Recent Personal Work
San Francisco, January 2025
San Francisco, January 2025
San Francisco, January 2025
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March 2025
Circuit Breakers- Some Thoughts
At 22nd and Illinois St, Dogpatch San Francisco, there is a city power plant across from my workplace. One summer afternoon I spent hours looking at this intersection and the shapes within. The shape that intrigued me the most, I learned to be the substation circuit breaker. Many of my sketchbook pages have accompanying notes, and this is a selected one.
I see phone and power lines overhead- views and arteries of urbanity, but who decided that the majority of the wires will be buried under the cement? I think about tree roots, and their spread, as ancient precursors to the electrical infrastructure overhead. To see this tree for its root system is analogous to seeing the electricity we generate and consume for the overhead lines in our environment. To see the forest (as grid) for the trees (as power lines) is to appreciate the lines as a series of material artifacts, structures with a technological function, social meaning, and aesthetic (form) that is predicated by function.
The roots underground and lines overhead are necessary links in their respective systems, yet “tree” and “electricity” often attract warmer visions and more generous associations. Similarly, the local electric system, a node of which radiates from the substation attached to the lattice steel tower on the hill, almost instantaneously transfer electrons to millions of lights and machines.
Both root systems and wire systems extend from tree trunks and wooden arms, yet unlike the organic shoots that burrow beneath this living specimen, the engineered, metallic threads overhead must hide in plain sight, and when such structures fail to hide, when the lines on the horizon do poke into attention, they are often loathed.
Power lines are actors, ones that convey a certain agency. The lines, and the values attached to them, create place as well as intersect landscape.
In drawing these structures and thinking about why I feel so drawn to draw these structures, I’ve come to understand them as urban analogues to natural forms: power lines as branches, underground cables as roots. Infrastrucutre is a part of our material culture—designed, placed, and lived with. Like trees, these systems are alive with energy. And like roots, their true extent often lies hidden from view.