Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Buildings don't lie to you the way people do. They sit there, massive and indifferent, spilling their secrets in concrete and glass if you're paying attention. These structures (the Sea Ranch clinging to that brutal Northern California coast, the Transamerica Pyramid stabbing upward like San Francisco's middle finger to gravity) are all screaming something about the distance between what we dream and what we're willing to live with.
Architecture is music that doesn't move. It's the three-chord progression of shelter, function, and ego frozen in space. McMurty Art Building becomes a stage for bodies in motion because what else is a building but a dare to make something happen inside it? Alcatraz. Jesus, Alcatraz. Now that's architecture as punishment, as control, as the ultimate bad review written in stone and salt air.
The California Missions understood this game centuries ago: seduce with beauty, then trap with necessity. Every arch, every bell tower is a con job, gorgeous and complete. The building isn't neutral, it's another performer, another collaborator, another voice demanding to be heard above the noise.
These aren't buildings as objects but as co-conspirators in the human mess. The Sea Ranch doesn't just sit on that coastline; it argues with the Pacific. The Transamerica doesn't politely join the skyline; it dominates like a headliner who knows they're the only reason you showed up. Architecture, done right, done honestly, is just another way of refusing to shut up and disappear.
The City 2025
There’s a particular kind of light that only exists in cities that have already seen their best days and don’t give a damn. San Francisco has it. Had it. Whatever. The point is, you stand on Saroyan Place (they renamed it from Adler, because this town can’t stop mythologizing itself) and you look up at […]
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FalseArt 2024
Ruth Escobar looked at a perfectly good theater in São Paulo in 1969 and said, essentially, “fuck this”, then proceeded to destroy it. Not metaphorically. Literally excavated the stage five meters down, erected a cylinder clear up to the fly loft, 20 meters of vertical madness, 86 tons of iron, elevators, cranes, suspended cages, gynecological […]
ReadEngineering 2019
There’s something about a joint that refuses to die that makes you believe in America again, or at least in the stubborn, beautiful refusal to give up on what matters. Peninsula Creamery sits there on that corner like a middle finger to everything Silicon Valley pretends to be: all its disruption and optimization and whatever […]
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Wanderlust 2019
Here’s what I didn’t think about when I was standing there at midnight in front of Notre Dame with a Polaroid camera: that I was taking a photograph of something that wouldn’t exist anymore. Not in two days. Not ever again, really. Not the way it was when I was there, then. I’m just exhausted. […]
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Engineering 2018
I’m going to tell you about a place that got murdered. Not quick, not clean. Slow, by a thousand cuts from people in Patagonia vests who convinced themselves they were improving the neighborhood. The building’s still standing on California Avenue. The sign still hangs there like a tombstone. But Antonio’s Nut House? The real Antonio’s? […]
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Individualism 2016
That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941 The stone holds everything, every failed marriage, every dead child, every […]
ReadCollusion 2016
I get it. They did what they always do, what they’ve been doing to everything worth a damn since some MBA sociopath figured out you could monetize nostalgia and sell it back as “progress.” They took something old, something with actual soul (remember soul?), something that had earned every water stain, every crack in its […]
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Wanderlust 2015
Étant la plus saisissante manifestation de l’art des constructions métalliques par lesquelles nos ingénieurs se sont illustrés en Europe, elle est une des formes les plus frappantes de notre génie national moderne. Gustave Eiffel Here I am with this gorgeous Leica M2 I scored at some outdoor market in Marseille, and I’m pointing it at […]
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Speculation 2015
Speculation: Site Specific Dance Rehearsal as the Chocolate Heads‘ rehearse at McMurty Art Building, Stanford. It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing […]
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Speculation 2015
Architecture is inhabited sculpture. Constantin Brancusi So here we are, in the courtyard of this 96,000-square-foot monument to interdisciplinary aspiration, and the dancers are turning Brancusi’s old line, “Architecture is inhabited sculpture”, into something that bleeds and sweats and refuses to be theoretical. The McMurtry Building wants to be unified, wants its art practice and […]
ReadIndividualism 2014
Here’s a guy who couldn’t even show up to his own exhibit because the Chinese government had his passport. Think about that. They locked him down, kept him from leaving, and he responds by creating this massive installation about freedom and imprisonment in one of America’s most notorious prisons. That’s not just art. That’s a […]
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Wanderlust 2013
There’s this moment when you roll up to San Juan Bautista, mission número fifteen in the chain, if anyone’s counting, which they shouldn’t be, and the whole place just hits differently. Not in some postcarded up, sanitized heritage way, but like walking into a room where ghosts still pay rent. The thing squats on a […]
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Collusion 2013
You walk into the Performance Art Institute expecting some precious meditation on process, maybe a little performative navel gazing with power tools as props. What you get instead is Angrette dropping a fucking bomb on the whole polite machinery of artistic intention, and she does it with hammers, two by fours, the San Francisco Building […]
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Wanderlust 2012
The Sonoma Mission squats there like the last gasp of something that already knew it was dying when they built it in 1823. The final outpost, the 21st link in a chain of spectacular ambition and casual brutality stretched up the California coast. You can feel it, this desperate, magnificent hubris frozen in adobe. Stand […]
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