CALI-FORN-I-A (Palm Springs & Joshua Tree)

We did not take any other big "day trips" and stayed closer to home-base in Palm Springs.   

Of course - we spent time at the pool.  The kids liked the water slide that was there! 

Mercer went to the pool without us a couple of times.  Isabella went with either Todd or myself -- or both.

The kids & Todd wanted to go back to the pool on the 4th of July instead of going out to the "street fest" in downtown Palm Springs with me / catch any fireworks.  

That's OK.  I'll be honest - it was HOT.... it was 100 degrees even after the sun went down. I bought a bottle of water that was frozen (they sell them that way!) and it had mostly melted while I was walking around looking at vendors booths!

There is a lot of artwork scattered throughout the downtown too.  I am glad I did my thing. 

This sculpture was cool -- from the front you could see through the different sheets of metal / couldn't tell what the sculpture was until you walked around to the side.

It was a non-traditional 4th for sure!

The next day, Todd and I went to the Architecture & Design Center in downtown Palm Springs.   They had an architecture museum!  what?!  Of course we'd check it out!

(notice the "screen" at the exterior of this building -- that will be mentioned later!)

There is an architect who was featured there that we'd heard of in college - Albert Frey.

He came to America by way of working with a famous French architect for a short time: Le Corbusier.  He used that stint + his talents to get a job in New York. 

His career in the states launched with the design of a "home of the future" that got a lot of attention and praise.  A prototype was built, but we learned that no others were ever built on a homeowner's site.

Framed renderings of "Aluminaire"

Since it did not take off like it was expected, it ended up on a college campus in New York... and eventually ended up - reconstructed - in Palm Springs as a part of the art museum complex.

Here it is in place now as a part of the Palm Springs museum collection.

The sheet metal cladding is really wavy / doesn't look good. (Todd called it "oil-canning")

But this interior was interesting -- from what you can see from down below. 

We went and explored one of his other buildings -- originally a gas station, now a welcome center for the city of Palm Springs. 

(Elevations)

Here are the drawings as well as the actual building that we visited....  

(Floor Plan / Details)

The drawings at the museum were really hard to photograph -- behind glass & reflect the lights / so unfortunately are not straight-on images

(Rendering)

At different times while we were walking around the outside of the building / taking photos that both of our cell phones overheated & shut down !!! 

There is a large overhang - which is really necessary in the desert!!

It was over 110 degrees and felt wonderful to step inside the visitor's center!!

(professional photos at the museum of the gas station)

This is his 2nd house he built for himself -- building the house around a rock.  It goes right through / serves as the wall for the bedroom and the dining room.   Pretty cool -- except it would bring in a lot of heat!!

This is a rendering of the house.  We drove by it (found it on the architecture map we purchased)... but it was behind a gate. 

(rendering)

Here's a photo from a website about Palm Springs architecture that is 1000x better than we could get -- even if we could climb over the gated wall!

There is an "online" tour of the Frey house #2: https://visitpalmsprings.com/tour-frey-house-ii/

(construction documents for the house with the rock through it) 

(floor plan)

(elevations)

To our surprise, there were a lot of people coming through the museum while we were there -- most were international visitors from what we could tell.  We were impressed that the had a generous sized staff for this small museum & appreciated that they had a museum for architecture!! 

We went through the exhibit on our own, but then a guy told us he was going to do a tour later in the day & could tell us some of the highlights of his talking points.  

We said OK... but the guy probably did his normal hour-long tour!)  It cut into our time to drive around to look at the architecture around town, but we enjoyed his info as he had a lot of insight to the exhibit that we didn't notice and/or didn't take the time to read on all of the signs.  

The Frey exhibit runs through mid-August:

https://www.psmuseum.org/art/exhibitions/albert-frey-inventive-modernist

The most famous architect that has a house in Palm Springs: Richard Neutra. 

(He designed this desert house for Kauffman... the same Kauffman that had Frank Lloyd Wright design Falling Water). 

But - he wanted someone other than FLW to design this house. 

And - FINALLY - the "other" famous architecture in Palm Springs: generally called "Desert Modern" architecture.

They have a lot of Mid-Century Modern houses as do many cities, but they have a uniqueness to them:  bigger overhangs, the windows are generally high (under the eaves)... and there are screens to help block the direct sunlight.  

(many buildings / houses / screen walls also add "texture" by offsetting a brick or concrete block out from the face of the building to create decoration / shadow as the sun is high in the sky. 

According to this site: https://www.visitgreaterpalmsprings.com/things-to-do/tours/midcentury-modern-tour/   "Desert Modernism" has 4 distinct characters 

This 1st picture is the epitome of the Desert MCM houses!  The rest were just interesting.

1 - Cantilevers / large roof overhangs

2 - Clerestory Windows (the windows up high under the roof instead of down low)

3 - Brise Soliel (translated from french meaning "sun-breaker"  -- it's the screens that are often in front of windows - like at the museum in the image above

4 - Shadow block walls

(Mid-Century Modern around the country has clean lines / floor-to-ceiling windows / generally asymmetrical / low-sloped angled roof / open floor plan)

Here are some images from a Visit Palm Springs website. 

("classic" architectural rendering)

shadow block wall

and - this guy - he developed a neighborhood full of these houses (2000 of them!) architect William Krisel

They appreciate the built environment there and it's heavily publicized even in the visitor's center.... they have an App for your phone you can download!  just wow.  

And - finally - in front of the architecture museum, they have their own "walk of fame:  

(I've never seen that in any other city!)

I'm sure the kids were OK with staying in the hotel all much of the day while we got our architecture fix!   They definitely did NOT want to see all of this, but we're glad we got to!

So - the whole time we're in Palm Springs, we were noticing how DIFFERENT the palm trees are that we're used to (in Florida)... how "useless" they are in terms of creating any shade.  They're like 50+ feet tall and have a TINY plume of leaves on top.  There's really no shadow.

There are also palms that Isabella kept calling "those without a haircut" and "those with a haircut"  We saw so much palm tree debris on the ground too... like the big parts of it fall off!  eek.

That evening was our last hoorah in California:  visiting Joshua Tree national park.

So... when planning this trip in the desert... in the summer.... during a heat wave.... it really restricted / limited some of our exploration!   No kidding, there were signs throughout the park that say "DO NOT DIE TODAY"  

gulp!

Joshua Tree is at the confluence of 2 deserts:  the low Colorado desert and the high Mojave desert.  

According to their website, JT is almost 800,000 acres and provides habitat for 813 higher plant species, 46 reptile species, 57 mammal species, and over 250 bird species. 

The federal register lists one park reptile, the desert tortoise, as threatened and one park plant species, the triple-ribbed milk vetch, as endangered, and one plant species, Parish′s daisy as threatened. In addition there are 49 plant species of special concern being protected within the park.

Joshua Tree has one paleontological area and potentially eight more. The park protects over 700 archeological sites, 88 historic structures, 19 cultural landscapes, and houses 230,300 items in its museum collection.

The park was named after a yucca plant coined by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Mojave Desert in the mid-19th century. The tree's unique shape reminded them of a Biblical story in which Joshua reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer.)

It IS a really unique place!  We've never seen anything like it!

We went for a hike along the Hidden Valley trail where we watched the sun set as we were hiking.

I wish we could have also been at the Cholla Cactus garden trail during sunset (supposedly the cactus glow as the sun passes through them), but we couldn't be at both places, so - we'll have to go back sometime.... maybe NOT during the summer though!

Here is a photo dump between Todd & my shots:

Mercer grabbed Isabella's sun glasses.  After wearing them, he realized that everything looked purple through them.

He started tinkering around with shooting through the glasses lenses.  It was a pretty cool effect!

This was our most photographed tree!  

(but all the trees looked cool / unique!)

I was told (by my mom) to get in more of the photos.  Selfie?! 

I was not really "feeling it" though... Todd got additional shots.  At one point, I had to go back to the car with Isabella for the film for her camera.  And - I tripped / fell (I tripped over a rock in the path while I was too busy looking at the scenery around me instead of at the ground!).  My hurt shoulder (which was temporarily dislocated again this summer) was injured a bit in the fall + I skinned up a knee and a hand (the ground was made of up tiny rocks -- smaller than a pea / bigger than grains of sand.... and they hurt when stuck to your skin!  :/   )  Thankfully, that was our only "incident" on the trip.  

After the sun set, we picnicked at a table near where we parked. 

Really the only way to get definition (below) is from light pollution, sadly.
 

We chose this spot because it was one that was identified as one of the best for star-gazing. 

We tried to coax the kids into staying longer and longer and longer after the sun set so it could get darker and darker and darker. 

(errr... annoying car headlights as people were filing in to also come to this spot!)  
 

this photo - someone was shining a giant light onto this mountain... but the photo would not come out if they didn't. It still may be too hard to see in these smaller photos on the blog, though. 

But - it was pretty amazing at how many stars you could see.  Everyone (but me) saw 1 or 2 shooting stars.  I've seen them before.... I'm just glad the kids got to see them! 

(this is an enlarged / zoomed in photo!  did Todd catch a photo of Mars?  the red dot?!

And the Milky Way was faint, but we could see it.  - not to photograph it so much, but we've got that memory locked away.  :)  Mercer had a hard time finding the Milky Way, but thankfully he found it just after we left the park while we were gassing up the rental car!

The next morning, we packed up & returned the (luxury) SUV that had waaay too many bells & whistles for us to know how to drive the thing properly!.... we checked into the airport and "relaxed" 'til we got onto our flight. (relaxed is in quotes because we had a couple of delays!)

We did it.  We SURVIVED the desert!  

What a unique experience it was.  It was definitely a memorable vacation!  (one more funny pic of Mercer!)

(just next time - we'll make sure to check for extremes! -- no extreme heat in the summer!)