Product Description

The Berkeley hills offer great natural beauty and sensitive landscape design that skillfully incorporates the architecture into the natural environment. In the early 20th century, architects inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement worked to integrate the hills' large outcrops of rock (known to geologists as Northbrae rhyolite) into the city's development. At once a historical architectural reference and a captivating art book, BERKELEY ROCKS documents the unique harmony between Berkeley's distinctive geography, homes, and local ideals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #885363 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Released on: 2007-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

From the Publisher
* A stunning photographic survey of the geological treasures, architecture, and landscape art of Berkeley, California. * Includes more than 200 full-color photos, plus archival photographs from the early 1900s. * Insightful narrative discusses the design philosophy and impact of Charles Keeler, landscape designer Mark Daniels, and legendary architects Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard. * Includes information on the original landscape as well as the work of the developers, engineers, architects, and early homebuilders who turned this beautiful natural landscape into a residential haven.

About the Author
JONATHAN CHESTER is a professional photographer and author of 13 books. Trained as a geographer in Australia, he has worked as an environmental consultant and had a brief stint as a rock-climbing guide. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Customer Reviews

Great Rocks!
For much of my life I held hope to be able to own a home in
Berkeley with one of those great rocks filling the front of the lot and obscuring part of the house. It never happened, so finding this excellent book fulfilled part of my wish. The photography really captures the feeling of being near the geologic history of the area and there is a
great source of geologic detail in the text, for anyone who
wants to know why those rocks are there. Excellent photograpy and very informative text.

Berkeley's Blessed Boulders, or, Zen and the Art of Franciscan Rock Maintenance
Not surprisingly, it took an Australian trained geographer/rock climber to point out the obvious beauty and value of East Bay geology in the landscape design for private homes and parks in this wonderful pictorial work.
If you think rock is something only the landscape architect has to design around, see the photos of how some banded rhyolite boulders look in a billiard room, or examine a mass of in situ chert protruding through a homeowner's bathroom wall (the geologist's 'dream' WC). Berkeley loves its rocks. While Chester never gets into it directly, this region's desire to protect rocks and outcrops is geoconservation in practice. For more on that, see my review of GEODIVERSITY.

Chester includes a Berkeley Area map to locate these local geologic treasures, and a decent map of the bedrock geology of the Berkeley Hills on page 14. My only complaints would be 1) the title--the word 'nature' should be changed to 'geology', and 2) references to geologic works mentioned in chapter one are not included in the recommended reading section.

Bought a second copy
We liked this enough that we bought a copy as a present for another Berkeley resident. This is a fun book to look through.