Firstly, the First Bay Tradition

(Continued from Roots)

The body of influence lay decumbent, an autopsy proceeded, resembling the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, attended by a human pyramid of blood-lusting surgeons, vampires transfixed by fresh dissection. The influences, pestiferous; the foolish notions, the valour, courage, rage, and misplaced affections, the pathology tortuously revealed as monkey tricks and nothing more.

The flight impulse took hold again, like a plane refusing to land, I charged through snowy hinterlands in the battered pickup, through places of great silence, quarries, and sandpits, uncongenial surroundings, past courts of public assistance housing, and the substantial Tudor Revivals of Hancock Park given an eerie nighttime immensity by patches of parti-color light from lawn height parabolics.

The third and most important revelation came not with the low-rumbling of drums or the hiss of steam, but as if overheard, a snippet of speech intercepted, the trailing words of an exchange between confidantes: the First Bay Tradition.

The First Bay Tradition was the handiwork of a radical group of architects, seeking to give San Francisco and environs a regional identity, fusing formality with rusticity, bold experiments in spatial arrangement intensified by unexpected detail and juxtaposition. The era of significance began in the 1880's and lasted till the great quake (if not the Great War). Site specific work, with spectacularly complex massing, shingle clad, and infused with local materials.

It was time to confront my maker.