Camera Obscura

I love the West Coast. It is among the oldest coastlines in the world, and it looks it. This impression is confirmed with a look at maps of the way the continents have drifted, tumbled and collided around the globe over millions of years: the west coast of North America has always been pointed out, facing the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In light if this, it seems to make a kind of poetic sense that the West Coast was the symbolic goal of the Manifest Destiny, the prize in the drive to conquer the North American continent and the frontier. I've always had this sense that the history of technology in California and the West was just an extension of the migratory drive westward of the American pioneers. The Pilgrims and their heirs achieved their Manifest Destiny, and the land has been conquered, for better or for worse. But now, with all the land gobbled up, what do we do with our insatiable drive to discover, to conquer? We keep going.

And where is there to go? Why, into space of course. Up into outer space, and down into inner space. Symbols of the extension of our frontier can be seen from the freeway which runs between San Francisco and San Jose. The most obvious is Stanford University's massive radio telescope which towers over the 280 corridor. The Dish, as it is known around here, takes our drive to conquer and points it out to space. The Dish, and all the world's telescopes and antennas, scan the next swath of territory, looking for signs among the stars that we can keep going. A mile down the freeway, for those who are driven to discovery on a different scale, is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Dept. of Energy's two-mile long linear accelerator, which runs under the freeway and plumbs microscopic space, searching for pathways to knowledge in between the atoms.

Most of us don't get to go on these journeys--the pathways of science are as obscure to us as was the way west to Louis and Clark, before they started up the Missouri. We don't understand the meaning of the intergalactic hiss that the Dish records or the significance of the images the Hubble takes, as beautiful as they are. We don't know what to make of the dance of the charmed and strange particles that leave their trails on the target at the end of the particle accelerator. But when we see pictures of stars, or of scattered pieces of atoms, we take some comfort in the fact that someone is searching out new trails, that hidden truths may be revealed.

But I wonder if we are ever capable of arriving, of ending the journey. Having come to this place, to the edge, as it were, can we just appreciate it as a place? Can we ever stop searching and just see? Or is every place just a waypoint? Are we bound to urgently press on? I'm willing to accept that some are called to always search the horizon for new routes, but this straining impulse, this expectation that there is more to discover, more to do, is so deeply rooted in the psyche of everyone who has come to California that it is nearly a disease.

As an antidote to this straining, this looking beyond, there is a place on the coast near here where you are encouraged simply to see. Where you are not encouraged to map out new trails, or to imagine what lies over the horizon. Having arrived, you are invited just to see the beauty of it. In this place is a kind of old-school technology that is also an anti-technology. It's a kind of camera, but one that doesn't fill your shelf with albums or your hard drive with JPEGs. The images it produces do not require or even permit analysis. It is the Camera Obscura.

The Camera Obscura looks from the outside like a cheesy tourist spot: the Giant Camera of the old Playland at the Beach amusement park on the seaward side of San Francisco, built in 1946. But as cheesy as it looks, it is a thing of wonder: a dark room containing a six-foot wide parabolic wooden surface painted white that captures a projected image from outside without electricity, chemicals, or WiFi. The image is often moving, gently rotating with the turning of the lens which sits on top of the building, and as it is reflected via a prism down onto the table, we see the scene outside (the Cliff House behind the Camera, Seal Rock, the beach, and the open sea) panning and turning all at once on the circular surface. It can be a little disorienting, a bit hypnotic; it is certainly beautiful.

The round table on which the image is projected is about the same diameter as the target end of the two-mile long accelerator inside SLAC, as the sensor that hangs suspended in front of the Dish to catch it's magnified space signals, and as the mirror in the Hubble Telescope. But the images it captures are less obscure than these, less abstract. What you see on the table in front of you in the Camera Obscura is immediate and intimate, it is the Place Where You Are. No interpretation is needed. You can't study it, because it's moving and changing and always different. You experience it.

A quick view with the lens at rest.

The table is perfectly round, here viewed from the side.

Technology always promises access to things while simultaneously distancing you from them. The Television delivers programming from around the world but you are still stuck sitting in front of a glowing box in a darkened room. Jet airplanes can move you to the other side of the planet in hours, but you have no sense of the journey--of what you flew over, or through--only a sense of discomfort at having been squeezed into a tube and then squeezed out in a place where everything is different. The internet gives us access to all the world's information, but requires us to keep our eyes fixed on a flat screen, and our ears plugged and wired.

The Camera Obscura, as a piece of technology, is no different, even if it operates on principles that have been understood for millennia: the image on the table is of the place where you are, but you are also not there. You're inside a dark room looking at a projection of an image of the sea, not standing on the beach looking at the sea with your own eyes. Yet like all cameras, the Giant Camera of San Francisco helps you see things differently (or see them for the first time), and unlike the portable cameras we all carry, this camera preserves a feeling of immediacy and authenticity because the camera is bound to the place. You never really suffer that technology-induced isolation. You can hear the sea through the walls.

The Camera Obscura is also made of lovely, low-tech things: essentially glass and wood. A five-inch wide glass lens projecting on a six-foot wide table with a concave wood surface. Apart from the motor that turns the lens assembly, there is no electricity, no Intel Inside, no HD screen.  In the Camera Obscura, you are the computer that processes the image, and if your capacity to remember hasn't suffered too much from our culture of hyper-literacy, then you will recall this trip to the coast as a distinctly satisfying one.

Visit the Camera Obscura:

1096 Point Lobos Ave
San Francisco, 94121

 37°46'41.64"N
122°30'51.22"W

(Satellite view): bit.ly/giantcamera

Timing and Technology, A Pattern Language

One of my very favorite books is A Pattern Languageby Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. The book is ostensibly about architecture, detailing how to design and build the places we live, from the regional scale down to the nook in the corner of a child's room. It is a beautiful manifesto for simple, economical, ecological, human-centered design; I know of nothing better to have come out of the 70s. Inside this 1200 page book are about 250 patterns, each describing a principle, a pattern, that is essential to designing and building livable, humane spaces and communities.

But the beauty of The Pattern Language is that you quickly come to realize that the patterns being described are not limited to application in the world of architecture. Alexander says in his introduction that he hopes "that a great part of this language ... will be a core of any sensible human pattern language, which any person constructs for himself, in his own mind" (my emphasis). To read how Alexander lays out the pattern for the furniture in rooms (Pattern 185, Sitting Circle), or for the essential businesses in a town (88, Street Cafe, etc.), you get the idea very quickly that the patterns all assume that the reason for design is to accommodate life, not economic forces or engineering principles. The book has the effect (whether or not you are in a position to build your own home) of awakening an appreciation for community and humanity that has been somewhat dampened by the design of modern social spaces. The book is inspiring, and gives me a sense of expectation that good things can happen between people when technology doesn't get in the way.

Technology, by definition, is the application of scientific knowledge for the purpose of increasing efficiency in any practical endeavor. There is nothing wrong with technology in itself. Problems come when a technological solution is pursued blindly, hastily, and at the expense of the potential intuitive solutions that are much better suited to a local context. Technology is tied to efficiency, and efficiency is tied to questions of scale. It makes a certain economic sense to mass-produce formulaic solutions that can sell, or communicate, across cultures. Technology often provides the most efficient and economical solution. But, does it ever provide the best solution? Getting back to architecture, Alexander argues that normal people are fully able to discern, design, and build their own unique living and work spaces, and that they will do the best job of it for the least amount of money, too. Does that sound radical? Why should it? It wasn't that long ago when that was the way it was done. Today, we assume that anyone who builds their own home is either a licensed contractor or just quaint (think of people that gather for barn-raisings, all beards and buttons and suspenders). Alexander intends to provide "an alternative to technocratic and rigid ways of building that have become the legacy of the machine age and modern architecture" ... for normal people, not only contractors and the quaint.

I've been reading the book for three or four years (not unheard of with me and certain books) and I'm almost done. I recently came to a moment late in the book where I was stunned to realize just how serious Alexander is about providing alternatives to rigidity. This moment, spanning two patterns that come into play as a subject begins to build their house, perfectly expresses when and how to embrace technology.

In pattern 212 (Columns at the Corners), Alexander describes the standard architectural practice of hiring a draftsperson to create blueprints from a design and then turning them over to a contractor, who relies on the drawing to raise the house on-site. But, he says, this practice "cripples buildings". Not only does it force a kind of rigidity on a design and put too many technological barriers between design and construction, but it will be doomed to frequent revision as the builder encounters a multitude of problems on site not imagined when the design was committed to paper. Many trips back and forth between contractor and designer and client result. This scenario, which threatens to suck a property owner dry of enthusiasm and money, might be eliminated if the client could be both the designer and builder, and skip the whole blueprint stage entirely.

Oddly enough, the way I first learned about A Pattern Language was by reading the account of a writer who decided to build a small writing hut on his property. Odd because he falls into the very trap Alexander is preaching against. When the floor of his hut was laid, a mistake in measurement was discovered: the foundation was ever so slightly off-square, and it could not be easily or cheaply fixed. With horror, the author and his handyman realized that the whole building was now going to need customizing. Every subsequent piece of the building would need to be finished with a slight angle to fit the whole, a situation described as catastrophic. I guess this author failed to read or take seriously the part of Pattern Language where Alexander suggests that they could have scribbled the design on the back of an envelope, and then walked the site pounding in stakes where the corners felt right, with no concern for uneven lines or imperfect angles. In case you didn't get that: Alexander is really saying that precise blueprints are not necessary. In fact he would rather they be rejected: in the pattern language, the design process doesn't end until well after you mark out the corners of your building, with chalk or stakes or whatever. The beauty of this organic process, as it is described, is that the design grows around the realities of the environment ... and the concerns of the people who will live there. Stand in "the kitchen" and you'll realize that the wall with the window and sink will need to be bigger, and perhaps angled differently to take in that particular view ... no sweat: move the stakes. Change the size of rooms according to your experience of the site, and obsess ye not over right-angles. Amen.

But before the reader can swear on a stack of building codes never to step foot inside a house where design and construction are happening all at once, we move on to pattern 213 (Final Column Distribution). In this pattern the question is asked how the "spacing of columns" is effected by the size of rooms and number of stories, and the chapter is sensibly free of any organo-hippie vibe. Having just told you in 212 to put the corner columns wherever feels right to you, Alexander goes on in 213 to detail the complex technical formula for determining how to design a wall, with it's intermediate columns, to support the weight of a roof and additional upper-story rooms. And this technical, industry-standard formula comes just in time. It is important for walls to be able to support a roof - this will provide many holistic benefits to the occupants of a home, like not dying under a collapsed roof when you slam a door, or not dying under a collapsed roof when the wind blows, and so on. I believe it is axiomatic that one should not take shelter in a home where the compressive load-bearing capacity of its walls has been intuited organically.

If technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, then there is a time and a place for it in all aspects of our lives. Technology can be a lifesaver. However, apply it too early in a design process and it cripples our products and projects, our homes and communities. They become cold and rigid--we fear any imperfection in them. They will be impersonal and homogeneous, ill-suited to our unique context or environment. You can see the results of an overly technological architecture everywhere you turn in suburbia: homes built according to some remote architect's bland, marketable standard of what a beautiful home should look like ... and when such "homes" are planted on a typical suburban half-lot, these mini-mansions look like part of a demonic plot to destroy a neighborhood. The best thing you can say about them is that they won't fall down in a storm ....

Let's adopt this as a (low) tech writer principle: let individual or community wisdom, forged-in-context, dictate the unique shape of your house, project, product, or organization. Take time to listen for, intuit, and live with the implications of the designs you are working on. Only after organically discerning the shape and scale of a new project should you consult outside "experts" (or formulas). These may aid in developing levels of structure efficiently, but such expert witnesses will seldom have your local, contextual perspective, and so should not under any circumstances be allowed to dictate design.

The Old Testament book of Proverbs 24:3 says, "By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches." This is the original idea of getting the order right in building. "Wisdom", it says elsewhere in Proverbs, is the product of a healthy reverence--awe--for God. In the biblical context, of course, this is referring to the need to listen to God before you start anything that bears The Name, whether a building or a military campaign. In other contexts, the same reverent attention to the names associated with a venture is called for: the name of the family that will dwell in a home; the name of a town where a business in starting up. How does the life of these communities, small and large, dictate the design of the structures that will serve them? The getting of wisdom has to come first in the building of anything, a home or a life. Later, once the foundation is understood and laid, it's gifts of a more intellectual kind (not less sacred) that come into play: the understanding of compressive load-bearing capacities that makes it possible to raise a structure, and the knowledge of the community that dictates the filling of the structure with the stuff that makes a place livable and pleasant. But wisdom is needed to determine the shape of a thing, not technology or intellectual precision. And wisdom comes from a reverence for the life that a thing is meant to serve.

A companion volume to A Pattern Language is The Timeless Way of Building.This book takes a higher-level view of the philosophy of building towns and buildings.