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Stanford Fire Truck House

Fire stations completed in 1904Stanford University buildings and structures
Stanford Fire Truck House
Stanford Fire Truck House

The Fire Truck House, built by Charles Hodges in 1904, served as Stanford University's firehouse until the early 1970s, when the current firehouse was built on Serra Street. It was manned by a mix of students and professional firefighters. The students received room, board, and a stipend. A few later made firefighting a career, including William R. Bamattre, Chief of the Los Angeles City Fire Department from 1996 to 2007, and Nick Marinaro, Chief of Palo Alto Fire Department from 2004 to 2010. Today, the Fire Truck House houses student campus organizations, including the Women's Community Center, which promotes the success of Stanford women by providing opportunities for scholarship, leadership, and activism, on the first floor, and the LGBT-CRC (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Resources Center), which organizes diversity awareness programs and offers mentoring support for queer, questioning, and allied students.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Stanford Fire Truck House (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Stanford Fire Truck House
Santa Teresa Street,

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N 37.425066 ° E -122.171667 °
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Fire Truck House (Stanford Fire Truck House;Old Firehouse)

Santa Teresa Street
94305
California, United States
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Stanford Fire Truck House
Stanford Fire Truck House
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Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden
Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden

In 1994, Jim Mason, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, arranged for two groups of men from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea to carve the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University. The men were from several communities or villages of the Iatmul people and the Kwoma people. The New Guinea Sculpture Garden is located in a small, wooded grove on the Stanford campus next to a dormitory. In addition to wooden and stone artworks, the garden also features landscaping and plants organized by Wallace M. Ruff, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, University of Oregon, and research fellow in the Department of Architecture and Building, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Lae, Papua New Guinea. He was assisted by one of his students, Kora Korawali. The landscaping evokes the Sepik environment – river flanked by embankments - as well as the central plaza in Sepik villages, in front of an all-male cult house or men’s house, which are used for the staging of rituals. The entrance to the garden is an open space, like the Sepik flood plain. But visitors quickly stroll into a forest of sculptures and trees reminiscent of a majestic Sepik cult house. The garden is roughly organized into four zones. Near the entrance is a large, wooden eagle atop the shoulders of an ancestresses. This statue resembles the finials that often adorn Iatmul cult houses. Behind the eagle is a cluster of about a dozen, enormously tall wooden poles carved with exquisitely elaborate Iatmul and Kwoma motifs and patterns. A series of brightly painted Kwoma poles forms another aesthetic cluster, while the third area of the garden consists of large sculptures in pumice, an entirely new medium for the carvers since stone is rare in the Sepik flood plain. At night, the objects are aglow from ground-level spot lights. The stone sculptures largely represent Sepik mythological creatures modeled after Western sculptures found elsewhere on the Stanford campus. The carved poles subtly blend traditional and modem motifs so that, for example, ancestresses wear grass skirts. Many of the carvings beautifully wind around the natural contours of the wood, a sense of three-dimensionality that was not traditionally incorporated into Sepik carving. One of the most brilliant works in the garden is a bare pole that contains only a hint of the sculpture it might have become. This work, titled "untitled,” expresses the processual aspects of the garden, and the unfinalizability and partiality of any interpretation. The garden wonderfully plays with themes of light and shadow, revelation and concealment, nature and culture. It is and is not mysterious, contemplative, quiet, and surreal. The logistics of the project were enormous. Mason raised $250,000 in individual donations. One could sponsor a fern for $250, a palm tree for $500, a bench for $750, and so forth. Large donations are acknowledged, like the artworks themselves, by name. Corporate donors included Bechtel Corporation, Chevron, and Airnuigini, the national airline of Papua New Guinea. Funds were also supplied by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford University, and affluent Palo Alto families. The university allowed the garden a permanent site. Mason arranged for several dozen hardwood trees to be shipped to the campus from Asia. The ten woodcarvers were flown to California from the Sepik by way of Hong Kong, a journey that far exceeded any of their previous travels. Once they arrived, the carvers were the toast of Palo Alto and multicultural Stanford. They dined at catered events in mansions and performed with African-American drummers outside dormitories. The carvers, working on a six-month educational visa, were given local donations by individuals, organizations, and businesses of food, medical care, clothing, transportation, recreation, materials, and a trip to Disneyland. One of the Iatmul artists, Teddy Balangu from Palimbei village, later was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (University of British Columbia). He also spent time at Alcheringa Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia.The "spirit of the project" framed the carvers as "artists" and not as exotic, anonymous specimens of primitive savagery and mystery. By labeling the men as "master carvers", the project positioned them in Western category defined by rare artistic genius, a category defined by the very terms of connoisseurship that once marginalized Melanesian art as something less refined than Western masterpieces or so-called "high art". This way, visitors approached the carvers and their works not as primitives and crafts but as authentic artists and art. However, in Iatmul society, there is no comparable category of "master carver" in the local lexicon or social structure. Ironically, then, the garden fostered the Western appreciation of non-Western art by substituting one western category for another. One of the great aesthetic joys of the sculpture garden is the visual contemplation of the ironies that arise from the cross-cultural dialogue and categorization of artworks in the contemporary, transnational or globalized world. A goal of the project was not to recreate a traditional Melanesian setting but, as Mason himself reported, to create "an opportunity to experiment with and reinterpret New Guinea aesthetic perspectives within the new context of a Western public art space." The carvers, it was hoped, would blend traditional, Sepik River themes with the ideals of Western modern art such as individualistic expression and the creation of art solely for a contemplative gaze (so-called "art for art's sake"). That is, the carvers were given an opportunity to "break free", in a sense, from the conventional aesthetic constraints of the village in the Papua New Guinea – to create art not possible in a Sepik River setting. Much of the success of the project resulted from the interplay of different yet not-necessarily compatible cross-cultural categories: Melanesia/West, traditional/modern, art/culture, and so forth. Thus the men were brought to Stanford University on the basis of their Sepik River or Papua New Guinean identity; but once there, they were encouraged to think of themselves not as Papua New Guineans but as artists. Moreover, the artists were given considerable input into the project, thus intentionally dispersing "curatorial authority" such that, in contrast to most museums, the "tribal" artists are lent considerable "voice" in the final display of their works, and in choose how and what works to display. Similarly, the garden foregrounds the individuality of the artists – identifying them by name on each piece, which rarely, if ever, occurs in museum displays of "traditional" tribal art. An essential part of the six-month process was a variety of collaborative programs: daily site tours, bamboo flute performances by the carvers, a public lecture series, Friday night barbeques, "story-time" with the artists, and outreach programs for school children, such as on-site bark painting. These interactive encounters are vital to the authenticity of the works. The sculptures that received the greatest amount of press and attention were two carvings in wood and pumice respectively that intentionally resemble Rodin sculptures displayed elsewhere on the Stanford campus, The Thinker and The Gates of Hell. Both sculptures were carved by the two Iatmul men from Tambunum village. According to Simon, when he saw The Thinker in the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts on campus, he thought to himself, "I can do this - even better!"The Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden has its own Facebook page.

Stanford Memorial Church
Stanford Memorial Church

Stanford Memorial Church (also referred to informally as MemChu) is located on the Main Quad at the center of the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California, United States. It was built during the American Renaissance by Jane Stanford as a memorial to her husband Leland. Designed by architect Charles A. Coolidge, a student of Henry Hobson Richardson, the church has been called "the University's architectural crown jewel".Designs for the church were submitted to Jane Stanford and the university trustees in 1898, and it was dedicated in 1903. The building is Romanesque in form and Byzantine in its details, inspired by churches in the region of Venice, especially, Ravenna. Its stained glass windows and extensive mosaics are based on religious paintings the Stanfords admired in Europe. The church has five pipe organs, which allow musicians to produce many styles of organ music. Stanford Memorial Church has withstood two major earthquakes, in 1906 and 1989, and was extensively renovated after each. Stanford Memorial Church was the earliest and has been "among the most prominent" non-denominational churches on the West Coast of the United States. Since its dedication in 1903, the church's goal has been to serve the spiritual needs of the university in a non-sectarian way. The church's first chaplain, David Charles Gardner, began a tradition of leadership which has guided the development of Stanford University's spiritual, ethical, and academic relation to religion. The church's chaplains were instrumental in the founding of Stanford's religious studies department, moving Stanford from a "secular university" at the middle of the century to "the renaissance of faith and learning at Stanford" in the late 1960s, when the study of religion at the university focused on social and ethical issues like race and the Vietnam War.