Place // San Diego, CA

Though there are few truly vital reasons to leave LA's urban soup for San Diego's relative towniness, there are a few compelling ones. Most of them involve fantastic CaliMex food, the insane Tijuana border--for which I had neither the stones nor the time to visit, instead choosing to guide my lovely female companions to relative safety/sanity--and NFL football, SoCal-style. But if you're a student of architecture, conquistadors, or just like the beach, it's worth a look. But first a little history...

The area was first explored by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602 and named for a Spanish saint, San Diego de Alcalá. In 1769, a group of Spanish missionaries established a permanent colony on a site now known as "Old Town" San Diego. Later, the colony transformed into a military outpost, displacing the missionaries a few miles to the east, and was the location of a few small skirmishes between Spanish soliders and the indigenous Native American tribe, the Kumeyaay. Mexico gained indepedence from Spain in 1821 and San Diego progressed under Mexican jurisdiction until the resolution of the Mexican-American War in 1850 (known as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) ceded the city to the U.S.

Update // Happy New Year!

Yes, the blog was left fallow through the end-of-semester madness and various holiday adventures. Apologies to all. But now it's time to pull up the weeds and get it crankin' once again! I have made it part of my resolutions to write more regularly - or at least as regularly as I used to - but it remains to be seen whether I have the fortitude to make it stick. I usually fail when it comes to resolutions, though I am a bit more optimistic about this year. The economy seems to be turning around, say the crackpot number doctors on Capitol Hill, which should make anyone in the architecture business smile a little (though it is unclear if this improvement will lead to more design jobs). And at long last, one of four semesters of M. Arch is in the books, and I have grown accustomed to the grind. 

Other resolutions: explore more of California and the Southwest. Trips hopefully in store: San Diego / Salk, Santa Barbara, Pacific Coast Highway, San Francisco, Vegas, Phoenix. At least one of these is sure to happen in the next month or so...updates on that later. Also, better health and more romance. Can't promise any (detailed) updates on that.

Visited the new LA Holocaust Museum this afternoon. Interesting building by LA firm Belzberg Architects...Mr. Belzberg was a visiting professor for the undergrads this fall. The surfaces and lines are soft and sinuous and the interior volumes are terraced, sunken into the ground and covered with grassy vegetation, creating a seamless transition to the undulating hills of Park La Brea on whose north end the museum sits. Shot-crete construction facilitated these formal gestures, and the hard nature of the material contrasts with the smooth curves. Philosophically, this is a vastly different approach than, for example, the obvious symbolism of Libeskind's jagged, violent forms in Berlin. Yet while it's a perfectly fine building in and of itself, it does leave me wanting a little bit more visible emotional content.

[Sunken entry.]