130 Bush Street

One of my favorite books in my small library is 130 Bush Street. It traces the development of a building on Bush Street and the adjacent structures in downtown San Francisco from the early 1900’s to the present.

What’s great about the book is that it is entirely made up of hand-rendered illustrations of the buildings. The book was written by L.G. Segedin, a professional architectural illustrator. There are over 60 pen & ink drawings in the book, half of which were painted by the author. It’s easy to see that this book was a labor of love.

A feature of the book that helped suck me in was that every page with a color illustration is preceded by a translucent vellum page with the same illustration printed on it in a grayscale line. When you first view this page, the muted colors of the next page that show through create a nice overall effect. Turn over the vellum page, and then you see the fully colored drawings in all its glory.

I’ve always liked the "controlled-squiggle" style of architectural drawings. On one hand it can look like an incredibly elaborate sketch, but you know that a lot of work went in to construction the perspectives or tracing the photos. While computers can do wondrous things with architectural illustration, it’s a little sad to see the hand-generated drawings slowly become a relic of the past.

130 Bush Street is out of print, but it can be obtained through some specialty bookstores. It’s a nice piece of work for people who are interested in San Francisco history or architectural illustration.