WHY? why not?
narrative lives | san francisco by barbara stauffcher solomon
Gus and I continue west along the beach at Aquatic Park. From here I can see the window two blocks up Russian Hill where Aunt Sadie watched fishing boats and cruisers sail in and out of the Bay. Behind that window, Lil and I listened with Sadie to the radio as FDR declared war on Japan. Sadie had a romance with a purser on the Lurline, which involved many cruises to Hawaii. After December 7, 1941, no more cruises. Behind another window one block up the hill at Galileo High I learned geometry. Then, at Fort Mason, Gus and I walk west up the cliff side path along the Bay. As the path descends we see the green grass rectangle of the Marina Green and the flat grided streets of the Marina District. In California people have love affairs with places. This land where I was born, owns me. It’s the shaky solid base of my story. When I’m away from here, I feel uneasy and rush back to its frail beauty. ~
Gus and I walk everywhere from home.
We walk one block down the Francisco Street Steps to the garden apartment where Chloe plays with her cat, writes children’s stories, and listens to Mozart, Beethoven, or Vivaldi. Another block and we’re at the Embarcadero. We continue south. On the Bay side of the street, classic porticos of bulkhead buildings provide high archway entrances to the piers. Coit Tower is on the other side of the street.
There’s a time warp in my eyes.
Portable, inexpensive sheets of 8½ x 11 layout paper. What can’t one do with these? Graphic lettering weighs down the pages like concrete blocks; the Villa d’Este is deconstructed and spread over the page like a code book; women become complex knots that spiral across the tight 8½ x 11 frame. Underneath the text of this book is a plaint recognisable by every woman who ever worked as an architect or a designer: there were daughters, there were husbands, there were lovers, there was a mother, there was endless truck back and forth between America and Europe following work, study, degrees; there were demanding men, there was the constant need to make money, and rarely were either adequate money or acknowledgement forthcoming. It is a horizontal career, that does not advance, rather it slides back and forth in parallel ventures. In 2011 she produced Utopia Myopia , 36 plays on a page. Typography & pornography, lines & lies & clues to use, nonsense invents events. A kind of a novel novel. One hudred and fifty-seven 8½ x 11 pages drawn on, text glued on, registration lines drafted on; the girl with hands that are birds dances through a discourse on how even thinking about utopia fails us, makes us myopic, and from that myopia crimes of passion and design occur. The elegaic passage printed here is neither typical of, nor unconnected to, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s eighty- year unsentimental narrative that unrolls with a kind of haphazard logic – as all life does, framed by Solomon’s own Californian self, her own nomadic history, her own city of San Francisco. The general made so specific.
The Embarcadero Promenade, palm trees and pier remodeling, cleaned up the waterfront, but when I look at the new stuff, I see the old at the same time. Grasses still grow on Telegraph Hill, eucalyptus leaves still fall and smell sweet, seagulls fly by, and the fog blows. When I worked in my office on the next block and ate at EATS, there were more brick-red warehouses and no pink and beige condos. Pier 23 Caf. looks about the same as it did in 1954 when Frank and I sat at the bar listening to live jazz. At Pier 1, Bill Turnbull’s low-rent workspace has been remodeled into luxury offices and restaurants, but the Ferry Building, renovated to look the same but cleaner, looked older when it was young. In 1934, my father and I stood here watching his Italian anarchist longshoremen clients march during the General Strike. Half a mile further south, the Bay Bridge spans the Embarcadero. In 1935, my grandfather would lift me onto his shoulders to better see the giant crane hoisting a huge steel section of the bridge into the underbelly of the structure above our heads. Slowly, the crowd looked up. Grandpa was enthralled. Everyone forgot to breathe. Then Grandpa bought us root beer floats at the longshoreman’s lunchroom, now Red’s Java House. That place looks the same; the coats of white paint and red trim are thicker. Grandpa left Russia to make a life in San Francisco. When I knew him, he worked at the American Can Company on Third Street, about a mile further south. He invented machines to can golden California peaches. Grandpa loved this mother-of-pearl city, the bright glare of the light, the smell of the fog. He was proud to be part of this new land, part of the possible.
This is an excerpt from Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s autobiography in essays and drawings, Why? Why Not? 80 Years of Art & Design in Pix & Prose, Juxtaposed. San Francisco: Fun Fog Press, 2013. pp 145-6 Barbara Stauffacher Solomon was, legendarily, responsible for the supergraphics on Sea Ranch: proper Swiss graphic design at the scale of a building, revolutionary for an America which was, at the time, graphically challenged – pop art revelled in the kind of folksy, amateur, American lettering of billboards and advertising. In contrast, Solomon had studied in Basel. She elevated the architecture she inscribed into something sophisticated and worldly. A parallel production to the supergraphics, are her 8½ x 11 drawings on small ordinary pieces of paper. This includes her analysis of formal French and Italian gardens, Green Architecture , published in the 1980s which became a graphic and a landscape bible for most young architects.
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facing page: California Waving a Pink Handkerchief , 8½ x 11” mixed media drawing.
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