The Stone and the Monolith, The Mirror and the Tower, the Sphere and the Garden (2013)

The Ruins of the Sutro Baths lie at the southern tip of the Land's End trail in San Francisco, California. Originally built by mayor Adolph Sutro in the late 19th century as a massive, free bathhouse and pools it is a memory of an architecture which embodied a massive, idealistic spirit of a public altruism all but disappeared from contemporary society. Fragmented, dissolving into the fog, it takes on a spiritual dimension, at once memory and artifact. This project is an addition and a relief, a stream of consciousness, a trail unfinished. Two stones and two monoliths, a mirror, a tower, spheres and gardens embrace the sea.

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A low, linear plan stretches the site taught, giving the existing pathways a pulled tension like a stretched bow. Two concrete forms rise from the ground, complementary angles forming a whole. In one, a library for Sutro and great public works and dreams of architecture. Lit from a deeply penetrating void facing the southern sky, it tracks the sun paths in it's variety throughout the year. In the spring and fall at noon it reaches it's peak and floods the space inside with light. Connecting through a series of stepped gardens, a rotunda and auditoria below, one meanders up the internal steps of the second monolith, encased in a sphere facing the sky above pointed at the moon to the north visible in late afternoon throughout the year.

Stepping past the walls back onto the trail, a tower forms at the highest point of the ruins, it's base framing perfectly the two rocks which seem like pebbles in a Zen garden but are in fact the exact same size as the monoliths just visited. A void above shows several cables, or ropes, dangling down into the central void. Stepping inside, one recognizes finally the slight tingling sounds they had been hearing as they approached the tower. Brass pipes, wind fed by small circular openings on the tower walls, clang together in unison with the crashing waves. Standing here immersed in sound, one looks west to see the twin rocks, and back east to two forms rising from the fog.