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REGISTER · 2026-09-15

Journal — Buildspace — journal entry

Fort Mason, from the top of the hill

The walk down to the building is the part I would keep if I could only keep one thing.

Work periodSeptember 2023
EvidenceJournal entry
Published2026-09-15
AuthorDarby Bailey McDonough, Ph.D.
The approach as I remember it: the path down from the garden, the yellow building by the water, the fog line, the bridge off to the left. Drawn from memory, not from a map.
The approach as I remember it: the path down from the garden, the yellow building by the water, the fog line, the bridge off to the left. Drawn from memory, not from a map.

You come at it from above. There is a path that runs down through the community garden, and from the top you can see the whole thing laid out below you, the yellow building with the red trim and the bay behind it, and on a clear morning the bridge off to the left where the fog is still deciding whether to leave. It is one of the prettiest spots in the whole bay. Calm, spacious, people out in the park, and the pier right there if you want it.

The building was Founders, Inc., and for the year I was there, that was where Buildspace held its in-person events. I took photographs the way a participant takes photographs, which is to say I was not standing outside with a notebook. I was inside with a laptop. I built in Erevald, the green house. What I built was an album, and it has its own entry. There were four: Spectreseek in red, Alterok in blue, Gaudmire in yellow, and Erevald in green, each with its own room, its own milk crates stacked in its color, its own screen on the wall playing the anime-style videos the team made for it.

What I want to record is the air. The windows opened and the coastal air came in, that cool foggy air, and it made the inside feel like the outside had not been shut out. You could walk out of any room and be in nature in about a minute. The garden was right there, up the hill behind the building, and people used it. Esther, one of the members I later interviewed, gave informal tours of it between sessions. That is a Jacobs detail. Nobody scheduled the garden. It was just used.

The other detail I keep is the windows on the front, floor to ceiling, covered in post-it notes. Each one was a project idea in somebody's handwriting, and each one had a staff member's initials in the corner, which meant someone had read it and said yes. The morning light came through the paper and made the whole wall a mosaic. That is the sidewalk in one object. Public, initialed, and legible from the street.

I did not know yet that I was going to write a chapter about the building. I thought I was writing about the internet. I was, but the internet had a hill you had to walk down, and the walk was where I understood what I was looking at.