Photo by Michele, whose hands are reflected in the heart.
I grew up saying “Merry Christmas,” even though nobody in our family was an actual practicing Christian, and it is still my most comfortable greeting for this time of year. For us, for me, anyway, Christmas is a secular holiday to celebrate the return of the Light, the return of the promise of renewal that, first, the New Year, then Spring, which is now just around the corner – Coastal California, at least – gives us.
If, however, you would prefer Happy Bodhi Day, Happy Hanukkah, or Happy Yalda Night, then “Happy Bodhi Day”, “Happy Hanukkah”, or “Happy Yalda Night”. If you prefer Happy Holidays, then “Happy Holidays”.
The river forms a green gauze belt, the mountains are like jade hairpins. (漓江像一条绿色的丝带，山峰似一根根玉簪) Han Yu, written sometime between 768 and 824 (when it wasn’t as smoggy).
Yangshoe has been a tourist destination, of sorts, for a thousand years. Now – well, in 2009, really – the town was full of tourists. Mostly Chinese tourists, many of them staying at big, expensive-looking hotels with BMW X5s and Mercedes in front, and the handsomest store in town is a wedding arranger.
On our second day, we wandered out of Yangshou into a rural landscape. Still, walking around the farming area by Yangshuo, everything seemed familiar. The sights, the smells, the quiet, the slow pace of the people, the water buffalo. At first, I thought my mind was making it feel familiar so I would feel safe, then I realized Michele and I have been walking through these areas for as long as we’ve been married.
But China is very different. In other countries we’ve been to, the children would come up and ask for pens or candy; in China, they take pictures of us on their cell phones. We bought water at a small store, and the salesgirl – and the salespeople are almost always young girls, that hasn’t changed – scanned the bottles!
We chatted with the only tourist we saw all day, a White woman from South Africa, who we saw on the trail, which in China, is a paved road! – and she said “It’s like China skipped a stage”. Here, in the good ol’ USA, we are told almost daily how poor China is, and it is, compared to us, but not compared to what it was. China’s transformation is a story of skipping a stage, as the woman on the trail observed. It began in 1978 with the shift from a centralized planned economy to a decentralized market economy. This series of moves created a manufacturing powerhouse, integrating China into the global economy and pulling over 800 million people out of poverty. China has become a vast, modern economy, now evolving toward high-tech innovation.
The country’s economic muscle is undeniable, but the change has also brought complexity. It’s no longer just the world’s factory; it’s now a global player in tech and value-added industries. Yes, our internal propaganda still talks about how poor China is, but compared to its past, it’s a radically different, modernized place, in the cities, at least. Traveling through China’s cities is fascinating, but the countryside is probably not very different today from what it was in, say, 1975, or from Korea in the 60s, or rural Guatemala, or Morocco. In the countryside, the rapid ascent – from quiet, familiar rural scenes to an undeniable technological leader – is not as noticeable.
The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. Robert A. M. Stern
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness. Frank GehryThe
A couple of days ago, I got a text from Beth Stelluto, saying, “So sorry to read that one of your architectural heroes died. 96wow! Love his creativity.” I texted back, “And Robert A. M. Stern died two weeks ago.” The exchange started me thinking about Stern and Gehry and how much they, in particular, and architecture in general have enriched my life, which led me into the infinite rabbit hole of the World Wide Web and the realization of how much of their work I missed and how much they have formed our world.
To start at the end, the world of architecture, all of us really, lost two of our most influential architects recently: Robert A. M. Stern, who died on November 27, 2025, at 86, and Frank Gehry, who died on December 5, 2025, at 96. Each began their careers at the high-water mark of Mid-Century Modernism, and each reacted in entirely different ways to the great majority of their fellow architects. They ostensibly ended up occupying opposite ends of the design spectrum – one, Stern, almost a classical architect until you look closely, and the other, Gehry, pushing Mid-Century Modernism into sculpture – were both ultimately committed to the same thing: making buildings that absolutely demanded to be seen, discussed, and remembered, enriching our world. For almost diametrically different reasons, they are two of my favorite architects.
Robert A. M. Stern became the master of pre-Mid-Century Modern (for the lack of a better definition). He was born in Brooklyn in 1939 and built his architectural practice on the idea that buildings should be contextual and honor the site’s longer cultural lineage. Stern wasn’t a nostalgic purist, but, in his own way, a rebel who asserted that elegance and history were vital components of contemporary urban life. His aesthetic was rooted in echoes of the past and a desire to fit in, as seen in his limestone-clad, 550-foot-high residential tower at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan (on the far left, below).
Except that he never changed his name, Robert A. M. Stern reminds me a lot of Ralph Lauren (and, believe me, that’s a compliment). Both were outsiders who took the establishment’s worn-out accoutrements and revitalised them; in other words, both got rich catering to the bourgeoisie ( bourgeoisie in the Marxist context of the capitalist class who own most of society’s wealth and means of production as opposed to the proletariat). I went to a lecture at, I think, an AIA conference about thirty years ago when Stern was the featured speaker. One of the shocking things he said was that more than fifty percent of his commissions had no budget for either architecture or construction.
Frank Gehry, born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, was a revolutionary who spent years designing modest shopping centers, designed and built on budget, before his creative explosion. It wasn’t until the transformative remodeling of his own Santa Monica home, using a chain-link fence and corrugated metal, that he began to show his talent. He went on to become one of the most influential architects of our time, forever reshaping skylines with his striking, sculptural works, such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and 8 Spruce Street in Manhattan.
Looking at these two buildings in New York, the classic facade of the Stern condo, and the rippling curves of the Gehry apartment, these two titans of architecture, for all their differences, represented the full, rich spectrum of American architecture. Robert A. M. Stern and Frank Gehry built different worlds, one of dignified grace echoing the past and the other pushing design freedom, both leaving behind a profound and lasting legacy. We’ll miss them.
Finally, here are a couple of their building that I don’t think need architectural identification.
Back in 2009, Michele and I flew from Guangzhou, China, to Guilin, China, and then traveled by car to Yangshou. Guangzhou and the surrounding cities, like Hong Kong, make up the largest metropolitan area in the world with about 70 million people. It is modern and cosmopolitan. The airport was surreal: huge, gorgeous, clean, busy; all under one huge, vaulted space. The flight was about an hour: takeoff, a long level-off period, long enough to pass out some sort of nut thing, and then landing. The Guilin airport was back to another, older China. Sort of like what I imagine the Bakersfield airport to be like.
Our hotel had arranged to pick us up at the airport, and we had an hour drive on the new toll road to Yangshou. The scenes – without the power poles – on the drive were classic Chinese watercolors (on steroids).
The very smoggy, extraordinary landscape felt ancient. For millions of years, it has seen change come and go, the great majority of that time before we even existed as a species. Four hundred million years ago, this area was a huge inland sea. For fifty million years or so, shelled sea creatures lived and died in this sea, sinking to the bottom, forming an almost 10,000-foot-deep hard layer of limestone. About 250 to 200 million years ago, as the whole mess was moving north across the equator, the Yangtze Plate bumped into the North China Plate, raising this area, drying out the lake, and turning the new landscape into dry land.
Later, much later, from about 40 million years ago to today, the Indian Plate, at the end of its wander from somewhere near South Africa, plowed into the Eurasian Plate, creating the Himalayas. The ripple effect from this event, almost 2,000 miles away, pushed this region up even further, to be shaped by weathering and erosion driven by heavy monsoon rains.
For most of the recorded history of China – of the world, really – this area was only known from legends and paintings. It was always too remote, across too many rivers, through too much not-friendly territory for many people to make the journey. But now Yangshou is only two hours away, by plane and toll road, from a megacity of 70 million souls. It was adjusting rapidly.
My first business partner was Sam Berland, and he had two pet peeves: people who said “Consences of opinion” because consences already includes opinion, and people who said “not to change the subject” and then changed the subject of the conversation. I used to argue with him on the use of the second peeve. And now, maybe forty years later, I think he might have been right. In my defense, when Sam and I owned bas in the 1970s, Sam liked to hold a weekly staff meeting. Like a lot of City Council meetings I’ve sat through, the staff meetings would often get bogged down by unimportant details to avoid the real problems. I would try to change the subject, not to change the subject, per se, from what seemed unimportant to me, but to what I considered actually important.
In this case, I want to change the subject away from what I think are the important issues of our time to something much less important, a trip to China 16 years ago. Issues like Ukraine is locked in a war of attrition with Russia (that Ukraine is either winning or losing, depending on where we get our information and what that particular commentator originally predicted). Issues like Trump running amok, or Trump and Epstein having sex with young children, or even whether Taylor Swift is really writing a screenplay inspired by her relationship with Travis Kelce, are all more important than an old trip to China.
Well, maybe not more important to me, but more reported on. I want to re-post on Michele and my trip to China twenty-six years ago for three reasons. When I first started this blog, I was using a platform called Typepad, which is now defunct, and I read that everything I blogged will soon be permanently deleted (shortly after I started blogging, at Michele’s prompting, I switched to WordPress as my platform, so most of this blog will stay around). When we went to China, we were twenty-six years younger, and much of that trip was to areas that would be much harder, if not impossible, for me to do today. Lastly, I process my photographs with Adobe Lightroom, which has vastly improved over the last twenty-six years, and I want to reprocess the pictures taken in China in 2009, when it was incredibly smoggy, making the photographs flat and grey.
In 2009, we flew into Hong Kong with no reservations except for a hotel reservation for the first night and tickets to fly out of Shanghai three weeks later (which, even then, was easier than it sounds because of the internet). I’m going to skip repeating Hong Kong and Shanghai because they are cities and, while very different than San Francisco or New York, or Paris, for that matter, are still very familiar with streets bordered by sidewalks and lots of buildings with stores on the ground level. The two things on our agenda were the karst formations around Guilin and the Li River and the Zhangjiajie area’s canyons, which we had read were similar to Zion National Park.
This photographic remembrance of our trip to those areas starts somewhere between Guilin and Yangshou.
