Designing Modern Childhoods : Landscapes, Buildings and Material Culture (review)

Designing Modern Childhoods sought to offer insight into the ways in which the built environment, both buildings and landscaping, caters to the needs of the young. A conference addressing the needs, ideals, aspirations and troubles of youth was quite at home in an area so inextricably linked to youth protest. The key locations of Moe's and Cody's bookshops were adjacent on Telegraph Avenue and Haight-Ashbury remains a colourful neighbourhood across the water in San Francisco. Arriving into San Francisco airport with a bird's eye view of the Bay Area, the Golden Gate Bridge and parkland, and approaching Berkeley's beautifully landscaped 1868 campus with its 1914 tower modelled on St. Mark's Campanile, Venice, the visiting academic is wryly reminded of David Lodge's portrait of Euphoric State University in Esseph in Changing Places. The Bay Area is endowed with extraordinary beauty of both nature and design such as the Californian Redwood trees (the largest living structures in the world), the Napa Valley wine region, the luridly painted Victorian domestic architecture and the breathtaking bridges - the Golden Gate (1932-7) and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (1936). Berkeley has many notable buildings dating from the 1900s onwards and recent architecture in San Francisco includes work by Mario Botta, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaus and (in progress) Herzog & de Meuron. The architectural heritage of the Bay Area is the setting for the highly recommended William Stout Architectural Books < http://www.stoutbooks.com/cgi-bin/stoutbooks.cgi> near the infamous Transamerica Pyramid.