A local architecture enthusiast has been doing "rephotography" — the practice of finding old photographs of buildings and locations, then shooting the exact same angle decades later to see what's changed. The latest set features Building 16 at the College of San Mateo, photographed in 1963 and again today. The original shot, taken by photographer Gerald Ratto, shows the building when it was still called North Hall. It's now Central Hall, because — in a move that will surprise no one familiar with institutional naming conventions — they built another building north of it.

The project is part of a broader effort to document the campus's mid-century modern architecture, designed by the legendary John Carl Warnecke, the same architect behind landmarks like the JFK gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. The research has been compiled in partnership with Docomomo, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and conserving modern movement architecture.

Why should you care? Because this is how you do preservation right — with private passion, volunteer effort, and zero taxpayer dollars wasted on consultants billing $400 an hour to produce a PDF nobody reads. No grants committee. No five-year environmental review. Just someone who loves buildings, did the research, and shared it with the public.

The Bay Area is quietly losing its architectural heritage to neglect, demolition, and the relentless march of generic mixed-use developments. Mid-century modernism, in particular, sits in an awkward twilight — too recent to feel "historic" to most people, too old to feel contemporary. Projects like this one remind us what we have before it's gone.

If you've got a few minutes, look up the full Warnecke-CSM project through the Docomomo Northern California chapter. It's a genuinely fascinating window into a time when the Bay Area built public institutions that looked like they were meant to last — and, remarkably, some of them did.