As a kid, Matt Baran had trouble defining what was “right.” He struggled between what was considered the norm, the constantly shifting opinions of his community, and wanting to do the “right thing.”
Baran didn’t grow up behind a white picket fence. His mother went through a series of divorces, and that brought a variety of characters into the house. These were the kind of men who Baran said “never sat with their backs to the door.” He saw drug deals go down, and he witnessed what he thought was mafia activity, but he never felt uncomfortable with any of it. He didn’t know until he went to college that what he’d been through wasn’t so “normal.”
This instability is at the heart of why Baran wants to have complete control over his environment and why he wants his work to affect the way people live.
He’s an architect who designs buildings and homes that might be able to give others what he never had himself.
“My intention was to find something that I could do without much interference,” Baran said. “Where I could do what I thought was right, both in terms of design and sustainability and construction.”
To escape this inner conflict as well as the “illicit activity” that he was regularly surrounded by in his hometown of Huntington Beach, Baran began to draw to establish a “stable medium.” “I was part of a social class that should have limited my success,” he said. “For most people that I know from then, it did. Maybe drawing let me escape from that.”
Baran’s drawings eventually led him to a career in architecture. Throughout college at the University of Southern California, he struggled with history and theory but always excelled in design. USC, he says, is where everything changed.
“I went from thinking of architecture as this prefabricated, regurgitated, typologies of what you see walking down the street and to thinking it is much more exciting than that,” Baran said. “It’s more of an art form.”
Baran developed his own philosophy of architecture, modeled after the godfather of modern-day architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than tearing buildings down and creating a new environment, Baran, like Wright, believed in contextualizing his designs, sustainably creating structures that build on the surrounding environment.
Baran came to the East Bay because of a job opportunity and found beauty in West Oakland. He was intrigued by the area’s mix of industry and housing. He admired the Victorians, the lines drawn by the freeways and the visual impact of the cranes hovering above. West Oakland, he says, had a character all its own.
“Things like the new urbanism and anti-sprawl movements tend to be very utopian,” Baran said. “They tend to try and sweep things under the rug and recreate from a blank slate. West Oakland green design is grittier than that… It’s not a utopian picture. It’s urban, it’s raw and it’s had years of turmoil.”
Baran, who says the hype around green design makes him nauseous, happened into the field when he made the connection that sustainable design was purely good design. West Oakland, he says, is the perfect location for good design, mainly because of the conditions caused by industry, the Port and the freeway. Some 2,500 trucks come through the Port, and West Oakland has one of the highest asthma rates in the region.
“Green design should be something you apply everywhere,” he said. “It’s more appropriate in West Oakland because the environment there is so problematic.
Baran started his career as a green architect by designing a truck stop prototype: a construction project that would both build on and improve the streets where the West Oakland Bart line and 880 intersect. These infrastructures have wiped out the streets below and turned them into what Baran refers to as “zero streets.”
These streets are “zeroed out” because properties on them have been deleted from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Information System database. The freeway literally cuts through urban West Oakland, erasing the properties that stand in its way. Baran, who wrote his thesis on the subject, defines Zero Streets as “conditions that represent the temporal and physical discontinuity of the urban fabric.”
The area surrounding West Oakland’s zero streets suffer side effects from the intrusion of highways and industry. Urban conditions such as air pollution from the Port and trucking, ground contamination and debris. The zero streets under the West Oakland Bart stop are dark alleyways covered in trash and abandoned belongings. There is a fog of pollution and diesel emissions.
Baran’s design for the truck stop reflects his philosophy that architecture should be contextual. It builds on what already exists at the site and improves those conditions. Baran envisioned a prototype that would feature a bio-fuel station, a tank-cleaning station where truckers can dispose of waste, and an emissions-testing scale.
Rather than “adapting” to the existing urban conditions, says Baran, the truck stop “extracts” from them. While a truck stop may seem counterintuitive, Baran says the trucks aren’t going away, and the best way to address the issue is to admit the conditions and try to enhance the quality of life by building on the existing circumstances.
This is where the concepts of the truck stop prototype and the West Oakland house collide: the idea that architecture should build off of the environment in which it is being constructed, rather than tearing down and starting anew.
Two months ago, Baran broke ground on a single-family house at 3245 Helen Street on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. The property sits next to a dilapidated house, which Baran says has been there since he purchased the property two years ago. In the background is a warehouse adorned with metal sculptures. The area is entrenched with industrialization, and Baran intends to integrate these qualities into his work, making the house look like an industrial space.
The three-bedroom house will be 1,500 square feet (1,800 with the garden). Initially, Baran and his wife will live there, and then the rest is up to the market. Baran’s ultimate goal is to sell the house back to members of the community, but if the market remains tough for sellers, he may use it as a portfolio project to show off to potential investors.
The metal roof is the most expensive element of the house. To maintain sustainability and help the house fit into its community, Baran chose metal that allows minimal heat absorption and is a more sustainable product than an asphalt shingle. It will also hang over the side of the house, providing shade in the summer. For the winter months, Baran plans to paint the outer walls a dark color to absorb heat.
Baran plans to re-use 75 percent of the materials he tears down. The house also features radiant heat floors and cross-ventilation, which flows easily through the house because of the “open plan,” another one of Wrights trademarks. The roof, walls and floors are seamlessly interwoven so that air can flow freely through the rooms. Unlike usual floor plans, an open plan requires a large stretch of floor with very little interruption by walls or furniture.
Baran is working in collaboration with Kathy Kuhner, another green architect who’s developed approximately 60 other units in the area, from townhouses to warehouses. Kuhner is working on the front house, elevating the dilapidated original house and creating green space underneath.
While Baran admits that the sustainable qualities of the house are not exclusive to West Oakland, he believes the specifics of the location makes the area uniquely positioned to both adopt and adapt to green culture. The proximity to Silicon Valley provides access to innovation. Baran’s projects are inspired by the area’s long history of industry, with a port approaching it’s half-century anniversary, and the culture of resistance—referring to the Black Panthers in particular—that define West Oakland.
“I think we can fit it into a culture that isn’t necessarily the image that we have of ‘utopia’ or ‘sustainable design,’” Baran said. “Some people need to have lost a loved one or suffered a divorce to be able to appreciate a beauty that suggests an exception to the ugly world. I think this might have been true for me as well.”
