The Marble-Clad Marvel

Your Boulevardier loves to look at buildings. He has traveled to some great cities in his day, and viewed some fine architecture. The structures in humble Castro Valley may not measure up to those in, say, Chicago or Paris or New York or Florence, but many of them have a certain charm. Your Boulevardier admires a sense of scale, a whiff of whimsy, a hint of history, a dash of detail in a building.

One Castro Valley building that many people pass but precious few probably notice is the marble-clad structure that houses Fura Bodyworks. It was, if memory serves, a lawyer's office for quite some time; today, piercings and tattoos are given -- apparently with some skill. Your Boulevardier sports neither piercings nor tattoos, and he has never set foot in the place. However, this does not detract from his respect for the building itself. (And he does acknowledge the entrepreneurial zeal and local loyalty of Fura's proprietor, Mel Speed.)

But back to the building. In a sense, it is a modern skyscraper writ small. Tiny, even. Vertical stripes of black-and-green marble, alternating with dark windows suspended in bright steel frames, forms a pleasing rhythm not unlike that evoked by Mies van der Rohe in his best mid-20th-century creations.

Not-so-close examination shows that this building is, underneath its stone cladding, simply a construction of cinderblocks. (Everyone who has driven through the Jack-in-the-Box drive-through knows this, in spite of efforts to disguise the fact with greenery.) But the facade the building presents to the street is all style, and even a bit of modernist glamour.