Donald And Helen Olsen House
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Donald And Helen Olsen House
The Donald and Helen Olsen House, in Berkeley, California, was built in 1954. (26 pages, with multiple photos) It is a Modernist, International-style house designed by architect Donald Olsen. Olsen is a native of Minnesota who studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard and established an architecture practice in Berkeley in 1953. The house is situated on a slope in the North Berkeley Hills near John Hinkel Park. The structure's main floor was built above ground level to maximize the site's views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. However, the view has been obscured over the years by the growth of mature trees on the property. The National Park Service described the house's style as follows: "The house's design is specifically the International style popularized in Europe by architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French ...
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Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emeryville to the south and the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington to the north. Its eastern border with Contra Costa County generally follows the ridge of the Berkeley Hills. The 2020 census recorded a population of 124,321. Berkeley is home to the oldest campus in the University of California System, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed and operated by the university. It also has the Graduate Theological Union, one of the largest religious studies institutions in the world. Berkeley is considered one of the most socially progressive cities in the United States. History Indigenous history The site of today's City of Berkeley was the territo ...
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Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the strait connecting San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The structure links the U.S. city of San Francisco, California—the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula—to Marin County, carrying both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1 across the strait. It also carries pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and is designated as part of U.S. Bicycle Route 95. Being declared one of the Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the bridge is one of the most internationally recognized symbols of San Francisco and California. It was initially designed by engineer Joseph Strauss in 1917. The bridge was named for the Golden Gate strait, the channel that it spans. The Frommer's travel guide describes the Golden Gate Bridge as "possibly the most beautiful, certainly the most photographed, bridge in the world." At the time of its opening in 1937, it was both the longe ...
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Houses In Alameda County, California
A house is a single-unit residential building. It may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.Schoenauer, Norbert (2000). ''6,000 Years of Housing'' (rev. ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company). Houses use a range of different roofing systems to keep precipitation such as rain from getting into the dwelling space. Houses may have doors or locks to secure the dwelling space and protect its inhabitants and contents from burglars or other trespassers. Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain one or more bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A house may have a separate dining room, or the eating area may be integrated into another room. Some large houses in North America have a recreation room. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic anim ...
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Houses On The National Register Of Historic Places In California
A house is a single-unit residential building. It may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.Schoenauer, Norbert (2000). ''6,000 Years of Housing'' (rev. ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company). Houses use a range of different roofing systems to keep precipitation such as rain from getting into the dwelling space. Houses may have doors or locks to secure the dwelling space and protect its inhabitants and contents from burglars or other trespassers. Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain one or more bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A house may have a separate dining room, or the eating area may be integrated into another room. Some large houses in North America have a recreation room. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as ...
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National Register Of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic value". A property listed in the National Register, or located within a National Register Historic District, may qualify for tax incentives derived from the total value of expenses incurred in preserving the property. The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 established the National Register and the process for adding properties to it. Of the more than one and a half million properties on the National Register, 95,000 are listed individually. The remainder are contributing resources within historic districts. For most of its history, the National Register has been administered by the National Park Service (NPS), an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior. Its goals are to help property owners and inte ...
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Claire Falkenstein
Claire Falkenstein (; July 22, 1908 – October 23, 1997) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, jewelry designer, and teacher, most renowned for her often large-scale abstract metal and glass public sculptures. Falkenstein was one of America's most experimental and productive 20th-century artists. Falkenstein relentlessly explored media, techniques, and processes with uncommon daring and intellectual rigor. Though she was respected among the burgeoning post–World War II art scene in Europe and the United States, her disregard for the commodification of art coupled with her peripatetic movement from one art metropolis to another made her an elusive figure. Falkenstein first worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, then in Paris and New York, and finally in Los Angeles. She was involved with art groups as radical as the Gutai Group in Japan and Un Art Autre in Paris and secured a lasting position in the vanguard, which she held until her death in 1997. An interest in Eins ...
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Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America. Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the (CIAM). Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, and contributed specific designs for several buildings there, especially the government buildings. On 17 July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Co ...
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Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modernist art, design and architecture. After Nazism's rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. He accepted the position to head the architecture school at what is today the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Mies sought to establish his own particular architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. The style he created made a statement with its extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern ...
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San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay is a large tidal estuary in the U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the big cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. San Francisco Bay drains water from approximately 40 percent of California. Water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and from the Sierra Nevada mountains, flow into Suisun Bay, which then travels through the Carquinez Strait to meet with the Napa River at the entrance to San Pablo Bay, which connects at its south end to San Francisco Bay. It then connects to the Pacific Ocean via the Golden Gate strait. However, this entire group of interconnected bays is often called the ''San Francisco Bay''. The bay was designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on February 2, 2017. Size The bay covers somewhere between , depending on which sub-bays (such as San Pablo Bay), estuaries, wetlands, and so on are included in the measurement. The main part of the bay meas ...
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Donald Olsen
Donald Olsen (July 23, 1919 - March 21, 2015) was an important mid-20th-century Bay Area architect. He was born in Minnesota. He studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard and established an architecture practice in Berkeley in 1953. In 1954, he designed Olsen House (known as Donald and Helen Olsen House) in the International Style in Berkeley, California. Olsen was a member of the UC Berkeley School of Architecture faculty, which became the Department of Architecture when the College of Environmental Design was founded in 1959. Along with Vernon DeMars and Joseph Esherick, he designed Wurster Hall The College of Environmental Design, also known as the Berkeley CED, or simply CED, is one of fourteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. The school is located in Bauer Wurster Hall on the southeast corner of the mai ..., which opened in 1964. References Further reading Landmarks Commission Embraces Modernism {{DEFAULTSORT:Olsen, Donald American ...
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John Hinkel Park
John Hinkel Park is an urban park located in the North Berkeley, Berkeley, California, North Berkeley neighborhood of Berkeley, California, U.S.. It has been listed by the city as a Berkeley Landmark since April 2, 2001, and it contains a historical plaque since 2003. History In 1919, Ada and John Hinkel donated of hillside land to the city of Berkeley, in dedication to the Boy Scouts of America's work during World War I. John Gregg, a local professor in landscaping, had helped with the design of the park before it was donated to the city. The amphitheater was built in 1934 and designed by Vernon Dean and funded by the Civil Works Administration. The amphitheater was used in the 1940s for community gatherings, music, and dance productions. It was also the performance space for the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival from 1971 until 1991. The park also contains picnic tables and a playground. It once contained a redwood clubhouse (1918–2015), which was burned down in a fire. The ...
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Berkeley Hills
The Berkeley Hills are a range of the Pacific Coast Ranges that overlook the northeast side of the valley that encompasses San Francisco Bay. They were previously called the "Contra Costa Range/Hills" (from the original Spanish ''Sierra de la Contra Costa''), but with the establishment of Berkeley and the University of California, the current usage was applied by geographers and gazetteers. Geology The Berkeley Hills are bounded by the major Hayward Fault along their western base, and the minor Wildcat fault on their eastern side. The highest peaks are Grizzly Peak (elevation 1,754 feet/535 m) and Round Top (elevation 1,761 feet/537 m), an extinct volcano, and William Rust Summit 1,004 feet (306 m). Vollmer Peak (elevation 1,905 feet/581 m), although commonly thought to be part of the Berkeley Hills, is actually located on the adjacent San Pablo Ridge near the point where it meets the Berkeley Hills at the head of Wildcat Canyon. Vollmer Peak was named in honor of the ...
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