel: it is easier to carve, cut and fit straight lines by hand than it is to do so with curves.

            Another important element is the influence of nature in the designs. Not only in the warm, natural colors of the woods, but also in the arrangement of the doors and windows, and in the motifs of flowers and plants in the rooms. In the entry way and the living room, there are Tiffany style stained glass windows and light fixtures in the designs of a gnarled grape vine, and a rose vine. These glass pieces do in fact involve lots of complicated designs and curves, but are framed by the straight wood elements. Often it was made to look like the vines continue from one panel to another, making it seem like the design in the glass is a real plant winding its way around the man made wood. Nature is also incorporated through the views to the outside. When you enter through the front door, you immediately get a view of the backyard through tall glass doors at the back of the entrance way. So while you have entered inside, the outside is still visible and present. There are large windows to with views of the outside to give a connection to nature as well. The house is currently owned and maintained by the Sigma Phi fraternity society of students from University of California, Berkeley. They work to fundraise and maintain the house, while also living in it. Their efforts costs many millions, as there is much to be done to make the house earthquake safe, and while keeping up the original designs. 

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Urasenke Tea Ceremony

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Oakland's Paramount Theater

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Bone Blog: Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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Bones can tell amazing stories. For every skeleton there is something specific about its structure that is telling about the life of the creature it belongs to.
This past Friday was a visit UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The Museum houses a large collection of specimens, specifically the remains of creatures that are tetrapods, which means they have four limbs. The main purpose of the museum is for research, and not for public viewing. The main room is filled with large gray closed cabinets. On the outside there are labels of the kind of creature the box contains, and where that creature is from. In the back of the museum is a room that is mainly a skull collection.
     Alongside seeing the museum, we also had a brief lecture by Alan Shabel, a graduate student at UC Berkeley.  The lecture went in a number of directions. I think that he was a little unsure about what to teach a group of artists and designers. What would we want to know about vertebrate zoology? I don’t think we even knew (or still know) but it was interesting nonetheless. He gave us a general idea of the study of ecology and evolution based on studying the skeletons and remains of animals, in the context of their environments.
    One can look at any vertebrate, and find the same bones that we humans have, but that they’re shaped and oriented in a completely different way based on their functional needs. In the classroom that held the lecture, there was a skeleton of a pigeon. Its pelvis is very small compared to their sternum, while our pelvis is larger when compared to our sternum. This makes lots of sense, because a pigeon needs more support in the upper half of its body for flying, while we need more support down below so that we can carry our body weight while walking and running.
The most interesting thing about skeletons is the integrity of their forms. One can look at a skeleton, and know that the way it is made is right way. This of course comes from millions of years of evolution, in which nature was “tinkering” with the forms of living creatures to what best supports life in a specific environment.
    In our lecture, Shabel discussed how particular animals used “anvils” to break their food out of shells. Among these animals are sea otters, or mongoose that will throw clams against a rock. Someone asked, why don’t other creatures do the same? Why do some use tools, and others don’t? The answer came that they just don’t need to. Either they’ve evolved to use another method, or their source of food doesn’t require such tools. I think the manner in which we, as humans, regard the behavior and adaptations of animals is rather snobby. We think that animals that behave in the way that we do are the most advanced, when in actuality, most every animal is extremely advanced in its own way of living.

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