Even a brick wants to be something. — Louis Kahn

Kahn meant it almost literally, as a design ethic: ask the brick what it wants to be and it answers an arch. Every material aspires to be part of something larger than itself — a sense of purpose beyond its own dumb form.

Walk San Francisco long enough and you find things that took him at his word. A couple of them talk to me.

"I can't wait to be a stair." — Alta Plaza Park

"I love being a curb." — Dolores Street

There are curbs that love being curbs.

Along tree-lined Dolores — some painted over in red, some crumbling and patched, some hidden on Sundays behind the cars that park down the center median — are curbs that love being exactly what they are. Scalloped, filleted: the crown molding of the gutter. As absurd, and somehow as necessary, as the palm trees that line the same street through the same fog.

Up the hill, the bulbous steps of Alta Plaza just can't wait to be stairs. The whole thing exudes a happiness at simply being — a curb, a step — that is, honestly, a little kawaii. Not the kind of enthusiasm you expect from poured concrete.

They're artifacts of a distant, naive age we tell ourselves we "moved on" from. And yet it's in these Dolores curbs that I see the will to live — imbued with the unnecessary care of their makers. Care no spec sheet asked for.

Maybe it's similarly naive, but I think we should build things that love to exist. The bulbous stairs of Alta Plaza. The curbs of Dolores. Things that scream someone put craft and love into this — something worth preserving.