Loving our new home base in our new favorite neighborhood! #downtownsanfrancisco The extreme mix of scales is its essence - not just the buildings, but the spaces: Broad plazas & Market street contrast with alleys and nooks teaming with life. That halcyon San Francisco light focused, reflected and raked across textured street walls. Our new perch is the entire seventh floor of the 1907 Alto Building at the corner of Bush & Kearny (pic-3). Come visit! #urbanity #designinspo #urbanarchitecture #citybuilding #architecturelovers #kennerlyarchitecture #midcenturymodern #beauxarts #citybeautiful

In a city littered with famous buildings it’s a delight to stumble upon a great one that isn’t well known. To wit: The Madonna Della Strada Chapel on the Loyola campus: a basket of inventions wrapped in a Prairie-Deco-Moderne mashup. Set at the edge of Lake Michigan, it demurely turns its back on the campus requiring a walk through an arcade to confront the horizon (pic 10), then a U- turn to enter its bold & strange facade. Its bell tower is like a model of a skyscraper 10x its height (pics 2&11). The most intriguing feature is a series of nested limestone arches (3&4) above the alter with slots of glass block that let light ooze into the sanctuary. Alas, the glass was covered due to waterproofing issues and replaced with LED strips (pics 5 shows the effect before the change, pic 6 is from 1944 with the raw concrete interior before they had funds to finish it out). 1938 Andrew Rebori, architect. #chicagoarchitecture #atlasobscura #churcharchitecture #midcenturymodern #artdeco #prairiestyle #andrewrebori #architecturelovers #designinspo

Sunrise over Lake Michigan The Chicago lakefront with man-made cliffs baffles the denizens of the Pacific coast. The last gasp of summer before winter begins its slow, inexorable onslaught…. #chicagourbanism #lakemichigan #chicagoarchitecture #designinspo