InBerkeley

Overheard today on the Twitterstream:

tseng_tseng: Sitting at a cafe in Downtown Berkeley sipping my Pumpkin Spice Latte & listening to Train- Hey Soul Sister. It cant get better than this

Catharsis: sake tasting at the takara sake factory in berkeley for the first time. i’m epicurioliciously psyched.

kaottic97: Wow, looks like the WB Zephyr is late, but having it rush by at 70 mph at Berkeley station is pretty exciting!

MyOwnVelouria: Walking the pier at the Berkeley marina, more than a mile out into the open bay, San Francisco and Marin across the water. Awe. Some.

Berkeley Tweets

Bayer Healthcare has apparently decided to continue processing its Kogenate hemophilia drug at its West Berkeley plant, according to this article in the San Francisco Business Times. As a result, the company said it is investing $100 million in its West Berkeley facility — its largest single investment in the site — to increase production of the drug, but there is no indication as to whether this will result in more jobs at the site or not.

(Photo: Rupert Ganzer via Flickr)

Business, West Berkeley

The Guardian has a surprisingly convincing list of the 50 best things to eat in the world. It ranges from oysters at Strangfor Lough in Northern Ireland to ramen at Ramen Jiro in Tokyo. But Berkeley isn’t neglected:

Number 27 is the best place to eat California cuisine. Any guesses?

Chez Panisse doesn’t just do the world’s best Californian food: it is quite simply the best restaurant in the world. Superb.

Incidentally, San Francisco has zero out of 50. Not that we’re gloating. (See comments below to explain that strikethrough.)

Photo by Slightlynorth from Flickr

Food

Berkeley stands as the nation’s bulwark of progressive thinking, encouraging the new and diverse. Right? There are many areas where there is some truth to Berkeley’s proud self-image, but one field where the opposite holds sway is architecture. Listen to tales of getting things built — or, more often than not, not built — and you’ll hear a constant litany of planning battles, design compromises, and knock down, drag out fights.

To make some sense of what’s going on, I went to talk to Kava Massih. Massih’s eponymous architectural firm has had a significant and, to my eye, positive impact on Berkeley’s built environment. Since its founding in 1996, Kava Massih Architects has completed works ranging from the Pyramid Brewery, to Epicurious Garden, to T-Rex BBQ, to a number of works on the UC Berkeley campus. But KMA is most visible now for the recently completed Berkeley Bowl West, which garnered an understandable rave review from the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent architecture critic, John King.

I met Massih in his calm office just down the street from Berkeley Bowl West. We wandered over to the Bowl and chatted over sandwiches in the cafe. (Full disclosure: Massih and I are also regular tennis partners.)

IB: Why does it seem so difficult to get good modern buildings in Berkeley?

KM: One of the things I’ve always been surprised at is that progressives see architecture as the opposite. The more liberal you are, the less you see development as a good thing. Yet trying to hang on to the status quo is a conservative trait.

IB: Is the status quo such a problem?

KM: I’m not sure what great urbanity we’re protecting. There are no great parks, no great public spaces, no great boulevards…

IB: Tilden is a great park.

KM: But Tilden isn’t part of the urban fabric. The UC Berkeley campus master plan is by Olmsted [designer of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and New York's Central Park]. That’s great. We haven’t really had that kind of ambition since.

We do have some good houses, but they are scattered around. But you look at someone like Maybeck. In his day he was throwing all the rules out the window. Now he’s the god.

IB: How did you get something as bold and modern as Berkeley Bowl West completed?

KM: It took seven years. Right at the start, everyone said this is going to be great, and it still took seven years. It’s not easy to live through the process here were you’re constantly under attack.

Architecture takes so many resources to get something built and running. It’s so easy to screw it up because there are so many variables that can take it in the wrong direction. Someone says, “Why don’t you make the roof curved?” And you think, why not, just to get it through. It’s really hard to keep going with a design. There are so many pressures.

IB: Is this a particularly Berkeley problem?

KM: No, it’s not just Berkeley. We recently did the DA offices in Martinez. That was for the county of Contra Costa, so we didn’t even need approval by the city. But we presented it anyway. Someone stood up and said, “We only needed a house painter and the DA went off and hired Picasso.”

IB: What do you think about the Downtown Area Plan?

KM: Well, it was very watered down. The issue for me is that the less density we have in Berkeley, the more sprawl there will be elsewhere. You’ll continue to have people commuting from Tracy. But it’s impossible to tell someone we’re putting up a tall building next to your house. That new building may house 400 people, but no one thinks about the good environmental consequences of that.

If Berkeley can’t intensify its use with the environmental credos that are so powerful here, I don’t know where it can happen.

Architecture