Design Convo #19: Streets/Art Part I

Click on image to see a larger version.

Next week is the return of the Baltimore Design Conversation, held every month on the first Wednesday at the Wind Up Space. This go round is being curated by Fred Scharmen and the topic is Streets/Art. Fred has invited guests to look at aspects of public art that occur outside and between the institutions that have traditionally supported art in communities. On hand will be sculptor and performance artist Jonathan Taube; activist, artist, and facilitator Paulo Harris; and street artist, sculptor, and painter Andrew Pisacane.

This will be the first in a two-part look at how public art impacts cities. The second part of this conversation will take place at June's Baltimore Design Convo to be curated by Ben Stone.

At the event, Paulo Harris will unveil his design for the Nurture Form Community Bench:



Below is an image of Jonathan Taube's Over There, installed on a median in Baltimore in 2009. It's fabricated from steel, Stucco, and faux finish banana peels. Here's what Taube has to say about it: "This plop sculpture consists of a replica of a 'blast wall,' a modular concrete barrier that is commonly used in contemporary military conflicts to protect against bombings. Able to withstand the force of an explosion, this section is mass-produced, easily transported, and quickly assembled into a wall. However, a massive pile of banana peels attempts to topple the wall."



See you next week!

Design Convo :19
Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The Wind Up Space

12 W. North Avenue
6:30 - 8:30 pm

As always, this event is free and open to the public. Special thanks to the Baltimore Community Foundation for its support of these conversations and to The Wind Up Space for being our gracious host.

For those of you not yet familiar with the Design Conversation or D:center Baltimore:

D:center Baltimore is a new organization composed of a broad cross-section of disciplines and individuals invested in improving and encouraging design—in all its iterations—in the Baltimore region.

Each month the group hosts a Design Conversation at the Wind Up Space in Station North. The event is a casual gathering that is free and open to the public. It is supported by the Baltimore Community Foundation as well as the hard work of a core of dedicated volunteers. Each Design Conversation is curated by an individual or a team of people and is organized around a theme related to design, architecture, community building, urban planning, and city life. (For a list of upcoming themes visit the D:Center Baltimore blog)

Local and national participants are invited to address the evening’s theme in order to stimulate a dialogue among audience members. Since it launched in 2008, the Design Conversation has spurred creative projects across the city through a number of collaborations born at the event. It has also stimulated a recognition of shared interests and existing projects around the city and the country.

What is Natural?

Image from Azure's May issue on food and design.

On Earth Day last week I got a press release about a hotel in Baltimore planting a rooftop garden for its restaurant. The release extolled the value of food coming just feet from the kitchen (There is this competition, isn't there, to see how close we can get to a food source? How about inches? A garden cultivated in the diners' very table so he may pick and toss a salad at will.) Up the street from my home, a group of young adults adopted a vacant lot from the city and cleared it for a community garden. In the mail, my copy of Azure magazine arrived with a cover heralding The Urban Farm (and featuring an exceptionally well-heeled, chicken-wielding couple who look ready for brunch in Park Slope more than a day in the fields.)



Why has urban farming so captured the imagination of the American city?

Part of it is social. There is the benefit of putting hands in soil, turning an unused plot into a food-producing garden, and living in such close proximity to food.

Part of it, I believe, is our understanding of and belief in nature. The urban farm is reintroducing a natural state back into the unnatural, manmade chaos of the city. Or so we think. Americans have long held conflicting views of the city and the rural, believing the latter to be the more pure state. My father, William Evitts, explains this much better than I ever could in an essay published in Urbanite magazine titled "Reclaiming America's Stepchild."


Illustration by Cornel Rubino for Urbanite.

But what is "nature?"

William Cronon is an American historian specializing in environmental history and in the book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, he challenges our notions of the natural. Cronon contends that humans have prescribed a rather narrow definition to what is natural and what is not. Simply put, he says that "nature" is largely a human idea. "Far from inhabiting a realm that stands completely apart from humanity, the objects and creatures and landscapes we label as 'natural' are in fact deeply entangled with the words and images and ideas we use to describe them."

When traveling inside the deep rainforests of the Amazon, or to places seemingly uncontaminated by man, "we cannot help experiencing them not just as natural environments but as cultural icons[...]we turn them into human symbols, using them as repositories for value and meaning[...]."

Man is seen as the contaminator—he creates things like chainlink fence and nuclear power plants. He can save himself, we believe, by becoming more natural. More farms, less ugly fencing. But remember that man is also organic. Man IS nature. So how is the chainlink fence any different from, say, an anthill? Both are structures created by living organisms meant to parcel space.


An actual anthill and a home design based on anthill form.

There is the truth of nature—the way its matter functions, the laws of biology and physics—and then there are the ideas we ascribe to it. We will defend the pristine landscape against development, but will fight like hell to eradicated the infectious disease. "It is in some sense 'natural' that very large numbers of human beings should die from epidemic disease each year, and yet this does not prevent the vast majority of people—to say nothing of the entire infrastructure of modern medicine—from trying to resist that fate," Cronon writes.

And what of farming? Manipulating the earth to realize crops is not "natural" in the purest human definition. Farming is a human invention.

In truth, nature is not this pristine, undisturbed state that exists in perfect balance save the meddling interference of man. Nature is both the truth of pure matter and how it functions and the ideas man brings to it. Again from Cronon:

"Yosemite is a real place in nature—but its venerated state as a sacred landscape and national symbol is very much a human invention. The objects one can buy in stores like The Nature Company certainly exist in nature—but that does not begin to explain how they came to inhabit some of the most upscale malls in modern America. The bomb that exploded over Hiroshima could hardly have been more material, expressing as it did some of the most fundamental laws of matter—and yet it also could not possibly have existed without the human ideas that describe those laws and applied them to this very particular piece of technology, to say nothing of the use to which that technology was put."

Like the bomb, we can manipulate matter and ignore its consequences (global warming). We can proselytize the pristine at the expense of finding true solutions to the state of the natural world today (dogmatic preservation and environmentalism). Or we can decide to question our concepts of nature and work towards a better, more clear-eyed future based on both human reason and natural process.

PARA-Project's Attic

Somehow I missed the profile on this rehab by PARA-Project when it first appeared in Metropolis magazine in February. A 450-square-foot attic transformed. An incredible use of natural light. The divider wall pictured below? Made from recycled cardboard tubes. And I love the bookend of the open window on one side and the bookshelf on the other.

Energy Systems

Above: Energy Roof design by Coop Himmelb(l)au

I've written here and elsewhere about a project called The Plant, where a group of us envisioned a building that could plug into an urban city system and repair both broken social fabric and infrastructure. The idea is to see how a building can help create energy systems for entire blocks and neighbors can feed off of/ fuel one another.

This is why the Energy Roof caught my eye.



"Energy Roof" is a design concept developed by Wolf D. Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au. He presented this design over the winter to a group in Perugia, Italy. The idea is that the roof would serve as canopy along Via Mazzini in the center of Perugia while also creating the entry point to the archaeological underground passage that leads you through the history of the city. The structure would also produce energy:

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU developed the design of the roof with the goal to generate energy for the city. While the orientation of the west wing is optimized in relation to solar radiation, the east wing captures wind. The roof consists of three layers: the energy generating top layer, the structural layer in the middle and a layer on the bottom as a combination of laminated glazing and translucent pneumatic cushions. The top layer includes transparent photovoltaic cells to generate electricity and shade the sun. The orientation of the individual cells is generated and optimized by a computer driven scripting program. Furthermore five wind turbines that are placed inside the structural layer are generating additional energy. Both the roof and the underground passage are energy self-sufficient.

This is the way of energy efficiency in urban planning. Imagine going beyond mere buildings and creating mini ecosystems and micro-infrastructure for entire streets, blocks, and communities.

eedickinson.net

Screen shot of the homepage with an image from Brooklyn taken by Yalda Nikoomanesh.

The new Web site is live. Still working out some kinks and still uploading content. I'm also figuring out if/how this blog will incorporate into the new site. But here it is: eedickinson.net.

The image on the homepage rotates each time you click on it. Some very talented photographers—Yalda Nikoomanesh, Seth Sawyers, Fred Scharmen, Leslie Furlong, to name a few—have been gracious enough to let me use their images. I'm loading more every day...

And why Dot Net? Cause I let my domain names lapse for 3 days and someone in Japan snagged my Dot Com. Not nice.

Saved by droog

The first half of every year brings the onslaught of furniture and interiors shows, from January's interior shows in Cologne and Paris, to April's Milan Design Week and next month's International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. My favorite thing to emerge so far is the project Saved by droog, which premiered in Milan last week. Every month some 500 companies in the Netherlands go bankrupt, prompting Dutch design collective droog to wonder: where does their stuff go?

So they started amassing stuff at auctions and liquidation sales—everything from furniture to handkerchiefs—and they acquired over 5,000 objects. Then they invited 14 artists to reconsider these items and create new objects.

Below is the Daily Handkershief by Studio Makkink & Bey




900 plain handkerchiefs are ready to be embroidered with selected articles from 30 days of news from around the world. You pick the news you want.



A simple folding chair...



...was transformed by designer Marian Bantjes. They were "manicured" by nail artists using polish.



The guiding manifesto behind Saved by droog:

we need a new design integrity.

we redirect creative energy.

we redefine the lifecycle.

we create ongoing value.

we start with what's easily available.

we want sensible innovation.

we redesign until we find an owner.

we care about where it goes.

we invite everybody to participate.

we celebrate the new owners.

we enable you to share.

Design Conversation #18: Invention

Click on the image for a larger version.


This Wednesday I'll be hosting the monthly Baltimore Design Conversation at The Wind Up Space in Station North with the rest of the design convo gang and it promises to be a fascinating evening (City Paper picked it as one of their weekly critic's picks for events!)

The theme for the night is “invention” and we will look at how we can spark Aha! moments and create new creative connections. Invention will be explored from three angles: the brain, materials, and collaboration.




Image of Charles Limb by Marshall Clarke for Urbanite Magazine, Read an interview with Limb in Urbanite by clicking here.

Neuroscientist Charles Limb will discuss his breakthrough research on the brain as it relates to creativity and jazz.

Ellen Lupton, designer, writer, teacher, and curator of contemporary design at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Inna Alesina, product designer and teacher, will showcase projects from their new book, Exploring Materials : Creative Design for Everyday Objects (a spread from the book is pictured above). They will encourage us to see everyday materials in new ways while expanding our materials vocabulary.



Rendering of the virtual learning environment in a Baltimore public school.

David Peloff from the Johns Hopkins Center for Emerging Technology will tell us how he collaborated with the Applied Physics Lab to bring NASA technology to the creation of a cutting-edge virtual learning environment being piloted in Baltimore public schools.

As always, this event is free and open to the public. Special thanks to the Baltimore Community Foundation for its support of these conversations and to The Wind Up Space for being our gracious host.

For those of you not yet familiar with the design conversation or D:center Baltimore:

D:center Baltimore is a new organization composed of a broad cross-section of disciplines and individuals invested in improving and encouraging design—in all its iterations—in the Baltimore region.

Each month the group hosts a Design Conversation at the Wind Up Space in Station North. The event is a casual gathering that is free and open to the public. It is supported by the Baltimore Community Foundation as well as the hard work of a core of dedicated volunteers. Each Design Conversation is curated by an individual or a team of people and is organized around a theme related to design, architecture, community building, urban planning, and city life. (For a list of upcoming themes visit the D:Center Baltimore blog)

Local and national participants are invited to address the evening’s theme in order to stimulate a dialogue among audience members. Since it launched in 2008, the Design Conversation has spurred creative projects across the city through a number of collaborations born at the event. It has also stimulated a recognition of shared interests and existing projects around the city and the country.

Tonight! Speedism at Open Space

7 pm @ Open Space
2720 Sisson Street
Baltimore, MD

Speedism is the duo Julian Friedauer (Germany) and Pieterjan Ginckels (Belgium). The partners work at the borders of architecture, architectural theory, visual arts, visual theory, urban tactics, imagineering, and scriptwriting. Tonight, they come to Baltimore for a rare performance. They will perform "Untitled States of Doom & symmetric side effects", a live photoshop journey through layers of their imagined universe. Driven by a live soundtrack, Friedauer and Ginckels will click their way into an empty place, a no-risk land.