Arch 179, Syllabus, Summer 2006 / Page 7
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Field Seminar in Architectural and Urban History
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This draft: June 25, 2006
Prof. Paul Groth
Arch 179 / 8-Week Summer Term, 2006 / 3 units / CCN 13785
Fridays 9-4; six hours of lecture on site each week, plus an hour for travel and lunch
Organizational meeting, 9 AM Friday, June 30, 172 Wurster Hall,
followed by our first field trip (10 AM to 4 PM)
Traveling on foot and by BART—and through on-site study of the architecture, urban design, and cultural landscapes of Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco and Pleasanton—students in this field course will explore the built-environment history of the American city since 1850. Student expenses will include the course reader, BART fares, and meals. Note: the first class meets for the entire time period. Enrollment limited to 20 students. No pre-requisites. Both undergraduate and graduate students are welcome.
The goal of this course is to introduce ways of seeing various building types, street and block forms, land use patterns, and other cultural features of the Bay Area as records of repeating processes of American urban history: cyclical periods of investment and disinvestment, migration and immigration, connection and disconnection, reinforcement of individual and social identities, day to day maintenance and care, economic production, and consumption.
This will NOT be a course simply about high-style buildings and their designers. We will examine high-style designs within their contexts of ordinary, everyday urban space. This implies a balance of settings from monuments and official civic spaces to vernacular buildings; from work places (such as offices, workshops, factories, and stores) to home, leisure, and other consumption settings—all seen as people have changed them over time. The course has only one trip to the post-1945 suburbs, assuming that most students will be familiar with suburban settings.
The course will also explore the sedimentation of social and economic relationships that have brought American cities and buildings into being; the constant negotiation of identities, meaning, and memory within American buildings and cities; the issues of representation of built environments; and the roles of interpretation of built environments for the public. Wherever possible—through excerpts from guidebooks, web sites, historical maps and photographs, archival drawings, group interviews with various experts, and library sources—we will compare selected representations and interpretations of Bay Area design with our on-site observations and discussion, emphasizing the place-making and explanatory roles of designers, clients, developers, owners, renters, writers, teachers, politicians, community activists, and other social groups.
Attendance. The main components of a field course are first-hand site experiences and short, on-site lectures and discussions that help students learn how to think about buildings and urban space. Hence, your attendance must be full-time. The only exceptions are days when you are certifiably ill or have a certified family emergency. You will be allowed only one unexcused absence without grade reduction.
Field trips, like vacations, are a lot of fun; unlike vacations, they require diligent work and alertness. You will not be having a beer or wine at lunch on any trip! At all sites (as in all good seminars) you will be expected to have done the preliminary reading, and to be curious, pay attention, ask questions, and raise speculations.
Short two-page reaction papers. In addition to the readings to be completed before each field trip, and being prepared to discuss those readings on site, students will write 2-page reaction papers about two of the eight field trips (that is, about a third of the students each week will be writing a reaction paper about that week’s field trip). At the second class meeting students will sign up for which weeks they will write about. Sample reaction papers from prior terms are included in the course reader.
A process analysis. There will be no final exam, although all students will be asked to write a 4-page to 5-page (double spaced) final paper, due on the next-to-last week of the course, exploring the evidence (or lack of evidence) of one general process of urban change as observed throughout the course. At the beginning of the course, students will be assigned (or will choose) one particular process to observe throughout the course. Sample process analysis papers are also included in the course reader. At the last course meeting, the afternoon of our last day, students will give a five-minute “executive summary” of their findings, for discussion and comparison.
Grading. Participation in class, 60%. Two page reaction papers, 20%. Process analysis and presentation, 20%.
Contacting Paul Groth. Summer office hours are by appointment, best arranged by E-mail. Office: 597 McCone Hall, in the Department of Geography. Office phone 510-642-0955. Home phone: 415-695-1544. E-mail (I typically read E-mail only once a day, often in the evenings, at home): .
Required reading. One text will be required:
Peter Booth Wiley, National Trust Guide to San Francisco (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), $19.95
In addition, at least one xeroxed article or book chapter will be required for each week, collected in a xeroxed reader available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way. These readings will explore various genres of local literature or interpretation of local sites.
Useful reference books you may want to consult:
Allan B. Jacobs, Looking at Cities (Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1985) out of print, ca. $40 used
Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) $16.95
Sally Woodbridge, John M. Woodbridge, and Chuck Byrne, San Francisco Architecture (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992)
Sally Woodbridge, ed., Bay Area Houses, new edition (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith Publisher, 1988). $35.00
James Vance, Jr., Geography and Urban Evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area (monograph, 1964: city of realms model of urbanization).
Alex Marshall, How Cities Work (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000)
Paul Groth, AC 15: Oakland as a Cross Section of America’s Urban Cultural Landscapes (Xeroxed course reader, in the ENV library, 1994 revised ed.)
OUTLINE OF COURSE MEETINGS
Note: These are preliminary plans. Expect changes as the course evolves.
Check your Email Thursday evening before each class, as starting points may be adjusted slightly!
Week/Date Trip
BERKELEY: A FAIRLY CLASSIC AMERICAN STREETCAR SUBURB
1. June 30 Introductions and the South Campus and campus areas as initial reading lessons in American urban settlement. People in the course, and the perspectives that they might bring to the group. Walking tour from Telegraph Avenue to Piedmont Avenue south of campus. Making urban land from rural land: plats, plots, blocks, and elements of buildings. Streetcar connections. Sanborn Maps as site resources; seeing change over time in vernacular commercial structures; contrasts in storefronts and store buildings. The transitions of residence groups over time (from the merchants who built along Piedmont to waves of student groups) and traces of those groups. On campus: congruence and conflicts of design and site planning, and changing conceptions of American university education.
Mechanical detail: Collect signed waiver of liability forms.
Readings: Grey Brechin, “The University, the Gate, and ‘the Gadget’ [the atomic bomb],” Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 280-330.
Paul Groth, “Processes of Cultural Landscape Change,” unpublished manuscript, from Geog C160A/B review notes.
2. July 7 The Berkeley hills and the central Berkeley “flatlands”: personal and social identities in “signature” architecture versus ordinary architecture. Meet at Wurster Hall. Morning: Turn of the century Arts and Crafts influence in what the geographer Richard Walker calls the “upper class bohemia” of the Berkeley Hills, compared to idealist experiments of Rose Walk, Greenwood Commons, and Maybeck-Land on Buena Vista Way. Afternoon: Commercial buildings on the fringe of a typical small-city Central Business District, and the flatlands: a cross-section through land use and building type mixtures in textbook-case streetcar suburban area. Social stratification in consumption space.
Mechanical detail: Sign-ups for two-page reaction papers and one process to look for throughout the course.
Readings: David Gebhard, “Life in the Dollhouse” in Bay Area Houses, Sally Woodbridge, ed. (rev ed., 1988)
Grady Clay, “Crossing the American Grain with Vesalius, Geddes, and Jackson: The Cross-Section as a Learning Tool,” in Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, eds., Everyday America (2003)
BLUE COLLAR OAKLAND
3. July 14 Oakland’s historic downtown and waterfront, and West Oakland: production space and workers’ housing. Meet at the City Center in downtown Oakland. We observe the nexus of streetcar lines at 14th street, and then walk south toward the original ferry terminal and port area of Oakland. Examining the inter-relationship of water and rail links, industry, and the steered immigration and migration of skilled and unskilled blue-collar workers to serve in industry and transportation jobs. Chinatown as a retail node fast converting into a residential district; West Berkeley as a quintessential workers’ cottage district and, on some blocks, zone of emergence. Gentrification of former warehouse and workers’ cottage districts.
Reading: Paul Groth, “Workers’ Cottage and Minimal Bungalow Districts in Oakland and Berkeley, California, 1870-1945,” Urban Morphology 8,1 (2004)
SAN FRANCISCO
4. July 21 San Francisco’s financial district and South of Market Area: capital investment and capital circulation Meet in the central entry lobby of the Ferry Terminal Building, on the waterfront across from San Francisco’s Embarcadero BART station. Evolution since 1906 of the American Central Business District (CBD). Specialization and separation (the hallmarks of modernity) versus a revived interest in mixed uses. Office buildings, loft buildings, live/work lofts. Urban renewal and new scales of multinational capital circulation and investment.
Readings: Peter Booth Wiley, National Trust Guide to San Francisco (2003), chs 1, 6, 10, 14: “A Beautiful City in the Wrong Place,” “The Pacific Rim Metropolis,” “The Downtown/Financial District,” and “South of Market.”
5. Sun July 23 Specially scheduled field trip, because instructor will be out of town the following Friday:
San Francisco’s Union Square, Chinatown, and North Beach areas: retail space and social identities. Use Powell Street BART station and meet at the Starbucks Coffee Shop on Fourth Street, across the street from the Metreon, in the first floor of the Fourth and Mission Parking Garage (also labeled as the Yerba Buena Parking Garage. The retail half of the Central Business District (CBD), and the dialectical relations (feedback loops) between American retail spaces, individual identities, and social identities in CBD retail spaces, Chinatown, and inner-city ethnic neighborhoods. The spatial histories of racial segregation of Asian Americans, tensions between identity preservation and acculturation in Chinatown, Manilatown, and North Beach. Links from the former Barbary Coast and the Beats in North Beach, and throughout all, the roles of post 1960s tourism as San Francisco’s number one industry.
Readings: Peter Booth Wiley, National Trust Guide to San Francisco (2003), chs 11, 12, 15: “Chinatown,” “The Union Square Area,” “Telegraph Hill, the Barbary Coast, and North Beach.”
July 28 No class. Instructor out of town.
6. August 4 The Mission District and its edges: from northern European “zone of emergence” to Latino ethnic enclave. Meet at Sparky’s 24-Hour Diner, 242 Church Street in San Francisco, just south of Market Street at the edge of the Castro and Mission districts. From the 1870s to 1940s, shifts from the domestic consumption spheres of skilled workers (the lower strata of the middle class) to ethnic immigrant groups (a mixture of skilled workers and unskilled workers), and how these groups claim space in the present. Roles of social institutions such as churches, meeting halls, and clubs, as identity foci. Gentrification and its resistance.
Reading: James Rojas, “The Enacted Environment: Examining the Streets and Yards of East Los Angeles,” in Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, eds., Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (2003): 237-254.
PLEASANTON
7. August 11 Post-World War II Suburbs before and after 1980: Pleasanton and Hacienda Business Park. We meet at 10:00 AM (note later starting time) at the Arby’s Roast Beef Sandwich outlet at 5900 Owens Drive, on the SW corner of Owens Drive and Chabot Drive in the Hacienda Business Park, on the south side of the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station. The new scales and forms of workplaces and residential developments in urban realms built from 1980 to 2000. National and multinational businesses as spurs to urban growth. The role, especially of landscape architecture design and planted elements, in defining the office park, suburban workplaces, and homes. The links between centers of innovation and centers of investment, management, and production.
Reading: Louise Mozingo, “Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation,” in Wilson and Groth, Everyday America (2003): 255-275
Due: Final 4-5 page paper tracing the effect of one major process of urban change, as observed throughout the settings explored in the course.
CONCLUSIONS AND COMPARISONS
8. August 18 Downtown Oakland and individual activism. Meet at Mojo’s Coffee Shop on Broadway, near the 19th Street BART station. Guest commentator, Oakland real estate attorney and preservation activist, Frederick Hertz. Personal agency and social structures at work in Oakland’s Uptown and City Hall Plaza areas. Failures and successes of urban renewal, private attempts to create a white corporate downtown by Lake Merritt, small details of urban revival, and the reconstruction of the City Hall area. Back on campus for the afternoon: presentation and discussion of final “process” papers, and the course as a whole.
Due: Five-minute “executive summary” presentation of each student’s five-page essay tracing one urban process through the course.
ABOUT THE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
THE TWO-PAGE “REACTION PAPERS”
Reaction papers are one or two page essays (up to about 500 words) about some landscape element, idea, comparison, or generalization—based on what we see and discuss on site during a particular field trip, and what you have read for the course. This paper requirement will keep you looking closely at our sites during the trips themselves, and will help you practice the art of selecting landscape elements as foci for discussion. If you wish to incorporate course readings, you may use the reading for that week, or any reading from the course syllabus.