1. See The Sea | Why The Pier Experience?

a. The pier is the quintessential destination experience. It is a sea looked at and never touched, a threshold of dreams never crossed, a place where imagination, desire, and memory dance. The pier is a place we can go and contemplate life and return from the trip. The pier is a place to see the sea, to visit the unconscious. It’s a place to look out and remember we all came from the same sea on the same struggle and landed on the same land.

2. Monument Becoming | The Horizontal Ascent

a. The Pyramid, The Needle, The Arch, The Obelisk, and The Tower are singular points in space. Monuments are rhetorical to themselves and undemocratic by their very nature. They dictate a relationship of the citizen to their surroundings. The pier is a social place composed of a multiplicity of experiences. It is the most democratic of monuments. It is a communication booth with the self, a commune with nature, and a confessional with ones Creator. One’s ascent is not a physical one on the horizontal monument, but a spiritual one. Moving across in body, the spirit is lifted up with one memories, dreams, and desires becoming the true monument.

3. The American Dream | Necessity of Desire

a. “Great necessities call out great virtues.” Abigail Adams

b. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in the shallows and in miseries… And we must take the current when it serves. Or lose our ventures.” William Shakespeare

c. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence

4. Keep Going | The Point of No Return

a. On any trip there is a point after departure that one refuses to return or quit the journey, but due to the distance already traversed, one must press on. We have come this far, we might as well see this journey through, one says to himself. This point is a critic threshold in the pier experience. The pier is a destination, and going to the pier and not reaching the end is unacceptable. On a hero’s journey its the relationship of the level of adversity to the distance travelled that push us forward. The point of no return is a critical psychological moment in the event of the pier that justifies the struggle to the end.

5. Destination Space | A Communication Booth

a. The color of the sky we see is a color we have never seen before. It’s not pink or blue, black or grey. The sky is the empty color of my heart. It is the silence in the vision of a colorblind child’s taste of blood, the every-color of Greta Garbo’s lips on the screen. We desire love and push it away. We pull love in close and sink it like a battleship. Dawn on a pier, we freeze the moment there is no moon and no sun, that moment when the sky is lost. A point in time when the question of becoming day is most pertinent and the answer to the question is not in the day but in the instance of how we got to this point. To freeze dawn on the end of a pier is the point at which love has no color and tomorrow is not absolute. The horror of a broken heart, a lost love is caught in the torture of dawn’s blank eternal stare. It is us hanging on a plank together, in the chill of no moon or sun, with a bottomless sea of black below, we wait. We wait on the pier and question if the day will ever come and thaw the pain of now.

6. The Myth of The Pier | Intimate Daydream

a. Le Monde est grand, mais ne nous il est profond comme la mer.” (The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.) R.M. Rilke

b. “One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer out-side the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” Gaston Bachelard

7. Paradise | Immensity Elsewhere

a. “L’espace m’a toujours rendu silencieux” Jules Valles (Space has always reduced me to silence.)

b. “Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of mediation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn’t imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of fact, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings, that is, when it is not lodged in the houses of the past, it is immense. And one might say that daydream is original contemplation.” Gaston Bachelard

8. Turning Back | The Long Return of Matter and Memory

a. The return from the end of the pier is a turning one’s back on the sea, on the daydream, on the immense elsewhere, and returning to a harsh reality of the land and man. Its turning away from everything one aspires to be to face real pain, real strife, real disease. It’s through this struggle that one creates the art on the walls, acquires the knowledge of the books, lectures on the sciences, and above all creates debate among each other. Why not stretch this return to land as long as we can?

b. “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of images. And by image we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing — an existence placed halfway between the thing and the representation.” Henri Bergson

9. Cosmopolitan | Sacrifice precedes Sophistication

a. “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” John Adams

10. See The City | Why The Metropolis?

a. The complexity of the city is the very ejaculation for the presence of museums. The dirty, messy, mix of people in the city is the breading ground for the life in art to come. Without the metropolis there is no laboratory for the future of humankind. Without the city there is no home for the immigrants to come. The crashing together of cultures and society makes the city a beautiful experiment. It is in this laboratory that life becomes art and art becomes life.

b. “The City of the Captive Globe is devoted to the artificial conception and accelated birth of theories, interpretations, metal constructions, proposals and their inflictions on the World. It is the capital of Ego, where, science, art, poetry, and forms, or madness compete under ideal conditions to invent, destroy and restore the world of phenomenal Reality.” Rem Koolhaas

11. Facebook Multiculturalism | Globalization in Reverse

a. Globalization is dead. Nationalism is powerless. The corporations built the temples of the day. Today it’s development for development sake. Multi-national corporations control the news, the wars, the art, and the science. What does the American dream mean today? How does one dream in a world flattened by uploading, outsourcing, and off-shoring? The multiculturalism in America today is local, not global. Local is the new global.

b. “Diaspora communities around the world use today’s global media networks to cling to the local mores, news, traditions, and friends — no matter where they are living. Globalization of the local is the globalization in reverse. Instead of global media enveloping the world, regional, local, media are going global.” This phenomenon or the globalization of the local is being driven by the demand for local news and information from peoples in their diasporas, notably millions of Latin Americans in the United States. You would think some day Miami would go English, but that’s not the case. It’s going Spanish with ‘local’ goods, services, and media going global. “It’s not the global which envelopes us. It is the local which goes global.” Thomas Friedman

For our own workspace we design our buildout in one of Ted Smith’s Live-work communities. Nestled in a building with Mamoth gaming designers, Maida hair salon, and Millimeter video productions, we love our creative surroundings. We started with an exposed concrete shell and added some folded white plains to conceal the private from the public. Redwood slat walls and maple plywood workstations add a sense of warmth and texture. Finally, with charcoal, topsoil, and baroque yellow, we created contrast and color. The open office space plan and social spaces help create a fun, productive and collabrative environment.

A RESTAURANT WHERE EVERYONE HAS A VIEW

Candela’s Restaurant sits on the edge of the Coronado Ferry Landing with a breathtaking view of downtown San Diego. At is very concept it’s a restaurant that is all about the view. The layout was designed so every guest is able to drink up the view. We wanted to create a place where every seat has a view and created a giant bay window. With floor to ceiling glass and no mullions, there are no obstructions whatsoever. The owner, Alberto Meustre, led with his vision, finishing touches and experience.

Gallery 5+5 is a urban, sleak, simple and sifisticated at the same time. This Art Gallery in an old converted hotel and flop house, brings art to downtown San Diego. This alternative reuse is a vital addition to San Diego’s growing downtown population. While the living units downtown have more than doubled in the last ten years so has San Diego’s demand for culture. It’s nice to see building owner’s and clients commissioning an adaptive reuse project that compliments San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter history. One of the goals of the project was to maintain the distinction of the 75 year old historic structure while providing a new contemporary blank canvas for the emerging San Diego art scene. The project distinguishes the old and new while allowing the patrons to enjoy the art and context. As the design evolved, concerns were raised regarding the texture and history, would the art or the historic richness be compromised? The gallery strikes a balance with the concept of providing a blank canvas for the canvas. It is a flexible setting that can be taken as a whole or as spaces with in the space. The display walls are sub-divided to provide breathing room between multiple artist exhibits or by framing individual pieces experienced along a path. The wood flooring is set on an angle to draw you towards the art while allowing patron to circulate efficiently in the space. Just as in a painting there is a fore, middle, and background, this space was designed along a similar concepts: the historic building is the background, the floating plains are the middle-ground, and the viewer’s relationship to art in the space is the foreground. These relationships setup a respect for the existing context and allow an old building to bring culture and dynamism to a blossoming urban fabric.