The San Francisco Bay can be viewed as a geographic paradox: a place and a void. The collective Bay (composed of San Francisco Bay, San Pablo Bay, and Suisun Bay) both unites and divides the community of the Bay Area, giving identity to the region while separating its populace. The Bay is a backspace, where hardened surfaces of the industrial city crumble into the water—as well as a shorefront, with designed parks and recreational marinas. It is intensely visited in some areas and nearly inaccessible in others; its beauty is acclaimed, its dumping grounds unparalleled. Its sparkling water is refreshed from Sierra snowmelt, its sewer outfalls and urban runoff robust. Once intensely militarized, it is now, just as intensely, demilitarized. In a sense, the Bay is a natural entity, borne of great rivers draining the entire Central Valley of California, however, every inch of its shoreline today is the product of human activity, by either intent or incident.

". . . [CLUI's] work stands out first for their embrace of territory that most Americans have either stopped seeing or never thought to look for and second for their refusal to make judgments....Coolidge and Simons have gone to great lengths to tell you where these things happen and what these places look like..."
—Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times, review of Overlook

". . .the omnivorous cataloging of late-industrial curiosities makes [CLUI's] archive a kind of 21st century cabinet of wonders."
—John Strausbaugh, The New York Times

"Everybody likes or finds some places interesting, but CLUI makes every place interesting."
—Lucy R. Lippard, art historian/critic, author of The Lure of the Local