Hello there
Thankfully the courses I’m taking are suuuper different from SUTD classes (had enough of that in terms 1-3 THX)! On Friday last week my class headed out to San Francisco for a walking tour around the city for a lesson in urban housing and development. It seriously amazed me how much my prof knew (offhand!) about the neighbourhoods we walked around. It was like he had a history textbook in his brain or something, because he could casually name the dates of a lot of different buildings scattered around – not that we’d know if he was bluffing, though.
We met at the Palace Hotel, which is apparently one of the poshest hotels in the city. It seriously looked like it HAHA it was so grand, and the current building’s been around since 1909. The original Palace Hotel was built in 1875 BUT it burned down in 1906 after an earthquake (ERM hope we are safe).
A lot of the content he covered focused on the buildings in the CBD area of SF being repurposed, i.e. the current tenants were not the original ones. He showed us a lot of really interesting gothic/European structures that housed very modern businesses like banks and retail shops, which really let us appreciate the efforts corporations have put into sustainability (even if it’s just to cut costs in refurbishing/to get government tax returns haha).
SO PRETTY RIGHT ahh I seriously can’t get enough of SF. So lucky Berkeley is just one bus ride away, albeit a pretty long one haha. Looking forward to our next urban walking tour!!
