The Fog Scriptorium
An inventive Venice–Berkeley garden-water collector, combining a communal Venetian cistern court with Berkeley experimental timber engineering. A low horseshoe-shaped masonry building encloses a front-open filling court on flat ground. Its left and right wings run front-to-back and its rear wing runs across the back. Ochre lime render covers thick brick walls; stone is restricted to bases, trough edges and tap surrounds. Low clay-tile lean-to roofs slope outward from the courtyard, and the front halves of the wings contain simple semicircular public arcades. The rear wing is a sealed cistern volume with a maintenance door and a narrow exterior water-level gauge; do not expose tanks in a cutaway.
Above this low base rise exactly three parallel front-to-back fog-collecting mesh leaves at staggered heights, each a narrow upright, gently concave screen stretched between paired curved laminated timber edge ribs. Their heights increase from left to right, and their tops arc gently like upright pages, not conventional peaked roofs. Mesh is visibly fine, porous silver filament with open air beyond it, never opaque cloth or glass. Carry each collector on timber uprights descending to masonry buttresses, with cross-bracing at the ends and discreet steel tension rods. Copper troughs along the bottom of each screen slope toward the rear; visible downpipes enter the sealed rear cistern. Keep the mesh clear of the tiled roofs. The outside left and right elevations show repeated buttresses, small maintenance openings and the descending copper channels; the rear shows the frame anchorage and cistern access. In front, three stone garden-water spouts empty into a continuous low basin beneath the arcade. Let the scale contrast between delicate high screens and thick inhabited plinth define the building.