Comice Pear Harvest

our own freshly harvested Comice pears (Pyrus communis) After pressing the majority of our Bartlett pears into cider, some of which we combined with the juice of ripe Roma apples, we made a point of reserving our delicious Comice pears for eating raw. The large pear has the juiciest, creamiest fruit, and its flavors combine […]

Giant Fish Sculptures Commence

‘feeder fish’, like these anchovies abound this time of year (public domain image) I’ve begun making the scale models for our giant, mosaic fish sculptures that will live permanently outside the new building for the Ocean View branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission, the project is the […]

Entropy Schmentropy

I doubt the rancher who owns this tiny roadside outbuilding shares my enthusiasm for the patterns of blistered paint on its corrugated walls. He’d probably agree that it needs repainting and was a poorly executed job to begin with, or that the galvanized steel was best left exposed to the elements without any paint at […]

The Week in Bloom

stacks of cedar dry in the warm September air I counted five Kestrel perched along barbed wire as I wound down Marshall-Petaluma Road towards Tomales Bay from Evan Shively’s mill. I had been inspecting the deodar cedar (Cedrus deodara) Evan milled for my latest interior design commission, and I was delighted to find the fragrant […]

In Praise of the Bead Plane

Around the autumn equinox is typically our hottest, driest time of year, with golden brown fields and chalk dry dust under the orchard trees, now barren after harvest. The tips of the redwood branches have turned an orange-y yellow, and happily soak up the sea fog of a rare night. I can feel the rains […]

Collaborative Agitprop

Scoping a site for Watershed Field Research in Fruitvale One of the most rewarding aspects of a collaborative working relationship is that both the relationship and the work it produces tend to improve over time. Whenever Ene and I (aka wowhaus) perform field research for one of our public projects, we pay as close attention […]

Watershed Morphology Workshop

representations of water from across time and cultures How do we indicate water, let alone its increasing significance in maintaining the fabric of a healthy urban watershed? As we prepare a final design for the City of Oakland’s system of Watershed Markers, Ene and I will spend the weekend at farmer’s markets and major pedestrian […]