Design is like a time capsule. It captures the aspirations of the moment during which it was made. I’m obsessed with historic design because it tells a visual story of our human experience.
If you know what to look for, you can see the story of San Francisco in its homes. In the earliest styles, you can see the growth of the city from a scrubby frontier settlement to a cosmopolitan city. Every era had its own look. Turn-of-the-century aesthetics show SF’s struggle with the advancements and losses of industrialization. During the last century, change happened crazy-fast. And modernist design reflects technological and social upheavals that transformed the city’s cultural and physical landscape.