architecture

Sonja Navin and Mike Kimball

I recently visited two openings for artists I met at Open Studios last fall and whose work reflects my interests in highways, architectural images and the urban landscape. The artists take very different approaches, and the shows were in very different parts of the city – but having both openings on the same night was a great opportunity to see them together and simultaneously reflect upon the city itself.

First, I stopped in the relatively quiet West Portal neighborhood for a show at the Greenhouse Cafe featuring Sonja Navin. Navin draws on her architectural background to capture familiar images of the city in her paintings. Perhaps the most “familiar” image was the King Street off-ramp from I-280 in her large painting entitled 280.

[Sonja Navin. 280. Photo courtesy of the artist. (click to enlarge)]

Navin experienced this interchange the way many of us do, i.e., being stuck in traffic, and thus had the opportunity to visualize it in detail. She also had a painting East on N which featured a familiar view along the N-Judah metro line in the Sunset district.

Although her subject matter is often architectural in nature, her painting style features large brush strokes and irregular areas of color rather than the straight lines and precision of architectural drawings. She also had several figurative paintings, and some such as In The Haight combine both character and street elements.

Navin’s exhibition, which also features artist Kacie Erin Smith, will be on display at The Greenhouse Cafe, 329 West Portal Avenue in San Francisco through April 30.

After brief ride over Twin Peaks, I found myself descending into the Mission district for an opening at City Art Gallery, where I was particularly interested to see new works by Mike Kimball.

Like Navin, Kimball’s interpretation of the urban landscape distills it down to basic elements, but his prints and paintings feature very clean lines and simple geometric shapes. One example is his Maritime Plaza, which I immediately recognized (it is a favorite out lunch spot of mine).

[Mike Kimball.  Maritime Plaza.  Image courtesy of the artist.  (click to enlarge.)]

Like the building it represents, the image is framed by the triangules and X-shapes of the seismic bracing. This was one of the first buildings to use this technique, which is now a familiar site on buildings in the Bay Area.

In Division Street, Kimball represents another familiar sight from daily life, the interchange of I-80 and US 101 that sits above Division Street in SOMA. The image is composed of very simple curves and lines and solid colors, from which one can distinguish the elevated structures of the highway and the shadows they cast, as well as details such as the markings (and probably graffiti) on the sides of the trailers.

[Mike Kimball.  Division Street.  Image courtesy of the artist.  (click to enlarge.)]

Trucks and trailers also feature prominently in Kimball’s work. His “Truckograph” series features a similar graphic quality to Division Street. His larger work Meditations on a port looks at the stacks of trailers at the port as an abstract collection of boxes. Kimball bridges the industrial and abstract in this work – close up, one can see the writing and metal texture, but from a distance one simply sees the colored squares.

Kimball’s current exhibition will be on display at City Art Gallery, 828 Valencia Street, through March 28.

Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven, Beijing

On the northwest corner of Beijing is the Summer Palace, or Yihe yuan (颐和园).

It is quite a contrast to the dense network of buildings and courtyards of Forbidden City, and is dominated by the “natural” elements of of Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill – “natural” is in quotes as the lake and hill are at least partly artificial. Along the hillside are a series of impressive buildings leading up to the Tower of Buddhist Incense. Other palaces and gardens ring the lake, with similar architectural and sculptural elements:


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In its present incarnation it is more of a park than a palace, with locals and tourists boating on the lake, or having picnics in the gardens and pavilions along the side. However, the main attraction remains the buildings of Longevity Hill. At the base, one enters a court and the Cloud-Dispensing Hall, and can look upward towards the tower up the hill.

From there, one climbs a series of covered and exposed stairways, navigating a series of buildings on the hillside:


[Click to enlarge]

The courtyard of the Temple of Buddhist Virtue at the top of the stairs is relatively tight, and only offers extremely vertical views of the tower:


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One does, however, get a specular view of the lakeside and southeast towards the city center of Beijing.


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The Summer Palace has quite a history. It was destroyed during multiple invasions in the 19th Century and was rebuilt around 1900 in its current form.

Back in the city center is the Temple of Heaven.

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The most prominent building, the circular triple-gabled building depicted in the pictures above, is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Harvests seems to have been a major focus when the temple functioned as a location for ceremonies performed by the emperor. However, the most important structure, from a ceremonial point of view, was the Alter of Heaven, a tiered circular mound at the southern end of the complex:


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Unlike the more architecturally prominent buildings, which have gone through extensive maintenance and renovation, the mound seems to have gone to seed a bit, with lots of grass and weeds coming up the ground. For me, however, this actually makes for interesting photography, as I tend to like buildings that in a bit of disrepair.


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I found more buildings in various states off to the side of the main axis of the complex, such as this dry moat with weeds growing:


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This area of the complex was nearly empty, no tourists and very few locals, and walking around here among more quiet and less maintained buildings was quite comforting, especially after the intensity and the crowds of Beijing.