How the sausage gets made, Eames Institute edition

Truth be told, I was ready to move on from the Eames Institute beat, at least for a while. I’d written about the John Birch Society hype man (and fledgling reality-TV judge!) Joe Gebbia, who helped fund the NorCal non-profit when it launched publicly in 2022, on consecutive weeks earlier this month. The Institute and its president and CEO, John Cary, along with its PR team at Berlin Rosen, had stonewalled my questions about Gebbia’s ongoing involvement and whether he is underwriting its ambitious plans to turn the former Birkenstock campus in Novato into a museum of arts and design. It was time for a break from this story and its toxic politics.

Then the San Francisco Chronicle rolled out a bit of journalistic puff pastry, in the form of an “exclusive” update on the museum plans from longtime staff writer J.K. Dineen. The article, which appeared Tuesday, was illustrated with a handful of new renderings from Herzog & de Meuron, which is leading the project alongside the Bay Area firm EHDD, and included the news that prominent landscape office Field Operations has joined the design team. Dineen quoted Cary, Eames Institute chief curator Llisa Demetrios, and designers from HdM and Field Operations at length.

The ostensible news peg was that the Institute was set, later that day, to “file a master plan” with the city of Novato “that will transform the 88.5-acre site into a global design museum, attracting some 200,000 visitors a year.” (I reached out to the Novato planning office for further details, but haven’t heard back.) The Institute, Dineen wrote, hopes to break ground in 2028 and open the museum in 2030, a timeline that strikes me as optimistic.

To be clear, I’ve written plenty of pieces in this vein myself. A prominent architecture firm, or its client and PR team, reaches out with new renderings of a project in the entitlement phase, or at some other critical political or fundraising juncture, and offers an exclusive, often under embargo.

The timing and impetus for this one seemed a bit different. The goal was maybe not only to produce some upbeat coverage of the Novato project but, by providing Dineen with broad access to the Institute’s leadership and a batch of new eye-candy renderings, to knock my recent reporting down a peg or two on the list of search results. Indeed, the Chron story didn’t mention Gebbia, to say nothing of the noxious John Birch Society or more-noxious-still Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist whom the Trump appointee and Elon BFF has boosted on X.

I reached out to Dineen, who first wrote about the Institute’s Novato plans in the summer of 2025. To his credit, he responded quickly and was frank about how the new story unfolded.