Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption

Product Description 
Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland’s built environment.\nOften overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. 
Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city’s postwar struggles.\nToward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland’s buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots. 
 Review \n“Schwarzer’s biography of Oakland is a big book, an important book, a powerful book and an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to reform the city by any means necessary.”\n― 
CounterPunch\n"Noteworthy for several reasons, but one is its timeliness. Though 
Hella Town tells a familiar story — Oakland’s rise as an industrial hub, its fall to the failings of racism, its still-troubled resurgence — the lens through which it makes sense of that story provides insights about how cities come to be (and why they fail) that prove eerily relevant to those writing Oakland’s next act right now. . . . All who want Oakland’s story to read, ultimately, as something other than tragic — more a celebration of all that makes this place uniquely great — should be aware of what building big things (or not building them) can do. Among other things, 
Hella Town is an excellent education to that end." 
 ― 
San Francisco Chronicle\n"A sparkling new history filled with lessons for our present." 
 ― 
SF Weekly 
 From the Back Cover 
"Mitchell Schwarzer provides an engaging and comprehensive history of Oakland’s built environment. Meticulously researched, 
Hella Town examines the forces that shaped the city’s landscape and exposes the structural racism that created and maintained the societal inequities that persist today. The book is a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand this fascinating city."—Libby Schaaf, Mayor of Oakland\n" 
Hella Town ambitiously and thoughtfully tells Oakland’s history from its cycles of expansion and industrialization to its current landscape of technology startups and gentrifying neighborhoods alongside trenchant poverty and homelessness. It is a must-read for those who want to understand how American cities get built and unbuilt."—Mabel O. Wilson, Professor, Columbia University\n"An absolutely first-rate work that fills a huge gap in our history. While Silicon Valley rules the internet, San Francisco is world-renowned, and Berkeley symbolizes American radicalism, Oakland is regularly overlooked. This great city deserves its day in the sun for being, again and again, the most dynamic, fascinating, and tragic part of the Bay Area."—Richard Walker, author of 
Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area\n"Mitchell Schwarzer’s 
Hella Town reads like a virtual roadmap through the complex web of discriminatory practices, policy, shortsightedness and greed that got us into the dual housing and identity crises we find ourselves in today. Will the people and the spirit that made the Bay, the Bay, be driven out along the fault lines of inequity, or will the la

History

Schwarzer, Mitchell

Americas

University of California Press

Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland's built environment. &nbsp; Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city's postwar struggles. &nbsp; Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland's buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.

This book presents for the first time in English an overview of the theoretical debates on architecture in nineteenth-century Austria and Germany. Drawing on a vast number of writings by architects, historians, philosophers and critics, Mitchell Schwarzer offers an exhaustive history of the principal debates on style, industry, nationalism, iron technology, and artistic expression, all of which inform modern architecture. He argues that the history of architecture in the modern era cannot be explained according to the simple evolution or progression of structural, functional, or artistic forces. Rather, he establishes modernity as a series of debates on the parameters of architectural knowledge itself and the identity of the architectural profession in a rapidly industrialising world. Describing theory through its conflicts and unresolved questions, Schwarzer uncovers the complex nature of modern pluralism, one that is still relevant in the late twentieth century.

German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Cambridge University Press

An internationally renowned architect and lecturer, Daniel Libeskind is one of the world’s most influential figures in architecture. Best-known for his first project, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Libeskind’s work resonates with Jewish history, as is reflected in projects such as the Felix Nussbaum Haus (Germany) and the Danish Jewish Museum (Copenhagen). His innovative design for the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco became his first commission in North America, and the spectacular building is now completed. With breathtaking photography, insightful essays, and an illuminating text by the architect, this volume is the first to examine Libeskind’s Jewish museums and to feature the architect’s vibrant new building in California.

Daniel Libeskind and The Contemporary Jewish Museum: New Jewish Architecture from Berlin to San Francisco

Libeskind, Daniel

Wolf, Connie

Young, James E.

Rizzoli

the de Young in the 21st century: a museum by Herzog & de Meuron

Betsky, Aaron

Ketchum, Diana

with Corbett, Michael R.

Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

Published on the occasion of the U.S. premiere of Jeremy Blake's new Winchester trilogy, this lush and strikingly designed catalogue presents three of the artist's short films: Winchester, 1906 and Century 21--inspired by the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The Winchester mansion was built over the course of nearly 20 years by Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Rifles fortune, who, after the deaths of her daughter and husband, became fascinated with spiritualism and convinced that she was cursed by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester firearms. According to her spiritual advisors, the noise of ongoing construction would help ward off evil ghosts, so she began building what would become a 160-room Victorian, full of bizarre architectural features, which was still unfinished when she died in 1922. Winchester presents a turning point in Blake's work, as the films include not only his well-known digital compositions, but also ink drawings and recognizable footage of the Winchester mansion and its environs. Overlaid, juxtaposed and morphing in and out of one another, these elements combine in an intensely expressionistic and non-narrative manner, evoking Winchester's trouble mind as she tried to rebuild her home. The films call into question traditional cinematic modes of storytelling: cultural mythologies surrounding guns; violence and the American West; and the relationship between physical and simulated reality in the digital age.

Jeremy Blake: Winchester

Weil, Benjamin

Individual Artists

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

A selective guide to the best-designed buildings, interiors, and public spaces in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Architecture + Design SF

Reference

Catalogs & Directories

Understanding Business

The successor to the popular guide book, Architecture and Design: SF (1998), this traveler's companion covers the best in classic and contemporary architecture throughout the Bay Area. The first part of the book surveys the area's architectural history, dating from California's beginnings to the present. The rest of the book is divided into regional chapters, which begin with color maps marked with architectural points of interest. Brief entries on each landmark include summary descriptions of the project, information on the architect, date of construction, and address. Many entries include color photos, some small and some up to a full page in size. The flexible binding allows the book to lay flat when open, and a placemarker ribbon sewn into the binding is icing on the cake. The readership for the book includes architects, students, visitors to the area, and general readers interested in modern architecture. Schwarzer is professor of art and architectural history at California College of the Arts. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

San Francisco: Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: History and Guide

William Stout Publishers

Guide map to Modernist architecture across San Francisco and the Bay Area. This two-sided folded map with original photography by Jason Woods is edited by Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor at California College of the Arts, and author of numerous books about architecture. The guide features over fifty influential examples of Modernist and Brutalist architecture from Berkeley and Oakland to Palo Alto and San Mateo. Details for individual buildings are supported by an introduction to Modernism in the Bay Area by Schwarzer. Architects featured include Vernon de Mars, Beverley Thorne, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Pier Luigi Nervi, Mario Ciampi, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo and many others.

Modernist San Francisco Map: Guide to Modernist Architecture in Bay Area (Blue Crow Media Architecture Maps)

Atlases & Maps

Blue Crow Media

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Books by Schwarzer, Mitchell