The light in San Francisco in January can be incomprehensibly warm and golden. My winter-lashed New England self was basking in its late afternoon glow as I sat with a friend in a lush Marina garden. Bliss. Then, in an instant, my eyesight went skiwampus. That was 2018. After a lot of medical head scratching, […]
Sarah Robinson
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Architecture is a Verb
Some proclivities are sui generis, perennially present as a life unfolds. That is the sense I get when George Saunders expresses the discomfort he still feels about his childhood failure to befriend a lonely girl in his neighborhood. For Saunders, gifted author and teacher, kindness and humility are built in. I have a primordial proclivity […]
- Architecture
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Robinson Redux
In Milan, down a side street I first became acquainted with architect and philosopher Sarah Robinson in 2012 when I came across her book Nesting at one of my favorite bookstores in San Francisco. After falling under the spell of Juhani Pallasmaa‘s extraordinary book, The Eyes of the Skin, I sensed immediately that Robinson was […]
Born Things
Shoji Hamada How easy it is to slip into busy. Busy, and disconnected from the core of things. This morning I found a needed course correction courtesy of Sarah Robinson‘s Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind: Cognitive scientists tell us that it takes time for the conscious mind to extract latent patterns within a diversity of superficially […]
Signature of the Landscape
Close up of Nagala that, from a certain angle, feels more planetary than painting I’ve been in a particular kind of intimacy with my latest body of work (such a wonderful phrase to describe a variety of artifacts that feel connected…) Yes, you bring them into existence. You labor over every inch of their surface. […]
Place and Imagination: Robinson’s Nesting
William Stout Books, San Francisco San Francisco’s William Stout Architectural Books is located on the periphery of North Beach, just a few blocks from the better known City Lights. Both bookshops are labyrinthine and lushly overstuffed. But Stout and me, we have a mystical connection. I never leave that narrow two storied jewel box without […]