Urban Palimpsest

The Lost Generation

2011-10-17T18:39:00.002-04:00

The editors at Architect magazine came to me recently with an interesting set of questions: Is the profession of architecture losing ground among young graduates of architecture programs? Are fewer and fewer potential architects choosing not to get licensed? Are we embarking on a lost generation of architects?

So I jumped down the rabbit hole that is the architectural licensure process and here's what I found...

The 50 Year Old Intern, Architect magazine, October 2011 issue.

I'm not the only one contemplating this question. Check out what John Cary has to say on the Good magazine Web site.

Maternity Leave...

2011-07-19T17:29:00.002-04:00

Nola Evitts Dickinson
Born June 26, 2011

More soon!

D center @ MAP

2011-06-17T10:32:00.005-04:00

Tonight marks an important turning point for D center Baltimore. Conceived in 2009, and official founded as a non-profit last year, D center represents a broad cross-section of disciplines and individuals invested in improving and encouraging design, in all its iterations, in the Baltimore region. Until now, the organization has been without a physical home (though they have sponsored monthly design conversations and regular events throughout Baltimore). That changes this evening with the official opening of D center @ MAP.

Now through early next year, D center will take over a 2,000-square-foot storefront gallery at 218 West Saratoga Street, formerly the Maryland Art Place building. The gallery space is funded by one of the Downtown Partnership's Operation Storefront grants, which support creative uses of vacant commercial space in the city center. D center’s mission is to "create a nexus for interdisciplinary design, collaboration, and creative conversations."

That nexus begins this evening with the opening celebration for the center's inaugural show, the Open City Challenge Exhibition. The Open City Challenge is a joint project of D center Baltimore, Urbanite, the year-long Exhibition Design Seminar at Maryland Institute College of Art, the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation. The competition offers a winning entry $10,000 in prize money, provided by the MTA, for the chance to implement their solution to a pressing city issue: the quality-of-life issues brought about by the construction of the city's Red Line.

TONIGHT!!
D center @ MAP
Exhibition opening and official launch party for the new space.
5-8 PM
218 West Saratoga Street

Baltimore: Open City Catalog

2011-06-15T08:40:00.002-04:00

This past academic year, students of Maryland Institute College of Art’s Exhibition Development Seminar invited scholars, activists, community-based organizations, local artists, and visiting artist Damon Rich to create a series of installations, workshops, and other public programs that investigate the ways in which Baltimore is and is not an open city. The result was the exhibition Baltimore: Open City. For the exhibition's catalog, I was asked to write a short, 500 word essay in response to the question: How can the physical design of urban spaces influence the way we relate to each other? Here's what I had to say.

I have come to believe that humanity’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness are one in the same: it is our ability to connect the dots and to draw conclusions. The human brain is unique in its ability to analyze and understand the world around it and to order information in a way that makes sense, developing along the way a philosophy of existence.

This intellectual process is intimately tied to observation. Humans are inherently experiential mammals and until we go through something directly, we can only try our best to grasp it. Our childhood fantasies of falling in love are likely different from the actual experience of feeling romantic love for the first time. Our idea of marriage rarely matches the truth of being married. As an expectant mother, parents constantly tell me: “Just wait. You have no idea what you’re in for.” And they are right, I don’t. I can only imagine.

We all understand the world through our limited experiences and over time, our limbic brain creates a kind of roadmap to living, a set of values and assumptions that filter our way of seeing. Neuroscientists call this path dependence. We frequently base the future on what we know and understand of the past and these heuristic biases influence our decision making, whether consciously or unconsciously. This means that we tend repeat ourselves.

Take public housing in America as an example. Executed primarily by those who never directly experienced the need to live in such housing, the experiments of the past resulted in a guessing game of what might work best. We tore down houses and rowhouses to build apartment towers. A few decades later we tore down those towers and replaced them with what had been there before: houses. In her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs notes that those outside the community attempting to “fix” the perceived chaos within via different housing models just weren’t seeing the truth. “There is a quality meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served,” she writes.

At present, the human mind cannot fully comprehend where the American city is heading. Many of our experiences from the past—economic, ecological, social, cultural—have shifted as we embark on a new era of urbanity. Cities like Baltimore and Detroit will simply never be what they once were and yet, we frequently apply the same processes, the same architecture, the same public policy to this unknown scenario rather than embrace the beauty and potential of exploration and invention. This is terra incognito and we must treat it as such.

It’s high time we challenge our path dependent thinking about cities and strive to connect the dots in new ways. We can begin by developing tools for communication and collaboration among designers, residents, policymakers, etc. that allow us to supplement our own experience and understanding with the perspectives of others in order to develop a new architecture for urban living. It is time, in other words, to stop looking to the formulas of the past and embrace the truth of what is in front of us: a new order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

Design Convo Tomorrow Night!

2011-06-06T17:29:00.006-04:00

Another great design conversation coming to you from D Center Baltimore.

Design Conversation 31: Demonstration
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Windup Space, 12 W. North Ave
6pm

Where does the foundation of artistic learning begin? Demonstrations—the quickly drawn gestures, models, and diagrams made by teachers in the classroom—are the basis of dialogue for this month's convo. Come out and learn how the practice of teaching art is shaping our contemporary model of art, design, and culture.

This event is free and open to the public. Curated by Rachel Valsing.

Design Conversations are a monthly series of events loosely curated by a group of volunteers, focusing on rotating topics that are timely and engaging. These events are always free, always at the Windup Space, and now on the first TUESDAY of every month! Cash bar, AV hookup available for spontaneous presentations.

Design Conversations are encouraged by the generous support of D center Baltimore and Baltimore Community Foundation. For more information, please visit the D center Baltimore Web site.

Also: Mark your calendars for the opening of D Center @ MAP and the opening of the center's first exhibit at their new space. Save the date: June 17th.

Roger D. Redden Award

2011-05-24T11:26:00.004-04:00

Photo of the City Arts Apartments by Tom Holdsworth Photography

I recently learned that I will be the recipient of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation's 2011 Roger D. Redden Award for individual achievement in the field of architecture. I am so incredibly honored and am joined by the extraordinary Jubilee Baltimore, who earned the foundation's annual Golden Griffin Award. The awards will be announced at the BAF's Annual Meeting this Thursday, May 26 at 6:30 pm at the new City Arts Apartments in Station North (developed, appropriately enough, by Jubilee.) This is a wonderful opportunity to meet other BAF members and the new Board and to learn about the foundation's work. Those interested in joining in the celebration should RSVP to:

Tracey Clark
410.539.7772
baf@baltimorearchitecture.org

City Arts Apartments
440 East Oliver Street
Baltimore, MD 21202

Baltimore Meets Rotterdam: Sister City Roundtable

2011-05-02T13:35:00.008-04:00

From the Baltimore: Open City exhibition at the North Avenue Market in Baltimore.

This Wednesday, May 4 at 6 PM, the curators of Baltimore: Open City will meet with curators of the 2009 and 2011 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam for a discussion about the “open city” in an international context.

Guests include George Brugmans, Director of the IABR, Kristian Koreman, Principal of Zus, Interboro Partners, and yours truly, who will moderate the event.

The event is co-sponsored by the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and AIA Baltimore.

Wednesday, May 4
6 PM
North Avenue Market, 16 W. North Ave.

And for those who couldn't make it to the launch of the Baltimore: Open City exhibtion last month, here are a few snapshots from opening night. The exhibit is in the North Avenue Market and is still up for you to see. Gallery hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 2-8 PM.

The crowd outside the gallery on North Avenue (notice the food trucks!). This was moments before a Baltimore marching band existed the building and drum-lined their way down the sidewalk.

The requisite National Bohemians in a can. Staples of any art opening in Baltimore.

Inside the gallery. It was packed!

L-R: Visiting Artist Damon Rich and the brainchild behind Baltimore:Open City, Dan D'Oca of MICA and Interboro Partners.

An interactive tabletop display.

(Center and far left): Marian Glebes and Marianne Amoss of D:Center Baltimore

A poignant piece in the exhibition that graphically shows the effect of poverty on Baltimore neighborhoods.

L-R: Architect, professor, and D:Center Board Member Fred Scharmen and sustainability consultant Geoff Stack.

An interactive map of the city.

"Baltimore: Open City" Opens Tonight

2011-04-01T13:32:00.003-04:00

Tonight is the opening reception for the exhibition Baltimore: Open City at the North Avenue Market in Station North. This is the result of an expansive year-long collaborative exploration launched by the Exhibition Design Seminar at Maryland Institute College of Art. I'll let them explain:

An open city is a place where everyone feels welcome, regardless of such things as wealth, race, age, or religion. In every neighborhood of an open city, one feels like he or she belongs. However in Baltimore—as in most American metropolitan areas—issues like housing discrimination, bad public transportation, and the privatization of public space separate people, and create an uneven distribution of health, wealth, and education.

For the exhibition Baltimore: Open City, students of Maryland Institute College of Art’s Exhibition Development Seminar invited scholars, activists, community-based organizations, local artists, and visiting artist Damon Rich to create a series of installations, workshops, and other public programs that investigate the ways in which Baltimore is and is not an open city. We welcome our neighbors to join us in exploring what a more open city might look and feel like.

As a part of this Open City process, there is also the Open City Challenge, a joint project of D center Baltimore, Urbanite, the year-long Exhibition Design Seminar at Maryland Institute College of Art, the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation. Self-organized teams are invited to compete for $10,000 in prize money (provided by the MTA) and the chance to implement their solution to a pressing city issue: the quality-of-life issues brought about by the construction of the Red Line. For more information, or to apply, visit The Urbanite Project Web site.

Hope to see you tonight!

AIA Spring Lecture Series: March 24

2011-03-04T17:37:00.006-05:00

I’m moderating a panel for this Spring’s AIA Lecture Series, with Mason White of Lateral Architecture, Paul Lukez, author of Suburban Transformations , and Hillary Brown from New Civic Works. We will get to hear from them about their latest projects as well as discuss how new development can merge with infrastructure, civic policy, and sustainability initiatives to create more integrated and holistic solutions in urban, rural, and suburban settings.

When: Thursday, March 24

Time: 6:00 p.m. with a reception to follow

Location: Falvey Hall at Brown Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, 1300 W. Mount Royal Avenue

For more information on the AIA Lecture Series and to buy tickets, click here.

I'm a Finalist!

2011-03-04T14:55:00.004-05:00

My feature article about the closure of Baltimore architecture firm CSD is a finalist for a 2011 Neal Award! The article published last year in Architect magazine. Click here for a link to the story.

Eye Candy

2011-02-17T11:37:00.004-05:00

I first saw the work of Japanese designer Kouichi Okamoto, of Kyouei Design, a few years ago at the designboom mart held during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. He was showing some beautiful ceramics, including a practical and beautiful umbrella stand that I still think about.

Lately I've had lighting on the brain because I need to find ceiling fixtures for several rooms in my house. Okamoto had created whimsical lighting in the past, like this paper lantern designed to look like an actual light bulb. Now it seems the industrial aesthetic that's sweeping lighting design has caught his attention as well. His Reconstructionist Chandelier, pictured above and below, takes the bare-bulb industrial safety clip lamp and elevates it into an open cluster accented by gold.

I like it, but with all of the industrial lighting hitting the marketplace—from Pottery Barn to Schoolhouse Electric and beyond—I imagine that in a few years (or months), this may feel as dated as antlers on the walls.

On a Personal Note...

2011-02-15T18:02:00.006-05:00

Me and my father in the Spring of 2009, just months after his cancer diagnosis.

Ironic that the post previous to this one announced an event called "Vacation." After posting that back in August of 2010, it seems as though I, too, went on an extended vacation from this blog. The hiatus, I'm sad to say, was because my father, William Joseph Evitts, was very ill with pancreatic cancer. He passed away in December leaving a gaping hole here in the Evitts family and in the Baltimore community. He was an exceptional man, a stellar teacher and writer, and above all else, an amazing father. It was because of him that I became a writer, a teacher, an editor. It was his encouragement that led me to follow my interests and my instincts and explore the world of design and design writing.

Dad defied the terrible odds and lived with pancreatic cancer for nearly 18 months. In his dying, as in his life, he had a grace and an openness that forever changed the way I see things. His death has already begun to move the compass of my work and I look forward to exploring new terrain. "Proceed and be bold," the architect Sam Mockbee liked to say. So now the brave work of living after someone you love dies. I promise to be bold. In honor of dad.

Baltimore Design Conversation: August

2010-08-03T16:44:00.004-04:00

Click on image for a larger version.

After a busy season of design conversations—including last month's big event at Artscape with Karin Bacon—the crew is taking a break in August to enjoy the lazy days of summer. But that doesn't mean we can't still drink beer together...

Please join the Design Conversation group at our usual time and place:
Wednesday, August 4th
The Windup Space, 12 W. North Ave.
Around 6:30 pm

Instead of a forum of speakers this will be an informal happy hour and a great chance to hang out, swap design ideas and stories, and put in your two cents regarding future topics for design conversations.

And if you've ever wanted to get more involved with the Design Conversations—or with D:center Baltimore—this is the perfect time to come and talk. Hope to see you there!

Ghosts

2010-07-30T11:19:00.004-04:00

Tater the terrier.

My husband and I adopted a dog from a local shelter in May and the little guy likes to walk. A lot. So twice a day I traverse the half mile from my home to Druid Hill Park, where we climb the switchback paths through the wooded terrain. What an amazing place. The forest smothers the sounds of the city and suddenly you are surrounded by the hum of nature. The park is 745 acres. It was purchased in 1860 from a landowner named George Buchanan, and developed into this lustrous playground of streams, lakes, playfields, and a zoo. Druid Hill Lake, built in 1863, is the largest earthen damned lake in the country.

Today, many of the features of the original park are overgrown and forgotten. Three Sisters Lane leads you past a deep, sunken section where kudzu and grapevine cover everything, including what once was a section of landscaped park with three manmade ponds. This was where sea lions would play. The effect of all that overgrowth is ethereal, like a house that's been closed up and its possessions shrouded with sheets. I have yet to master taking pictures while controlling a puppy, so I turn to another photographer...Here are some images taken from the Web site Monumental City.

Stairs to nowhere.

Some kind of a well?

A fence surrounds one of the ponds

The "Forgotten Fountain"

Street Art

2010-07-26T14:15:00.007-04:00

Paused to snap some shots of Gaia's street art along Franklin Street in Baltimore. He put work onto one of my favorite facades, The White Coffee Pot. (Photos taken with my phone, so excuse the quality.)

Also on the White Coffee Pot Building, this beautiful silhouette. Don't know who did it:

On the corner of Park and Franklin, another Gaia piece:

Around the corner on Park, remnants of Baltimore's former Chinatown district.

And these images I snapped because I liked them.

Metal rods cover a broken window.

What a gorgeous wall, framed at the top by dripping paint.

For more images of Gaia's work, click here for his Web site and here for his Flickr site.

And on the graffiti front, a new work appeared a few months back under the 83 near my home. This is on the corner of Clipper Mill and Falls Roads in Hampden.

Baltimore Design Convo Comes to Artscape

2010-07-14T10:32:00.004-04:00

(Click on image for a larger version.)

This Saturday D:Center Baltimore brings the latest installment of the Baltimore Design Conversation to Artscape.

Please join us for Design Conversation 21: FESTIVALS

Saturday July 17th 2010
Charles Street Garage (across from the Charles Theatre) - 1714 N Charles Street
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Beer and wine will be available for sale.

Design Conversation 21 will feature Karin Bacon. Bacon began her career as Festival Director for the City of New York, where she originated citywide celebrations such as the New Year’s Eve fireworks in Central Park and July 4th in Lower Manhattan. She went on to produce celebrations, parties, and promotions for audiences as diverse kids at the Bronx Zoo and celebrities at Studio 54. Since forming her own company in 1981, Bacon has created a broad range of events for clients from the worlds of fashion, architecture, finance, media, retail, entertainment, and real estate, known for their theatricality, imagination, and high production values.

Design Conversations are open to the public and are loosely curated by volunteers around a series of topics related to design, art, architecture, and cities. They are made possible by the support of the Baltimore Community Foundation and D:center Baltimore.

Questions? ben.stone@gmail.com | www.dcenterbaltimore.com

The Great Humanitarian Design Debate

2010-07-13T09:53:00.010-04:00

VS.

It's getting heated on the Fast Company Design Blog. Writer Bruce Nussbaum wrote a piece on July 7th that asked: Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?

His answer: Yes. Nussbaum called out organizations like Project H Design and One Laptop Per Child for being pie-eyed, misdirected, and crass to the needs of local populations. He compares this new direction in design to the Peace Corps:

"Are designers helping the 'Little Brown Brothers?' Are designers the new anthropologists or missionaries, come to poke into village life, 'understand; it and make it better—their 'modern' way?"

Emily Pilloton (who I interviewed on this site) is founder of Project H Design and she took exception to the piece, particularly the part where Nussbaum criticizes American-based humanitarian designers for going abroad when so many issues face them at home. Ironic in light of Pilloton's latest move. Read her response here.

And if this topic interests you, check out the blog post I wrote this spring for Metropolis about the humanitarian design debate.

ADDED LATER:

Nussbaum RESPONDS to Pilloton.

Susan Szenasy of Metropolis JOINS the debate.

And Change Observer follows the many posts the resulted from Nussbaum's original inquiry.

Is it Soup Yet?

2010-07-13T08:15:00.004-04:00

A postcard of Paris's Les Halles, circa 1920.

That's the question one of my editors asked when I was running late with an assignment. The implication: have all the research components for your article come together finally and transformed into an actual story? (The underlying implication: hurry the f*&k up).

Lately, I've been thinking about this magic moment of transmogrification when it comes to cities. When do the disparate ingredients of planning coalesce into something altogether different and whole? In a biography on James Beard, writer Robert Clark describes why Les Halles, that famous Parisian market, was so popular in the 1920's:

"Part of the wonder of Les Halles was the sense that it was less a collection of vendors than a full-blown organism whose life came not from any conscious effort but through the transcendent totality of its constituents."

Urban planning is a very conscious effort at changing place. Planners often apply ideas like recipes. Put a mixed-use development here, a highrise there, a new zoning overlay across the river; try to recreate the hub of New York city or the civic order of Portland. Like cooks, they can adhere to their favorite chef. Some cook from the book of Jane Jacobs, some from the book of Robert Moses, some from Andres Duany, others from Le Corbusier. etc. etc.

But what turns those urban planning ingredients into—as Clark so aptly describes it—a transcendent totality? In the case of Les Halles, it was the "constituents." The people. Les Halles symbolized the vibrancy of French culinary culture and it was imbued with the passion of the vendors sharing their livelihood and the customers who believed in those products. The people engaged in marketing at Les Halles believed in its value and as a result it became vital.

Interestingly, a similar public market in Portland, Oregon in the 1900's failed to achieve such success. Beard grew up in Portland and Clark describes how a thriving farmers' market was relocated into a civic structure at the prodding of political power brokers. The new market never achieved the same vibrancy as the original and it closed leaving Portland without a public market. They built it; the public did not come. The "constituents," many of whom were not aware of the political machinations that led to the market's move into a new building, sensed the place was off nonetheless and simply stopped going there. The most important consideration in the planning process—the end user—was not considered and the project failed.

That said, even some of the best intentioned plans can fall flat. It's hard to predict human behavior, to understand why a street with all the right ingredients comes alive with the "messy vitality" of urban life (a la Lewis Mumford) or does not. Some recipes sing, others are inedible. Why? I don't profess an answer. Any thoughts?

New on the Web

2010-07-01T06:29:00.005-04:00

Yolande Daniels’s Tea Cozy on the grounds of the Evergreen Museum. Photo: Will Kirk

Two posts of mine went live on other sites yesterday.

First, there is my monthly Letter from Baltimore blog column on the Metropolis Web site. I write about an exceptional sculpture exhibition at Evergreen Museum & Library that invites architects to make site specific work. Read more here.

Herfra til Evigheden, translated as From Here to Eternity, is a Danish housing collective

The second is my first article for editor Julie Lasky at Change Observer. Titled "New Visions of Home," it is a continuation of my research into thoughtful, universal design for residential housing around the world, particularly as it relates to our needs as we age. Read more here.

Downfall

2010-06-22T10:06:00.003-04:00

The casting call poster for Downfall.

Oh boy. And we thought the bad real estate news couldn't get any worse. ABC has taken it to a whole new level.

Tonight the network premiers its newest primetime game show: Downfall. Contestants compete on the roof of a 10-story building in downtown Los Angeles for up to $1 million in prizes. If they fail, those prizes are tossed from the roof to smash below:

"Fabricated facsimiles of all prizes will be placed on the largest conveyor belt ever seen on TV with a pile of cash at the end ranging from $5,000 to $1 million. In each round, players will try to answer all the questions before their prizes and cash go over the edge, off the roof, and sent crashing 100 feet to the street below."

Executive producer Scott St. John told The Hollywood Reporter: "Downfall is a new, hybrid, high-stakes field game show where fearless contestants have to fight and focus hard to keep their winnings from falling off the side of a building."

"Winnings" include people. Like your wife, who could also go over the side in a "controlled fall."

This works because stuff and people are expendable, right?

Considering our economy has taken the proverbial fall off the cliff—owing in large part to the uninformed, unregulated financial risks taken with our real estate—it seems perverse to air a show on a skyscraper that is centered around unmitigated greed and destruction. How about a game show where contestants save shit from the landfill instead?

The Rise and Fall (and Rebirth) of an Architecture Firm

2010-06-10T12:30:00.002-04:00

My latest feature, out this month in Architect, is about CSD in Baltimore. The firm closed last fall after 62 years. The question the article hopes to answer: How could one of Baltimore's oldest and largest architecture firms suddenly collapse?

Ed Hord remembers Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009, as a particularly sunny day in Baltimore. The senior principal of design firm Hord Coplan Macht (HCM) was at home when he received a phone call from Tom Spies, then the senior vice president of CSD Architects. Hord and Spies were practically neighbors—in business and in life—with offices blocks from one another and homes in the same bucolic neighborhood north of the city. HCM and CSD were not exactly competitors, but they did share a healthy rivalry; over the years, Hord and Spies had developed a kinship in the small pond that is Baltimore architecture. When Spies said he needed to talk, Hord told him to come right over.

They sat outside under a Japanese Snowbell tree as Spies unloaded his news. CSD, he explained, was in deep trouble. Hord, like most of his peers, had had no idea just how bad things were at the 62-year-old firm, one of the largest in the region. He’d had an inkling that business was down. There were significant rounds of layoffs over the previous months—all cataloged in the Baltimore Business Journal—but who hadn’t had to jettison staff to survive the downturn? HCM itself had needed to lay off good people. Then there were the rumors about revenues. “We had heard that their ratios died, but we had heard that about a lot of firms,” Hord recalls.

The rumors turned out to be true. CSD’s cash flow had atrophied, leaving a seriously unbalanced ledger sheet. Revenue projections for 2009 were anemic—just $7 million, down from $15 million the year before—while fixed overhead remained high. The company was, to quote CSD president David Dillard, about to “hear the sound of metal on metal.” That could mean only one of three things: bankruptcy, a merger or acquisition, or something else altogether.

It was this third option that Spies wanted to discuss with Hord. READ MORE HERE.

Conflict Kitchen

2010-06-10T12:21:00.005-04:00

A new restaurant in Pittsburgh will only serve food from regions of the world that are on the outs with the U.S. The first iteration of Conflict Kitchen is Iranian, with a facade designed by Pablo Garcia and graphics created by Brett Yasko (including the wrappers, pictured below).

The menu is Kubideh:

The facade, graphics, and menu will evolve with each country. Next up: Afghanistan.

Finding Language

2010-06-06T12:18:00.004-04:00

I am reading a new book by Robert Richardson called First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. Richardson culled Emerson's lectures and journals to glean his thoughts on the writing life. Emerson never wrote a specific piece about writing, but his private journals offer a thoughtful commentary.

Emerson felt strongly about word choice, believing it to be the writer's job to tether new words together in order to explain life. He bemoaned lazy language and the mindless repetition of fashionable phrases (think today of overused words like "green" "eco" "innovative"). True writers, he said, "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things."

It was this passionate search for the right language that helped Emerson coin so many popular phrases. "Hitch your wagon to a star," for example. The origin was architectural, used to describe the moon-powered tide mills that were grinding meal near his home. The phrase is abstract, but accurate, and it requires the reader to draw his own conclusions.

"In good writing every word means something. In good writing words become one with things."

Emerson's home near Concord, Mass.

The same can be said for architectural language, which is expressed in form rather than words. The vocabulary of a building is constructed, decision by decision, much the way an essay grows, first in words, then in sentences, then in paragraphs. Each builds off the other to generate the whole. If one word is out of place, if the author takes liberties and wishes to hear himself expound rather than write to the truth, the work fails. How many times has a building read as "wrong?" Something about its composition just isn't legible. And then you see the fissures. The authorial hubris that demanded that fenestration; the meek mirroring of another great work; the appropriation of tradition now out of context.

It is this last item that particularly vexed Emerson. He points to religion as an example of lazy language that leans too much on the past.

"If I were called upon to charge a minister, I would say beware of Tradition: Tradition which embarrasses life and falsifies teaching. The sermons that I hear are all dead of that ail. The preacher is betrayed by his ear. He begins to inveigh against some real evils and falls unconsciously into formulas of speech which have been said and sung in the church some ages and have lost all life. They never had any but when freshly and with special conviction applied. But you must never lose sight of the purpose of helping a particular person in every word you say."

Emerson is also very generous. He believed in the contemporary writer's capacity to create prose "freshly and with special conviction" and reminded young writers that the masters they so admire were once like them:

"Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books."

Believe in your ideas, he tells us. Give them grounding and wed them to the appropriate language. Young architects today could learn a lot from Emerson.

Tomorrow Night! Design Convo

2010-06-01T14:09:00.003-04:00

Jonathon Borofsky's Male/Female outside Penn Station.

Design Conversation #20: Public Art (part 2) happens this Wednesday evening at the Windup Space.

Panelists include:

Angela Adams, Public Art Administrator, Arlington Cultural Affairs

Cathy Byrd, Executive Director, Maryland Art Place

Jann Rosen-Queralt, Baltimore City Public Art Commission

Wednesday June 2nd 2010
The Windup Space - 12 W North Ave @ Charles Street
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Design Conversations are monthly events held the first Wednesday of every month at the Windup Space (12 W. North Ave.) at 6:30 pm. These events are open to the public and are loosely curated by volunteers around a series of topics related to design, art, architecture, cities, and anything else that is on your mind. Cash bar and A/V hookup available.

Design Conversations are made possible by the generous support of Baltimore Community Foundation and D:center Baltimore.

This one is being curated by Ben Stone. Questions? ben.stone@gmail.com | www.dcenterbaltimore.com

Baltimore Street Art

2010-05-26T17:21:00.005-04:00

St. John (2010). By Gaia.

My latest "Letter from Baltimore" post for the Metropolis Web site profiles street artist, Gaia.

Baltimore, like most urban environments, is lousy with graffiti. The culture of tagging is well established here. Street art, though, is just starting to take off. In the last few years, wheat-pasted posters and hand-painted imagery have been popping up on abandoned buildings, sidewalks, and light poles. These works of art—and these are art—evoke the likes of Banksy and Swoon, with subject matter that arrests us in our daily travels and reminds us to again see and question the city we occupy. READ MORE HERE.

Material Girl

2010-05-17T11:32:00.005-04:00

Felt Bag designed for the ICFF booth

Congratulations to Inna Alesina, industrial designer and teacher at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and her students for taking the editor's pick at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair this weekend. Inna and her students were selected as one of just four colleges and universities to have a booth at ICFF and of those four, they were selected as the favorite. This year's ICFF Editors Awards Committee was quite distinguished: Arlene Hirst, Anniina Koivu of Abitare, Jessica Johnson of Azure, Stefano Casciani of Domus, Sam Grawe of Dwell, Gilda Bojardi of Interni, Chantal Hamaide of Intramuros, Susan S. Szenasy of Metropolis, Benjamin Kempton of Wallpaper*.

Alesina, who is the co-author with Ellen Lupton of the new book Exploring Materials: Creative Design for Everyday Objects, worked with students to make basic materials from scratch. It was a low-tech approach to understanding the true nature of material. For the bag pictured above, student Sunny Chong made her own felt. Here's how she explains the process:

The felting process requires pressure, water, and friction to transform wool fibers into a compact nonwoven textile. According to the legend of Saint Clement and Saint Christopher, the men packed their sandals with wool to prevent blisters. At the end of their journey, the movement and sweat had turned the wool into felt socks. We packed wool with water and soap in large zipped bags and attached it to the car seat. After several days of driving while sitting on this bag, the wool got felted. This process can create any flat object. We chose to show a bag as an example. This project is about journey-made objects: the two saints travelled by foot, we travel while sitting on our butts. The result can be very similar.

Click here to read what writer Michael Silverberg of Metropolis had to say about the exhibition.

As You Like It

2010-05-12T15:38:00.010-04:00

On a bulletin board in my office I've tacked a postcard given to me by a good friend several years ago. Blue and black block print on heavy card stock, it was produced near Stratford-on-Avon in England where my friend sometimes travels. The front includes a quote from Shakespeare's As You Like It.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

It is Shakespeare at his pastoral best. Safe from the perils of urban life, those in exile find redemption in the natural. "Here, the corruptions of life at court are left behind in order to learn the simple and valuable lessons of the country," explains one literary guide to the work.

Escape to the woods for enlightenment. Retreat to the country.

I am reading a new memoir from a talented writer and she describes leaving New York post 9/11 and heading for the hills, so to speak. A simpler life away from the city. A place to slow down and mine the inner world.

I live in one of a cluster of modest stone homes built in the 1840s to house workers for the then-thriving mills of Baltimore. Back then the nearby Jones Falls River rushed from its source in the mountains of western Maryland, down through the plains and over the geologic break called the fall line, creating rapids before ultimately emptying into the Patapsco River. A few industrious men created a mill district along the banks, capturing the mighty flood to drive the equipment inside their factories. They fabricated cotton sailcloth for the famous Baltimore Clippers, the speedy and nimble ships that outwitted the British during the War of 1812. My street is named for the mill race, the canal created to divert the water to the mill wheel.

Now the Jones Falls is a polluted trickle, damned and rerouted, covered in places. A red sign on its shoreline reads "Danger. Polluted Water. Keep Out."

Today I took a walk to watch the water. There is a platform, built by a developer a few years back, that allows you to sit perched at the water's edge, hovering over a horseshoe-shaped waterfall. The manmade grabs my attention first. The graffiti on the benches, the plastic bottles bucking about in the water's froth, a mylar balloon—long deflated—caught in the branches of a tree.

Then I hear the birdsong. And see a flash of red. A cardinal. Upstream, a male and a female duck move with the current, floating side by side like an old married couple taking a stroll. Across the falls, a gray bird suddenly distinguishes himself from the concrete retaining wall behind him. His head is white and black, and he looks like a small heron of some sort. The bird is rapt, staring at the water. He looks like he might be stalking something and then, suddenly—was it five minutes, was it 15?—he takes off in flight and follows the river downstream.

The yin and the yang of rural and urban. Nature spoiled by man. This is no pristine wood, this is no pastoral sanctuary. The public haunts of man are everywhere; the corruptions that Shakespeare illuminated are palpable. There is something valuable, though, in not retreating from that. I could seek my Walden, but for now I stay rooted here intent on learning the lessons to be found by not running from the city.

Design Convo #19: Streets/Art Part I

2010-04-28T15:17:00.006-04:00

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?

2010-04-25T08:12:00.010-04:00

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

2010-04-23T12:17:00.005-04:00

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

2010-04-20T17:47:00.005-04:00

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

2010-04-19T17:51:00.003-04:00

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

2010-04-19T10:30:00.009-04:00

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

2010-04-12T14:46:00.009-04:00

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

2010-04-07T09:35:00.004-04:00

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.

New Web Site

2010-03-26T16:40:00.002-04:00

Why so few blog posts these days you ask? Well, I've been busy working on a new Web site and it will be ready to share soon...

Tonight! Design Revolution in Baltimore

2010-03-11T10:49:00.004-05:00

Click on the above image for a larger version.

TONIGHT!

DESIGN REVOLUTION: JOIN THE DEBATE

6:30 p.m.

Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount Royal Ave.

THIS EVENT IS FREE!

Debating how the issues of social justice and advocacy will impact the way artists conceive and execute their visual environment, a panel of top designers and editors looks at the future of design practice. Panelists include Emily Pilloton, founder, and Matthew Miller, project manager, of Project H Design, a non-profit dedicated to bringing product design to those who need it most; John Bielenberg, founder of Project M, an immersion program created to inspire young graphic designers, writers, photographers and other creative people to do work that can make a difference; and Julie Lasky, editor of Design Observer’s Change Observer section, which covers socially aware design. I will moderate the discussion.

This panel is a part of the Design Revolution Road Show, an initiative of Project H Design that is traveling across the United States with an exhibition of humanitarian products that empower people and improve life. The exhibition trailer will be open for viewing before and after the panel discussion. The lecture is co-sponsored by D:center Baltimore and Urbanite magazine.

Before the event, at 5:30 pm, Ellen Lupton and Inna Alesina will host a party launching their new book, Exploring Materials. Details below.

International Healthcare

2010-03-10T00:27:00.003-05:00

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, designed by U.S. firm by HDR architects, will be an anchor project for Sowwah Island, the new central business district of Abu Dhabi when it opens in 2012.

For my latest article in Architect magazine, I take a look at the typology of international healthcare and the burst of new buildings going up in the Middle East. Take a look...

In the 1970s, when the king of Saudi Arabia needed a heart operation, he did what Middle East royals had been doing for decades: He traveled to the United States. After his successful procedure at the Cleveland Clinic, more wealthy patients from the region followed, culminating in thousands receiving care at the hospital. But starting in 2012, these patients will no longer have to pull out a passport to get Western medical treatment. The Cleveland Clinic joins other major U.S. institutions, such as Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, in bringing its brand of medicine to the Middle East. When it opens in 2012, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi will be a multi-specialty hospital on a par, its owners hope, with the world’s top medical institutions.

READ MORE HERE.

Elle Decor Goes to Baltimore

2010-02-15T12:50:00.005-05:00

The March issue of Elle Decor includes a travel piece on Baltimore written by Jill Gerston (and including a quote from yours truly). Gerston highlights lots of good architecture and design resources, like Patrick Sutton and Housewerks. Check it out.

Design Convo #15

2010-01-27T13:23:00.005-05:00

The line-up for next week's Design Convo in Baltimore is just stellar.

Geoff Stack and Julie Gabrielli will be leading the conversation, which has the theme Sustainability: diversity, interdependence, self-organization. We’ll explore how these concepts can apply to design work in Baltimore and beyond.

After a brief introduction, there will be three short presentations:

Julie Gabrielli of GOforChange will talk about the diversity of the UMD LEAFhouse project team. (I wrote about this project for The New York Times Magazine)
Pavlina Ilieva of PI.KL Studio will discuss the aspects of self organization in the Commonwealth project she completed with partner Kuo Pao Lian.
Dana Bourland will cover the interdependent parts of her work with the Enterprise Community Partners

After, there will be about 60 minutes of facilitated small group dialogue with plenty of time to share thoughts and new ideas.

The 411:

Wednesday, February 3rd

6:30 pm. At the Windup Space, 12 W. North Avenue, Baltimore.

Free to all. Cash bar.

Brought to you by D:center Baltimore.

(We will be encouraging folks to find ways to support Architecture for Humanity’s efforts in Haiti at this event. If you cannot make it, please check out A4H at this link.)

Letterpress Design Competition

2010-01-15T15:19:00.004-05:00

Holy crap this is cool...

Gilah Press + Design in Baltimore is hosting Ready, Set, Fly! a design competition that could result in your artwork being tranformed into a limited edition letterpress print. Ten submissions will be selected for inclusion in a limited edition box set.

The theme for the competition is "fly" and can be interpreted however you like. Designs will be judged based on concept, design, illustration, and typography. Gilah will then host a show featuring the new work and the box sets will be available for purchase.

To submit your work for consideration, go here. The deadline is February 12.

And to learn more about the fantastic work being done at Gilah, check out this blog post from when I toured their studio space last month.

A Heidelberg letterpress in the Gilah Press + Design studio in Hampden.

Detroit's New Taubman Center

2010-01-13T09:13:00.004-05:00

Middle school students at the new Henry Ford Academy in the Taubman Center in Detroit. All photos by Nathan Kirkman for Metropolis.

In November of 2009, I went back to Detroit after being in the Motor City for Project M (and starting a big debate with this blog post.) While in town during the Project M trip, I got a late night tour of the then-under construction Argonaut building . Once home to General Motors design group, the building was being renovated by the College for Creative Studies into an interdisciplinary design eduction and innovation hub, with activities ranging from a design-focused charter school to professional space for start-up designers. I saw the building in action this fall and wrote about its transformation—and the evolution of design education —for this month's issue of Metropolis magazine. See the excerpt and link to the full article below.

Inside the new Taubman Center in Detroit.

Back to the Future

A school dedicated to design-based learning opens in the very building where GM's legendary Harley Earl became the father of the modern car.

It’s an overcast day in early November, and the students of the Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies (HFA) seem especially charged. Deshon Mumford, a ninth grader, leads a tour of his new school and explains that some of the excitement may be because he and his classmates just picked their official mascot. The sixth-to-twelfth-grade public charter school opened eight weeks earlier with students from neighborhoods across the city of Detroit as the inaugural class, and now they are helping to establish traditions. Nominations were taken, votes counted, and from here forward the students of HFA will be known as the Mustangs. Deshon, a bright kid who likes to write poetry, says it wasn’t his first choice, but he appreciates the process. “We all got a vote,” he says. READ MORE.

Writing for the Web

2010-01-11T13:49:00.004-05:00

I recognize the irony in using a photo of a vintage typewriter for this post, but it's so much nicer than a shot of a keyboard...

I'll be teaching an evening Odyssey course through Johns Hopkins University this winter titled: Writing for the Web: A Primer for Getting Published.

There are increasingly more opportunities to get published online as print magazines fold and Web-only presences emerge. Writing for the Web and submitting online to publications is not the same as writing and submitting to print publications. Knowing the difference is important. In this course, we will talk about where publishing is going and how the online community will affect writing opportunities. This class is one part writing—how to make your prose sing for an online audience—and one part practical—how to get published or self-publish via a blog. It's a workshop for those who want to get published for fun or for profit.

This continuing education class is open to anyone. Click here to be redirected to the Odyssey home page and then click on the image of their Spring 2010 course catalog for more information and registration forms.

The basic 411:

Class takes place on the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University
$180 (12 hours) 6 sessions.
Tuesdays, February 16 - March 30, with no class on March 9.

New Year, New Blog

2009-12-30T11:33:00.002-05:00

For the past several weeks I have been working with Web designer Justin Kropp on creating an actual Web site for my work and my blog. So very soon I will be launching eedickinson.net. Stay tuned...

Big Boyz

2009-12-21T15:26:00.003-05:00

As seen at Friends bar in Fells Point. Photo by Seth Sawyers.

'Tis the season for best of lists and countless retrospectives, so I'll add to the growing pile with the Best Marketing Technique of 2009. And the winner is...Big Boyz Bail Bonds. Sad, but true. Anyone living in Baltimore has likely seen their blazing pink and yellow ballpoint pens peaking out of restaurant aprons and pleather credit card folders. I've seen them in offices, coffee shops, college classrooms... Nearly as many pens as there are bail bond locations. I've been told that reps from the company drop these off by the bagfull in vans emblazoned with the Big Boyz logo. I've also been told that the pens have a knack for breaking open and bleeding blue ink all over you. I should insert some serious social commentary on the industrial prison complex and the truth that these pens portend, but I'll let the garish, prolific, oozing pens speak for themselves.

Market Forecast: 2010

2009-12-21T14:57:00.003-05:00

For Architect magazine's December issue, I spoke with experts in different sectors of the architecture and construction industry to find out what they think will happen next year. Here's what they had to say...

RIP I.D.

2009-12-16T08:34:00.003-05:00

More bad news from the world of design. F+W Media announced yesterday that it will fold I.D. magazine. After January, the 55 year-old publication will be no longer. This ranks up there with the loss of Gourmet in my mind. Another stalwart publication bites the dust.

The publisher released the following statement to explain their decision:

The fragmentation and specialized information needs of I.D.'s core readers (product designers) and the plethora of information resources available to them—some for free (online and B2B) and others that are highly specialized and targeted to specific industries served.

F+W will continue to produce Print.

Holiday Shopping

2009-12-05T09:42:00.007-05:00

A long hiatus from blogging. I went to Paris over Thanksgiving. When my husband and I returned to the U.S., the customs officer looked suspicious when we said we were bringing absolutely nothing back with us (besides higher cholesterol and an extra five pounds). The exchange rate just sucked, so no gifts from abroad. Back in Baltimore today and the weather can't decide if it wants to rain or snow. So for now, it's snrainy. We've got a fire going in the wood stove, but I'm going to venture out into the inclement day and join my friend Lisa at the Charm City Craft Mafia Holiday Heap sale over at St. John's Church. A sneak peak at some of the vendors below. Runs until 5 PM today in case you're in town and want to head over.

Letterpress cards from Bowerbox Press.

As someone who likes to keep handwritten journals when I travel, here's a map of Florence book by Bowerbox Press.

Screenprints from 2Hawks2Fishes. They have a wonderful collection of rock posters from local bands.

Flasks by Maneating Flower

Ceramics by Little Flower Design

Event: Build Boston

2009-11-17T18:33:00.004-05:00

Parkview Terrace, an affordable housing development for the elderly in San Francisco that combines universal design with beautiful aesthetics. A portion of the 101 units were set aside for the homeless.

I'm flying to Boston tomorrow night to be a part of a panel discussion on Thursday at the annual Build Boston Conference. The topic: New Models of Home for our Third Age (scroll to the bottom of this link).

I'll be presenting projects from the book I am researching about new models of residential design for our aging population (more on this in the not-to-distant future, I hope). I touched on this topic last year in an article for Architect magazine.

I'll be joined by Gabriela Bonome-Sims from the Institute for Human Centered Design, Elaine Ostroff, Hon. AIA, and Susan Szenasy of Metropolis magazine. The talk runs from 6-7:30, so for those of you heading to Build Boston, I hope you'll pop by.

Old School Remedy

2009-11-15T15:11:00.008-05:00

I was invited to dinner last week by a group of undergraduate graphic designers at the Maryland Institute College of Art involved in a course called Design Coalition. Taught by professor Ryan Clifford, the course partners with members of the East Baltimore community to bring graphic design and problem-solving to a neighborhood struggling to come out from under years of disinvestment and decline. The dinner was a chance for the students to cook their favorite dishes for some of the community members and to get to know each other better.

One of the guests was a woman named Ma Perkins. Ma has lived in East Baltimore her entire life and when asked what her neighborhood needs to recover and sustain itself, she talked about the young people. "They don't know how to take care of themselves. They are always looking to others for help," she told me. She talked about growing up in a family that hailed from St. Mary's, a rural farming community in Southern Maryland, where her ancestors were slaves on tobacco farms. She talked about knowing how to make a bag of groceries last for weeks, and how to stretch basics like beans and rice. Her generation, she said, knew how to take care of itself and fix what needed fixing. She talked about skills like carpentry and quilting and sewing, and how those are lost to kids today. This got us on the topic of simple home remedies. "You know the best cure for a cold with a cough? White onion," she said. You take an onion, slice it thin, top it with sugar and lemon, and let it cure. Then, Perkins explained, you drink the syrup. "That cold will be gone in no time."

This return to basic resourcefulness is a part of the DIY design movement, but what Ma Perkins was addressing goes deeper. It's not just about making something new, it's about making do.

We started to hatch a plan for gathering some of the elders in East Baltimore for an Old School Remedy night where they could pass along lessons and skills that may otherwise be forgotten. We talked about making a cookbook—or a sourcebook—to gather these stories and ideas.

Seems Ma Perkins is on to something.

Making the rounds on the Web last week was news of a new Brooklyn start-up magazine called Remedy Quarterly. The magazine has the tagline: Stories of Food, Recipes for Feeling Good. They explain their publication this way:

Remedy Quarterly is a magazine of food stories and the recipes that go with them. We love that food is a common language and drew inspiration from community cookbooks. The first issue of Remedy Quarterly starts where food often starts—at home. We have stories of family coming around the table, a cake that brings the author home in her mind, and a vegetarian coming home to omnivorism.

And, of course, there are the remedies. Though some of these sound downright awful. (And dumb. Raw egg in warm beer for a hangover cure? I think Remedy Quarterly needs a Remedy Test Kitchen like Cook's Illustrated.)

In addition to the obvious overlap in the conversation I had with Ma Perkins, I thought the two pages that the editors sampled from their inaugural issue to be particularly coincidental in light of our dinner gathering among friends: one about onions, the other about food...

Thursday Night! Design Convo #13

2009-11-04T16:18:00.004-05:00

(Click on image for a larger version)

If you are free tomorrow evening, Nov. 5 from 6pm-9pm, I hope you can pop by the next monthly installment of the Baltimore Design Conversation. The topic is "Design Policy + Tactics." (Click on the above image to get more details.)

As usual, the event will happen at the Windup Space, 10-12 W. North Ave. near the corner of Charles Street. The event is free and open to the public. You are invited to bring ideas and share your thoughts with the group or just swing in for a beer and some interesting conversation.

For those of you not familiar with the event, the Baltimore Design Conversation is a monthly program organized by a group of people (including myself) who think design culture should play a greater role in the future of Baltimore. The Design Conversations have been a way to highlight significant work being done by designers and to discuss design issues relevant to Baltimore and cities in general. It is also an outgrowth of the D:center Baltimore.

Questions? Contact this month's Design Convo coordinator, Eric Leshinsky @
eric (at) g-r-a-p-h.com

Solar Decathlon

2009-10-23T09:00:00.006-04:00

Illinois' entry. All photos of the Decathlon homes by Jim Tetro, U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

You can read more about my (rainy! cold!) trip to DC for this year's Solar Decathlon by clicking here for my Metropolis blog post. One thing I mention in that post is that the second place team from Illinois (pictured above) used a vernacular architecture for their decathlon entry. They channeled a classic gabled design that would feel right at home on the prairies of the Midwest.

Some other designs in the competition felt derivative as well...

The entry from Cornell:

Reminded me of the waste water treatment plant In Dundalk, Maryland:

The entry from Missouri:

Looks an awful lot like Shutter Shades:

The Arizona house, below, reminded me of the sloped glass sunrooms attached to some Wendy's restaurants, but I couldn't find the right image of a Wendy's online. Maybe I'll go snap a photo of the one on York Road near Belvedere Square...

Building Science Research

2009-10-16T15:40:00.006-04:00

Team California's design for the Solar Decathlon.

Tomorrow I will brave the cold and the rain and head south to D.C. to see the prototype houses set up on the National Mall for the Solar Decathlon. (Germany just edged out Illinois for first place in the overall rankings.)

The Decathlon is an event that advances building science research and encourages universities to examine high efficiency home design. But overall, the U.S. and the building industry are simply not investing enough sustained capital into research and development in spite of the fact that buildings are our biggest energy sink.

My latest feature article in Architect magazine looks at how much money is invested into the science of designing better buildings and where that money is going:

Shaky Foundation
Taming the economic, environmental and geopolitical cost of energy has emerged as a natinal imperative. So why are research dollars for building performance so scarce?

When McKinsey & Co., a global management consulting firm, released a report on energy efficiency in July, it caused quite a stir among building science researchers. Called “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy,” the report concluded that an upfront investment of $520 billion in efficiency measures could shrink this country’s non-transportation energy consumption in the next decade by 23 percent, or $1.2 trillion. That’s a considerable return on investment.
There is, of course, a catch. To realize such savings, the United States would need to rally around a national agenda. “Energy efficiency offers a vast, low-cost energy resource for the U.S. economy—but only if the nation can craft a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it,” the report states.
When it comes to building science research in this country—including everything from seismic and safety issues, to materiality and performance, to indoor air quality and moisture—we don’t do “comprehensive.” American building science research is, at best, piecemeal; at worst, it’s barely funded. There is no federal agency that spearheads research endeavors, and no dedicated funding stream that supports scientists. The building industry itself—architecture, engineering, manufacturing, construction, and maintenance—is a $1-trillion-per-year business employing some 1.7 million people, but it simply does not invest in R&D the way that, say, pharmaceutical companies do. The building sector spends one-tenth as much on R&D as the national average for other industries, according to Mark Frankel, technical director of the nonprofit New Buildings Institute (NBI). READ MORE.

Tonight: Meet Maurice Cox from the NEA

2009-10-15T08:06:00.004-04:00

Tonight, AIA's Urban Design Committee hosts a free forum on The Role of Design Centers in Urban Regeneration. Maurice Cox, Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts, will join Gary Gaston, Director of the Design Studio at the Nashville Civic Design Center, to talk about the formation of a community design center and the place for design in a city like Baltimore. I'll moderate a panel discussion after their presentations and we'll all get a chance to talk about Baltimore's efforts to form its own D:center Baltimore. I hope you can stop by.

The 411:

Thursday, October 15, 2009
Time: 6:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Location: RTKL, 901 S. Bond St., Baltimore, MD, 21231, Fells Point
Cost: FREE
1.5 AIA/CES Credits

Support Pie Lab

2009-10-13T10:59:00.005-04:00

What is Pie Lab? It's a fantastic experiment in community building and design in Greensboro, Alabama. And the designers who started it need your help. If they raise $10,000 by November 1, they will realize their goal of building a new center for design, community—and pie—on Greensboro's historic Main Street. You can learn more about the project by watching this video.

Design Convo 12: Bikes

2009-10-05T17:10:00.007-04:00

Click on image for a larger version.

This Thursday, October 8 join D:center baltimore for Design Conversation 12: Bikes. This month is an open discussion on frame building, bicycle design, bicycle infrastructure, bike collectives, bike lanes, and all things cycling. A/V system available for impromptu presentations. As always, the event is free. Cash bar. For more details, click on the above invitation and spread the word. The more the merrier! Also note that DC 12 has been shifted from the usual first Wednesday of the month to the first Thursday.

The 411:

Thursday October 8 2009
The Windup Space - 10 W North Ave @ Charles Street
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Questions? ben.stone@gmail.com | thewindupspace@gmail.com | blog.dcenterbaltimore.com

And speaking of bikes, I just got back from a weekend in Philadelphia and that city is lousy with cyclists. Bikes everywhere. Here are a few snapshots:

Spotted outside the Standard Tap.

Spotted in the Northern Liberties Neighborhood: Metal bike racks with glass-enclosed marketing signs for local businesses. This one was advertising the music line up at a local club.

Spotted in Rittenhouse Square: Tons of bikes, no place to park them. Cyclists ignored the official signs about not locking their bikes to the fence. Philadelphia needs what DC just created: a garage for bikes.

The new Mobis bike station in D.C.

Building for the Better

2009-10-01T10:45:00.004-04:00

The October issue of Urbanite magazine hit the streets today and it focuses on the built environment. I wrote a piece about the evolution of social design and how it's playing out in the city...

It’s November in Greensboro, Alabama, and a rare cold snap has brought frigid temperatures to this southern town. In a modest two-story house on the edge of Greensboro’s main street, five graphic design students and two professors from Maryland Institute College of Art are waking up.

There’s no furnace, just space heaters, so the MICA team is encased in sleeping bags in a room full of bunk beds. The scene resembles something from a sci-fi movie: frozen bodies cocooned in nylon, plumes of breath rising in the ash-gray light. Someone ventures to the kitchen to make breakfast. A carton of eggs left out overnight has frozen solid. READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

Event: Baltimore Architecture Week Panel

2009-09-30T16:16:00.005-04:00

Baltimore Architecture Week kicks off in less than two weeks and among the events is a panel discussion moderated by yours truly. The topic is the role of design centers in urban regeneration and the creation of a comprehensive design center in Baltimore. Gary Gaston of the Nashville Civic Design Center will be here to talk about that city's successful formula for a center and Maurice Cox, architect and Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts, will discuss the rise in community-centered design and the ways to bring design to all. The panel will be followed by a Q&A with the audience, so it promises to be an interesting and enlightening evening. And it's FREE.

The 411:

Thursday, October 15
6-8:30 PM
RTKL
901 S. Bond Street

Park(ing) Day in Pictures

2009-09-25T14:29:00.009-04:00

Floura Teeter's parking space turned cafe and croquet court.

As I mention in the post below, I didn't make it to Park(ing) Day celebrations around Baltimore and reader Joe McGinley of Floura Teeter landscape architects was kind enough to forward photos. Floura Teeter took over three spots on W. Franklin Street and turned them into a café seating area with a croquet lawn.

Thanks for the photos, Joe!

Morgan State's landscape program also created an installation for the front of Brewers Art in Mount Vernon. Here are some sketches from their concept (and if anyone was there, send pictures):

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive. UP reader Gerritt Shuffstall forwarded photos from Morgan's installation on Charles Street:

The Rules of the Road

2009-09-25T09:23:00.007-04:00

I missed national Park(ing) Day activities in Baltimore last Friday. I had heard that a new boutique hotel in the central business district (the Kimpton chain finally came to town) was going to participate. Coincidentally, that same day, friends dropped off an article from the February issue of Scientific American (thanks Lisa and Kerr!). The story explains how street closures and shared roadways can actually increase efficiency. The author describes what is known as the Nash Equilibrium, where an individual driver does not fare better than other drivers by seeking out the fastest route. Since most drivers take a selfish, individualistic approach to the road, the theory continues, most everyone is changing their strategy to reach the route perceived to be the most efficient. Which more often results in traffic jams.

Conversely, roads designed to force an unselfish approach seem to function more efficiently. The writer points to the concept of shared streets. "The practice encourages driver anarchy by removing traffic lights, street markings, and boundaries between the street and the sidewalk. Studies conducted in northern Europe, where shared streets are common, point to improved safety and traffic flow."

A Baltimore Share Lane.

Baltimore does not have shared streets, per se, but we are seeing an increase in "share lanes," which include large symbols of bicycles on the asphalt meant to encourage drivers to yield to cyclists. I didn't immediately grasp what this was when I first encountered one in my neighborhood. (If you want to talk more about cycling and the city, come to the D:Center's next Baltimore Design Convo on Wednesday, October 7 at 6:30 PM at The Wind Up Space. The topic will be biking.)

So back to parking. The story included a sidebar about San Francisco, the city where Park(ing) day was born. Planners in the United States in the 1950s believed that a few free parking spots downtown were paramount to attracting people into the city, a strategy now understood to be counterintuitive. It ignored the basic economic truth that lower prices increase demand, thus spurring an insatiable desire for more car parks. "Now limited urban space and concerns about global warming are inspiring city planners to eliminate these requirements," the article states. In San Francisco, a city that once required all development to include parking, planners now limit parking to no more than 7 % of a building's square footage. That's not a lot. The result: while employment has increased in the city, traffic congestion has gone down as people walk, bike, and take transit.

Ask the folks at the Downtown Partnership in Baltimore (where my brother works, FYI) and they will tell you that parking is a major issue in this city. Take it away and you risk a business relocating elsewhere. The challenge here is that many of the people coming into downtown do not live in walking distance. They cannot realistically bike in from the suburbs and regional public transit options are abysmal. Look at the places where share lanes and street closures work: New York, Portland, San Francisco...places with public transit and people living and working in close proximity. But even if you don't live nearby, see what happens in a place like New York. The distance from Queens to Manhattan is about 11 miles. The distance from Towson, Maryland to Baltimore city is about 14 miles, a negligible difference. You can get from Queens to a job in Midtown without needing a car. Not as easy a commute from Towson to the city.

So what's the answer? How do you take those cities where transit is limited to cars (most American cities) and attempt to transform them? I think I'll pose this question at the next Design Convo....

Book Panel: Spirit of Place

2009-09-24T16:30:00.003-04:00

This Saturday at noon, I'll be moderating a panel at the Baltimore Book Festival about the book Spirit of Place. You can learn more about the book itself by reading the post I wrote last year for Metropolis magazine. The panel will include the authors as well as several of the people featured in the book, including J. Michael Flanigan, an antiques dealer and appraiser on Antiques Roadshow and Vince Peranio, film and TV production designer for John Waters' films and The Wire. There's a book signing after. It takes place in the Literary Salon at noon. Learn more here.

SHoP and Atlantic Yards

2009-09-17T14:32:00.005-04:00

SHoP Architects and Ellerbe Becket will replace the ousted Frank Gehry on the troubled Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards project. When the news broke last week, it sparked discussion in the design community, including more speculation over the turmoil of this Forest City Ratner project.

I ran a piece on SHoP last year where founding principle Gregg Pasquarelli discussed his firm's philosophy. There's a short Q & A with Pasquarelli about Atlantic Yards here.

Gehry's design: Dr. Seuss takes Brooklyn.

The SHoP Design: Better?

From Basil to Pesto

2009-09-13T19:49:00.005-04:00

I'm on deadline for several writing assignments, which means I am avoiding writing. Or at least, the writing I'm supposed to be doing. Fall is here. Canada geese just honked over the house. I decided it was the perfect night to harvest my basil plant and make pesto for the winter. Because I'll be freezing the pesto for later (in ice cube trays for single serving cubes), I hold off adding the Parmesan cheese until it's ready to use. Fresh leaves, lots of garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, pepper... I also add a bit of parsley. It keeps the pesto green without changing the base flavor. In the winter I put it on toast for breakfast or stir it into soup. When used in a pasta dish, I add 1/3 cup of pasta cooking water to 2/3 cup pesto to allow the pesto to thin a bit and better coat the linguine.

I'm also making chicken stock from the bones of a chicken I roasted earlier this week. The smell of it is filling the house. The hand's down best recipe for whole roasted chicken is in the Gourmet cookbook. Butter, salt, pepper, a dutch oven. That's it. You can make a delicious pan gravy from the drippings with a touch of fresh lemon juice.

Project M Detroit: Plot 63

2009-09-12T12:35:00.002-04:00

I wrote a blog post for Metropolis magazine about the few days I spent in Detroit as an adviser for Project M. The post elicited a flurry of response, particularly from locals who took exception to my characterization of their city and outsiders who thought the residents' comments were offbase. Reading through this online "dialogue" presents an interesting picture of the challenges of urban renewal. Who is allowed to participate? Why do we get in each others' way? Critics lambasted the graphic designers for their immersion into the city saying that "2 weeks is simply not enough time to understand the complexities of this place or to affect lasting, sustained change." Hmmm. Well, the designers responded with their actions. Check it out:

Q & A with Van Jones

2009-09-06T11:20:00.017-04:00

Van Jones.

In April of 2007, I was just finishing up my tenure as the editor-in-chief of Urbanite magazine. One of the last issues I helped to produce was about the evolution of the environmental movement, and how it was embracing a broader message of social justice. Paul Hawken had just released the new book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came in to Being and Why No One Saw it Coming. And a California activist named Van Jones was talking about the creation of green collar jobs. We brought Jones in to be a guest editor for that issue, and we interviewed him about politics and the future of social and civil rights in America.

Jones went on to become Obama's Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality and last night he resigned amidst a bizarre "scandal" being credited, in part, to Glenn Beck. In his statement to the press, Jones wrote:

On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I have been inundated with calls—from across the political spectrum—urging me to stay and fight. But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

Jones talked at length about that "all hands on deck" approach in our 2007 interview. I thought I would share some more excerpts from our conversation, which took place in the winter of 2007.

The New York Times recently called you the new face of environmentalism. What did you think about that designation?

Oh, it’s silly but what can you do?

How did you start to evolve your work from social justice and begin to tap into the idea of the environmental movement?

I had been doing work primarily on criminal justice for a very long time and it was around 2000 that I went through a real emotional, spiritual crisis, for lack of a better term. I was banging my head against the wall going to business people for funding. It just kind of came to me as an epiphany: we need green jobs not jails. The green capitalists were trying to do enterprise in a more responsible way. We were working for restorative justice in the criminal justice system and these people were working for restorative economics. I thought that we should be allied and we should work together. It wasn’t very fancy, it was more like “Oh wow these people are talking about creating cool enterprises and who’s going to work for them?”

I thought that this green economy that was coming should be more than just business opportunities for rich people and consumer options for affluent people. I felt like we should make sure that this green wave would create job opportunities and wealth building opportunities and health improving opportunities for poor people. That was seven years ago. I was stunned that it struck people as novel. People would scratch their heads: “You’re talking about the environment and you’re talking about business and aren’t you a human rights guy?”

From my point of view it has always been about uplifting people. We don’t have any throwaway resources or species. We also don’t have any throwaway children or neighborhoods. It’s all sacred and precious and we should act that way.

Here in Baltimore, everyone has their own individual silos and they struggle to bridge that gap between what they’re doing and what others are doing. How do you address that?

In the ‘90’s everybody specialized in defining their problem really well. In the year 2000, Bush came in and within four years everyone was very clear: whatever your problem is, you’re not going to be able to solve it by yourself, in the face of a military petroleum complex, in alliance with the fundamentalist right led by this authoritarian president. Whatever you’re working on whether it’s lesbian and gay issues, civil rights issues, whatever your issue is, you’re too little to beat the Bush coalition. It meant that people who spent a decade slicing the problem more and more narrowly, whether it’s their own issue, the invasion of Iraq, Katrina, suddenly realized we have way too many enemies and way too few friends. Now what we’re seeing is a turning back toward each other on the part of the progressives. You’re seeing a willingness or an openness increasingly for people to make more friends on the left than enemies. A key to that is the turning away from talking about issues and problems, and starting to talk about solutions.

People get very frustrated because they feel somewhat impotent to impact change right now. You get people activated at a small community level and it does seem to impact change.

A lot of what is beautiful in our country is its roots. They’re underground and it’s not visible at first. There’s a way that we think if it’s not on the mainstream media everyday it doesn’t exist. I’ve gone to hundreds and hundreds of conferences, meeting tens of thousands of people. All of them say: “I’m all alone, the whole country is stupid, why isn’t anyone saying anything about BLANK?"

It is this way that we’ve trained ourselves to feel helpless and trained ourselves to feel marginal because we’re looking to the mainstream media to reflect ourselves back to ourselves.

In reality, there’s this huge, huge network of people who really do care and who turn the t.v. off and actually look at our lives as they’re occurring. We’re bigger than ever.

A lot of what is beautiful in our country is its roots. They’re underground and it’s not visible at first. There’s a way that we think if it’s not on the mainstream media everyday it doesn’t exist.

What does that mean? It means that even though the mainstream media is lying and stupid and talks about Jessica Simpson all the time or Britney Spears’ latest crush, the reality is that people get it. The tide is turning. People are now looking for answers. They can’t do more bashing-Bush books or bumper stickers. You have to come forward with solutions, because people get that Bush let them down. They may not say it the way you say it, they may not feel it the way you do. They may argue it differently, but they know Bush let them down. Now the question is can progressives step forward with a plausible vision for the country?

I think that we will get somewhere, but it doesn’t start out with a million people on the Washington Mall. It starts with people in their communities, their workplaces, their neighborhoods, getting clearer and clearer not about what they’re against, but what they’re for.

You’ve gotten very creative about this, getting your message out to lawmakers through vehicles like a record label. What are some of the other things you’ve been doing that you feel are successful in getting your message out?

Well, you know, there’s no easy way to do this stuff. The most important thing is that you be willing to be an insider as well as an outsider. We all need each other. We have a very complicated system that we’re trying to change. We need to be at least as sophisticated as the system we are trying to impact, which means we need lots and lots of people doing lots and lots of things and we need to support each other.

We’ve done everything from the sit-ins and marches to rallies and press conferences to research reports and papers. We go to a lot of funerals and stand outside of a lot of prisons. So the thing about the Ella Baker Center is that we are willing to try anything. We’re willing to work with anybody and everybody.

I was digging through a bunch of photographs over the weekend and here’s a picture of me with Coretta Scott King, a there's picture of me with John McCain. I can show my friends most of these pictures, but can I show these other pictures? I know which party I feel close to, but at the end of the day, there are good people in all of the parties. There’s one thing that we can all do together and for each other: We can learn something that we didn’t know. That’s invaluable. We spend so much time inbred and incestuous and we wonder why we don’t have fresh ideas. For me, it’s very simple. This government is on the side of the problem makers of the U.S. economy. They’re on the side of the warmongers, the incarcerators, the polluters. The problem solvers in the U.S. economy, the eco-entrepreneurs who are trying to go with clean energy and renewable fuel and who are trying to do triple bottom line and treat their workers right—the grandmas, the coaches, the counselors, the art instructors, the yoga teachers—those people get no help from the government. If anything they get a hard time. It’s really time that we put the U.S. government on the side of the problem solvers in the U.S. economy and that will require a grand alliance, a grand coalition. It will require a coalition as big as the New Deal coalition from FDR’s day or the New Right coalition that formed around Reagan to take the country back in another direction.

I know which party I feel close to, but at the end of the day, there are good people in all of the parties. There’s one thing that we can all do together and for each other: We can learn something that we didn’t know. That’s invaluable. We spend so much time inbred and incestuous and we wonder why we don’t have fresh ideas.

They need that kind of a grand coalition, a green growth alliance that includes the best of business, the best of labor, the best of urban activism, the best environmentalists, to say we can build a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. The market can’t do it by itself and we can’t do it without the market. You’ve got to have a partnership between government, community groups, and the best of business to put the country back to work.

Retrofitting all these buildings, putting up solar panels, putting up windmills, figuring out free ways to do agriculture, that’s the agenda of the future, that’s the agenda that can bring together the best of the country. But you can’t get there if you’re mainly focused on your issue and you aren’t focused on the big solution that moves the whole agenda forward for a potential progressive governing majority.

Who are some of the other leaders that you’re seeing arising around this idea of the new green agenda?

Majora Carter is probably the most important figure. She runs Sustainable South Bronx.

Certainly, Omar Freilla who runs the green workers co-operative also in the South Bronx is an important figure. He wants to do green jobs, but on a co-operative basis so the workers actually own what they’re working and he’s making real progress in getting investments also African-American.

You have Jerome Ringo who leads the National Apollo Alliance, pulling together this big alliance of national labor organizations, national environmental groups, business leaders, community leaders, to get the U.S. government to pursue a clean energy jobs strategy.

You have in Los Angeles Anthony Thigpen who is running the Los Angeles Apollo Alliance. He convinced the mayor of Los Angeles to sign on to the Los Angeles Apollo Challenge to create a job training pathway to green employment to the community colleges down in Southern California.

You have Winona LaDuke who ran for vice president twice on the green party ticket, a Native American leader doing clean energy on the reservation, an unbelievably inspiring, powerful writer and speaker.

There are many others. The difference is rather than focusing on environmental problems, we’re focusing on environmental solutions, a solution-based environmental agenda that can engage the majority of Americans. Not just the few who can afford the eco-premiums for the eco-chic products, but the majority of people who need their homes to be retrofitted so they don’t leak so much energy so they can save money, who need to move to a clean energy strategy because their kid has asthma, who need for us to move away from poison-based agriculture and toward organic agriculture because they’re suffering from cancer. There is a new working-class environmentalism, an environmentalism with its sleeves rolled-up and its fingernails dirty trying to make America work for the majority of people who live here. That’s the future.

I work in neighborhoods where kids go to school, 30 kids in a classroom, six books, and no chalk. There are metal detectors that go off all the time not because kids are bringing in guns but because they are bringing in inhalers for their asthma and I think we can do better than that in this country.

I have to say also that there is an emerging rainbow of hope in the United States. If you look at Barack Obama, if you look at Deval Patrick, who just became the first African-American governor of Massachusetts and ran on a message of hope, if you look at Cory Booker who’s now the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. You’ve got world-class leadership.

It’s important for us to recognize that the country that we want is being born in us everyday and it’s not about how awful Bush is, it’s not about all the bad news we’ve got to focus on. We already have in our ranks as many people who have marched against the war in Vietnam or ever went to jail in the Civil Rights Movement. Those were microscopic minorities compared to the whole country. The question is: are we willing to put forth real solutions for the country?

How do environmentalists reach out to our counterparts in social justice and get something going that’s more powerful than all of us who are just trying to do our own thing?

Well, I think two things. First of all, it’s about coalition building. It’s about going and being in service and listening. It’s an investment of time. There are leaders you like and organizations you admire, even if you’re executive director of your own thing and you’re a big shot in your own little world, be willing to go be of some service. Go get on a board and just help them do what they’re doing. Don’t say come over here and help me do what I’m doing, go help them do what they’re doing and listen and assume that there must be an awful lot that you don’t know that they’re desperately trying to communicate to you, while you’re trying to communicate at them. Somebody’s got to stop talking and start listening. Last century was the century of the great speaker. I think that this century is the century of the great listener. Can you actually just go and learn?

Number two, none of this stuff is going to happen based on issues or solutions. Groups work together or don’t work together based on individual relationships. Who knows each other? Who likes each other? Who respects each other? You used to be housemates or you went to school together. So we have to create artificial opportunities for people to get that level of this personal knowledge going across these racial, class divides. Is it possible to do some leadership retreats together? Everybody’s struggling around fundraising. Everybody’s struggling around human resources and meeting huge demands.

The last thing I’ll say is go slow, but go fast because it would be much, much better to do one small thing, a small information sharing brunch where people from one organization come to another organization and just get a tour of the building and get a little face and eye time for one hour. That will do so much more than trying to say we’re going to create this huge coalition and we’re going to argue about language, and get frustrated with each other and hate each other for the rest of our lives, which is the basic strategy so far that I can tell.

Somebody’s got to stop talking and start listening. Last century was the century of the great speaker. I think that this century is the century of the great listener. Can you actually just go and learn?

I think that part of it is that coalition work is more emotional, it’s more heart, but we immediately go into our heads. Who do you want to spend a lot of time with and who are you willing to trust with money? Who are you willing to trust with getting more attention than you? It has a lot more to with dating than it does with manifestos.

When you use the word “sustainable” in your discussions with us do you have any feelings about the appropriateness of that term? What do you think about it?

I don’t use it when talking to most people. A lot of terms like racial justice, eco-sustainability, nobody uses except like .001% of the population. So I just try to avoid it.

How do you, then, communicate to your audience what your message is?

I talk about people. I work in neighborhoods where kids go to school, 30 kids in a classroom, six books, and no chalk. There are metal detectors that go off all the time not because kids are bringing in guns but because they are bringing in inhalers for their asthma and I think we can do better than that in this country. You don’t half to talk about race, about racial justice or sustainability; you’re talking about people.

The problem is that we want everybody to have a PhD level of understanding about social change and ecology in order to really feel comfortable in our meetings or to understand what we’re talking about on the radio. I don’t think that’s right. There are two kinds of smart people: the smart people who take very simple shit and make it complicated and the smart people who take very complicated shit and make it simple. And the problem is we’ve got these kids coming on campuses and the only thing they’ve seen is professors taking very simple things and making them complicated because that’s what intellectuals do. There’s a time to study and there’s a time to actually give a shit.

Welcome to Detroit

2009-09-03T18:00:00.004-04:00

I blew the (descriptive) wad, as it were, on my blog post for Metropolis. Check it out.

And come back soon for more photos from the Motor City.

A Random Thought

2009-09-03T12:28:00.004-04:00

Will the definition of the word "glacial" have to change now that all of the glaciers are melting? The word is used to be "suggestive of the very slow movement of glaciers" according to its definition. As in: Progress on health care reform has been glacial. But with the swiftly melting ice caps, maybe glacial will come to mean something altogether different?

Cartoon from the The New Yorker.

And speaking of glacial, that's been my pace for posting. I have interesting news from Project M Detroit that will post to Metropolis magazine's Web site later this week. I have a Walking Tour from my trip, that I will post here when I have a spare moment. There are lots of exciting things happening right now and so little time to report on them. My pace feels glacial, which could be defined as both slow and fast, depending on how you look at it.

Project M Detroit

2009-08-28T07:00:00.002-04:00

I'm on my way to the Motor City for Project M. Dispatches in the days to come...

Cultural Context

2009-08-27T11:43:00.004-04:00

Screenshot from the Soyjoy Website.

Reading a magazine the other day, I paused at a full page ad for SoyJoy, one of the many products offered in the ever-expanding category of nutritional food bar. The ad included a watercolor of a soy plant on a tea-stained background, roots and all. Layered over the root system was a watercolor of a Chinese tea garden and an image of a Buddhist monk in meditation. The copy of the ad praised the long year history of Chinese nutrition and lauded the soybean as its pinnacle ingredient. Now, 5,000 years later, food science has distilled the soybean into a 120-calorie bar (with a few other ingredients thrown in for good measure, like Maltodextrin, derived from the thing Americans love best: corn.)

On the SoyJoy Website, you can scroll through a flash image of the soybean roots, and link to stories about the history of the plant.

This is what pops up when you click on "28th Century"

What's so funny and frustrating about American culture is that we always want to extract the essence of things, to take the unencumbered ingredient and turn it into the great panacea. In our Thoreauvian desire to suck the marrow, we disregard the whole of the animal. Soy is a wonderful example. We want to believe that we can capture the physical and mental health benefits of an entire culture, an entire way of life, by extracting one ingredient (and then manipulating the hell out of it in a food lab). We don't seem to grasp that it is the entirety of the Chinese lifestyle—the very elements of which are identified in this ad campaign—that yields the health benefits our extensive food studies tell us about. The Chinese live longer! They are not obese! They have less heart disease and breast cancer!

We forget about cultural context. We forget that soy is a mere player in a bigger vision of nutrition and lifestyle. It is an integrated component within a complex system.

I would argue that it is this same component thinking that has rendered us incapable of building sustainably in this country. We are excellent at the parts—a new facade material, a better solar panel, a high efficiency HVAC system—but terrible at the whole. The construction and design industry is just too fragmented and we have failed to effectively research the post-occupancy realities of our buildings. How are they functioning once they are up and running? We understand how one thing works in isolation, but we have no idea how they work in tandem; we just don't know how buildings work as systems, and until we do, we will never be able to meet our lofty goals of netzero energy.

On the Soyjoy Website, we are told that we can incorporate the food bar into our diet, and should consider consuming up to 3 a day. "Sometimes, our busy schedules make missing a meal unavoidable. SOYJOY® can be enjoyed as part of a meal on the go."

I wonder what the Buddhist monk featured in their ad campaign would think of that.

Book Signing with Ellen Lupton

2009-08-26T10:25:00.003-04:00

Ellen Lupton will be doing a short reading from her new book, Design Your Life: The Pleasure and Perils of Everyday Things, at the Ivy Bookstore in Baltimore tomorrow night. Pop by and get a signed copy.

(And check out this short piece on the Metropolis magazine Web site.)

Thursday, August 27, 7:00pm
Ivy Book Shop
6080 Falls Road
Baltimore MD 21209

Q & A with Emily Pilloton

2009-08-23T08:33:00.008-04:00

I first met Emily Pilloton, founder of Project H Design, when she came through Baltimore last spring for a lecture at MICA. She talked about her reasons for founding a non-profit dedicated to creating life-enhancing product design versus following a traditional career path. I saw Emily again this summer at the offices of Metropolis magazine in New York where she was working on her new book Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People. It comes out in September through Metropolis Books and was designed by the talented Scott Stowell of Open.

I caught up with Emily again recently via email to ask her some questions about the direction of design for an article I'm writing for the October issue of Urbanite magazine (more on that when the time comes). In the meantime, Emily agreed to let me share our full exchange:

Your manifesto articulates so well why you took the trajectory that you did with your work. If you were talking with someone in the general public just learning about design today, how would you describe the work that you do? Would you qualify it as "social design?"

I think I am allergic to the keywords and sound bites that tend to describe this kind of work: "social design," "humanitarian design" or "sustainable design." To me, Project H is merely a way to use design for what it's really all about: problem solving. And Project H hopefully is applying design to the most urgent problems, in order to provide meaningful solutions in places that need them. We don't just design for the developing world, we look locally and produce solutions WITH rather than FOR clients and partners in education, community empowerment agencies, foster care, disabled and mental health care, childhood development, and more. "Social design" to me sounds like "social engineering," and I would hope the work we do is less about design as the be-all-end-all solution, and more about a process through which to empower people and help co-create the best and most scalable solutions for big problems.

Do you believe there is a general increase in designers (of all disciplines) practicing social design?

I think there is a huge increase in interest, but I think the expertise is still very much "in progress." Because designing for fourth graders, or the homeless, or the elderly, often requires designers to drastically change their traditional design approaches, we are all learning as we go. While there is a new generation of "citizen designers" coming out of school now, there is also a lot of model-building, feedback looping, and metric analysis we need to engage in to ensure that these design solutions for social impact are in fact solutions, rather than just design for design's sake. There is a fine line between real design solutions and a sort of self-indulgent "design as charity" practice, and we all have a duty to not just commit ourselves to social design, but to be critical of our own processes and ensure that we're doing it right. Ultimately, these big social issues we are designing for require the most scrutiny, more so than, say, luxury or accessory design, because often it is our clients' livelihood for which we're designing. The stakes are higher, so we can't just call "design for the greater good" good simply because it is an act of service—it has to WORK.

What's driving this?

I think it's a combination of the urgency of big global issues (global warming, population growth, disease, hunger, resource shortages), that we can no longer ignore, coupled with an influx of new communication networks—people can now talk to basically anyone in the world in a single Tweet. At the same time, the time has come not for worrying or analysis, but for action—these global issues are not just big nebulous problems, but things that are affecting our livelihood. Designers, as solution makers, are inherently receptive to that and want to take action.

You spent some time at MICA working with students. How was that experience? How did the students relate to design? What message did you hope to impart?

The MICA students were amazingly engaged in the type of work Project H does, and not in a superficial way. They were genuinely hungry for this kind of work, offering suggestions and critique, and, like Project H, trying their hardest to find the best models to do meaningful design for social impact work. With design students, it's not just a zeitgeist, but a responsibility to equip these young designers with the tools, values, and initiative to go out and be more than just aestheticians, but activists with a finely tuned skillset that creates change. Spending time with the students at MICA reminded me that design for empowerment and social impact is all about looking forward to the next generation of designers, and to solutions rather than hindrances.

Where does design go from here?

Some days I honestly think that design, as we know it, is fairly superfluous—that we've created an industry that will soon be obsolete if we don't take a revolutionary approach. We (Project H) have walked into homeless shelters offering services, to which they reply "design? We don't need that here." Design is viewed as a luxury, rather than a right and a first line of defense, it's viewed as an "added bonus" rather than a necessary problem solving process. And we have to undo a lot of the design world we have created, to prove to people that design has value beyond the aesthetic, and beyond the luxury. My hope is that the next phase of design is not about ego, but about function and beauty and sustainable solutions for real people—whether they are families in East LA or farmers in East Kenya.

As more and more people use words like "social design" and "social justice" to describe their work, do we run the risk of it becoming diluted? Does it become the next "green?" (people complaining today about so much "greenwashing").

Absolutely. "Social design" is a very slippery slope: one that requires the MOST critique and feedback of any kind of design. If a vase is designed in a less-than-great way, what is the worst that can happen? If a water filter is designed less-than-perfectly, it's people's lives at stake. What designers sometimes don't understand (I'm guilty of this too sometimes) is that to engage in these "social design" projects is not about us: it's not about us as designers having "charitable" projects in our portfolio- we are designing solutions that in some cases are life-or-death for their users, or at the very least, have the possibility for real life improvement if done well. Overusing the sound bites and keywords only dilutes the gravity of the concept and process. "Social design" is not the place for half-assed solutions. Fancy renderings of homeless shelters made from shopping carts and blobject water filtration devices for communities we don't even know are not going to cut it.

The Hippo Roller designed by Project H created a safe and easy way to transport potable water.

Where do aesthetics come in? How would you define what is "beautiful" design?

The problem with design is that all too often, we use aesthetics as our starting point, rather than allowing beauty to be drawn directly from our material choices, or the ease of use, for example. For humanitarian solutions, aesthetics can be a great tool to engage the user in a visceral, emotional way, and to ultimately enhance the function and durability and adaptability of a great design.

When does your book release?

Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, will be available Sept. 2009 (hopefully first week of Sept). Get all the info by clicking here.

*And here's a little more about the book, courtesy of the publisher:

"Industrial design is more than the latest shiny housewares and disposable objects. It’s time we began to design for people instead of consumers, as activists rather than aestheticians. Design Revolution is a showcase, a resource, and a call to action. The book provides a comprehensive collection of product designs, systems, and concepts that improve the lives of people around the world—solutions that address global and local issues in education, transportation, energy, play, and other realms, and catalyze individuals and communities."

Abstract Urbanism

2009-08-18T08:42:00.010-04:00

Howon by Hosang Park. Available on 20x200.

The Web site 20x200 has made a simple process for buying art. Jen Bekman, site curator, introduces limited edition prints online and offers them in various sizes and prices, ranging from just $20 to $2000. (Bekman also formulated a nice visual for determining how big a print really is:)

I like abstracted patterns found in everyday things, especially urban settings and rural landscapes, such as ike Frank Thiel's photographs of Berlin. 20x200 offers a few examples of what I mean:

Uman by Hosang Park.

Houndstooth Pattern in Parking lot at Disney World, FL by Alex MacLean.

Untitled, Neighborhood (Overgrown) by Chris Ballantyne.

Red Truck on the Back Road to Manigango by Raul Gutierrez.

Cultural Tourism

2009-08-13T10:43:00.012-04:00

I had a job for a few years where I traveled the country and spent an inordinate amount of time in hotels. One of my favorite pastimes was checking out the Chamber of Commerce and tourism brochures to see how a particular place decided to present itself to the world. You can learn a lot about a city by how a marketing team chooses to sell it. You can also see how the official tourism material begins to impact the way tourists themselves identify with the locale. There have been studies on how tourism images effect economic and social perceptions. People begin to reconstruct the very photos they see, consciously or unconsciously framing their own shots to mimic those in travel books and tour guides. At times, it truncates the true exploration of the city and perpetuates the constructed image.

I'm researching an article for a magazine and I need to interview someone from Denmark this week. Online research led me to the Visit Denmark homepage (and to daydream that I was being funded to conduct this interview in person not via Skype). I couldn't help clicking on the "photos" section. The images they use to present the country to potential visitors are a curious mix. Among them you have...

Maritime:

Rose Hips:

Wooden monkeys in tree:

Wooden soldiers:

Sandtraps:

Modern furniture:

Making out:

I still want to visit, but I wouldn't replicate a staged shot of toy monkeys in trees. That chair photo, however...well, maybe.

When Crises Collide

2009-08-10T08:02:00.008-04:00

With so much arduous and ugly argument over reform, healthcare seems mired in debate and atrophied by politics. What are we missing?

An article I wrote about the potential for entrepreneurial opportunities in healthcare is the cover story for the latest issue of One magazine. I get lots of interesting people to talk shop, including Donna Shalala. Here's an excerpt.

When graphic designer Deborah Adler picked a topic for her master’s thesis at New York’s School of Visual Arts, she decided to address a very personal matter. Adler’s grandmother, Helen, took the wrong medication after mistaking her husband’s prescription pill bottle for her own. Other than the addition of childproof lids in the 1970s, the ubiquitous amber-colored vial had not changed since the First World War, even though polling found 60 percent of prescription drug users were taking medication incorrectly. Adler decided to revamp the prescription pill bottle, and the result was a revolutionary design born from a simple need: clear and detailed labeling that included different color-coded rings for different users. In 2004, a creative director at Target saw her work, and the company quickly purchased patent rights. The bottle went into the store’s pharmacies the following year. The product instantly captured the attention of the press and the design industry, which lauded its simple ambition. Adler not only effectively addressed a major health care concern, her work also raised an interesting question: Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before? READ MORE

Deborah Adler's new prescription bottle at Target.

It's (A)LIVE!

2009-08-06T15:49:00.005-04:00

In journalism they call it burying the lede. It's when you put an important piece of information too far into the article. I did just that when I blithely mentioned in an earlier post that D:Center Baltimore is now alive and well and living on the Interweb. This is big news and it deserves its own special announcement. After a year of gathering, conversing, debating, the D:Center now has a mission, a vision, a path forward, and a virtual home online. (You can learn more about that path forward by downloading the report PDF at the bottom lefthand corner of the homepage).

So while Twitter tries to regroup, don't despair. You can focus all that social networking energy onto the D:Center blog. Be a part of design in Baltimore (and beyond!) and become a D:Center collaborator. If you have a design blog, you can upload a link of it to the homepage. Just click on the link that says "Share Your Blog" and the following will appear:

Once your blog is uploaded, it will appear on the Web site like this:

Is EDAC the Next LEED?

2009-08-03T10:10:00.009-04:00

B.ARCH. M.ARCH. AIA. NCARB. LEED-AP. CSI. ACHA. It's time to add another set of letters after architects' names: EDAC.

Short for Evidence-Based Design Accreditation and Certification, this latest acronym comes courtesy of the Center for Health Design (CHD), a California nonprofit dedicated to advancing the use of evidence-based design practices in healthcare architecture. The accreditation test launched in a beta phase in February and was opened to the general public in April. One of its primary goals is to formalize what evidence-based design entails, in order to bolster its legitimacy and galvanize practitioners around a shared definition of the term.

A new accreditation in evidence-based design seeks to clarify this misunderstood term. My latest feature article on the topic is now live on Architect magazine's Web site.

Sound Design

2009-08-03T09:18:00.003-04:00

Architect David Rockwell's interior design for Bobby Flay's Bar Americain.

I just finished reading Gael Greene's memoir Insatiable. Greene is now donning her signature hat at the judge's table on Top Chef Masters, but she was the food critic for New York magazine for 30+ years during "that wondrous moment between the pill and the plague,"as she puts it. (Greene hungered for a lot more than just foie gras in her heyday). When she got to the 1980's in her timeline, she spent a page or two talking restaurant design. Architects like Sam Lopata and David Rockewell were changing the New York dining experience.

"The fusty French restaurants seemed irrelevant. Hushed eating in a temple was giving way to grazing in a raucous gym. Everyone wanted to be in the restaurant business...The stakes were awesome now. Where once an amateur could toss fleamarket tables and chairs into the basement of a Village brownstone and create a restaurant, now design reigned...It had to be noisy. 'Noise is cozy,' an architect, proud of his shattering decibels, assured me. 'Noise creates energy.' And no one really missed the glitter of conversation, because mostly people just talked about how many sit-ups they'd done that morning and which California chefs were rumored to be moving to New York any day."

Noise as architecture. Sound as an element of design. Funny to think that the annoying din and clatter of a loud restaurant is intentional. Interesting, too, to consider this as a cultural shift. As Greene suggests above, we went from hushed interiors focused on individual dining experiences and conversation, to raucous free-for-alls. I remember waiting 2 hours for a table at Manhattan's Momofuku Ssam on the corner of 2nd Avenue. We were ushered back through the narrow dining room and stuffed into the corner of the restaurant's adjacent bakery, barely able to breath for the crowd. The windows fogged from so much human exhalation. When we finally sat, our table was the corner edge of a long banquet. It felt as if we'd been plunked down at someone else's family dinner (and, in truth, we had. They were very nice—adventurous tourists from the Midwest who shared their crispy pig's head with us). The food was incredible. Crispy shaved brussel sprouts that had been pan seared and tossed in tangy and complex Asian vinaigrette with hot peppers. Lots of pig. Warm pork buns. Calamari in a spicy garlic sauce with sprigs of mint. More pig. We could barely talk over the '80's music (I forgot how much I like Tears for Fears) and I was hoarse the rest of the night. Whereas Greene's dinner guests rambled on about their aerobics classes, today's dining experience has become the endurance sport.

Momofuku Ssam, above, and the interior of the adjacent bakery, below, in a rare peaceful moment. I suspect these photos were taken at dawn.

How else does noise and sound play a role in design? You've got some time to think about this. The monthly Baltimore Design Conversation is taking a summer break for August (so no convo this week), but will return on Wednesday, September 2. The theme: SOUND. It will take place at The Wind Up Space starting at 6:30 PM.

If you want more information on the Design Convos, as well as ongoing design dialogues, news, and event listings, check out the brand new D:center baltimore Web site. Join the conversation online through the site's blog. If you have a blog of your own, upload it. If you have an event, you can email the details and add it to the calendar.

Screen shot of the new Web site.

Nice Package

2009-07-27T11:01:00.010-04:00

Lately I've been trying to recreate a certain gazpacho. I ate it on a trip through Spain several years ago and it was not at all like the chopped vegetable Moosewood version I was accustomed to. This one was more pink than red due to the day old bread blended with the fresh tomatoes. It had an incredibly rich and smooth flavor, vibrant and fruity with an astringent hit of sherry. I decided to try a new recipe last night and to serve it with a Cobb salad and a pear clafouti.

Gazpacho made in the Andalucian style. Image from Gourmet magazine.

I ran to the store for some olive oil and sherry vinegar. Sitting among the traditional and bland packages on the shelves, something caught my eye: a black and white photo of a man laughing. It was the label for Via Roma olive oil. I looked around and found another photo on their balsamic vinegar, this time with an older woman—the iconic Italian nonna—sitting in a small village somewhere.

The Via Roma olive oil in my kitchen.

When I got home I searched The Dieline, one of my favorite sites for label design. And there it was: a post on Via Roma.

(My favorite is the lady chugging from the wine bottle.)

The packaging was developed by the irreverent design firm United.
Screen shot from the homepage of United.

Photo from the Via Roma campaign.

I discovered that United is also responsible for another brand I've noticed lately, the organic Greenway products that are sold at my local Superfresh.

Turns out the packaging was better than the gazpacho. I'm still on the hunt for the right recipe...

The Sondheim and Social Justice

2009-07-15T12:11:00.017-04:00

BDC's Geodesic Dome on the terrace outside the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“Sometimes the conceit wins.”

My husband said this to me as we walked from the Baltimore Museum of Art on Saturday night. We’d just attended the announcement and party for the 2009 Janet and Walter Sondheim Award, the city's premier annual arts award that offers one lucky finalist a $25,000 prize. Selected by a jury of national curators and artists—and plucked from a pool of incredibly talented competitors—the winner also earns the prestige of recognition.

As someone who covers architecture and design for magazines and who often writes about fairness in the built environment and community-centered design, I should have been happy with the outcome. The winners created, among other things, a site-specific project focusing on democratic public space in a struggling section of the city. And yet, I am not thrilled that the Baltimore Development Cooperative beat out the other artists (including, full disclosure, a friend of mine).

A photo of the winners at Saturday's Sondheim Award. Photo from Cara Ober's blog.

If I were a true critic I wouldn't begin to type this because I am woefully ill informed. I don't know the three participants who founded the BDC in 2005—Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, and Nicholas Wisniewski. I am only vaguely familiar with their work, including Participation Park in East Baltimore. The reporter in me would never go to press. But this is a blog. So disclaimer in place, why am I miffed by the BDC win?

Two words: Social Justice.

The intent of the BDC, on paper, seems admirable enough. Get through the chewy curatorial jargon and hyper-politicized prose explaining Participation Park and you learn that their stated intent is to gather the community around a vacant plot of land in order to foster democratic public space and a dialogue about development. They located the Park at the epicenter of urban controversy: East Baltimore. The neighborhood struggles with crime, violence, drug addiction, and poverty. There is also the greater evil, the BDC points out, of eminent domain and the efficient march over the land by organizations—like Johns Hopkins—with more power than the people. Homes have been demolished and hundreds of people displaced for a new biotech park.

In 2007, the BDC decided to illegally squat on a piece of land on Forrest Street. They began gardening and I give them lots of credit for testing the soil—which they say they did—to confirm no harmful traces of lead or other toxins. Their goal, they say, is to turn this vacant lot into “an urban farm, social space, community kitchen, radical planning studio, free store, and adventure playground.”

They also say that that they are doing this in the name of the people who have been wronged by East Baltimore development and that the residents are very much involved.

(I sought out someone from the community at the awards ceremony on Saturday night because I hoped to ask them some questions. Why a garden? Why this spot? How is this impacting their community? What other needs, besides gardening, does the community have? Do they want an "adventure playground" or a place to organize radical activities? But I couldn’t find anyone from the neighborhood and my questions went unanswered. I wonder: was anyone from the community invited by the BDC to join the fesitivities?)

Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, was one of the judges of the Sondheim and she told the Baltimore Sun that the jury liked the BDC’s social activism and community engagement. “What they are doing is part of a pulse that's happening around the country, an activism that's reminiscent of the '60s and '70s,” she said.

Oliver is correct. The BDC’s work speaks to a broader trend in the arts and architecture community. We are living in an age where architectural stars like Frank Gehry wait for stalled projects to find their funding, but Bryan Bell and Cameron Sinclair travel the globe and build. It is a time when Fritz Haeg, who turns front lawns into edible gardens, wins the 2008 Whitney Biennial (Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney, was one of this year's Sondheim judges).

The symbols of this new movement appear to be gardens and geodesic dome; back to the land sustainability coupled with Buckminster Fuller’s humanitarian dome design. BDC constructed a dome on the terrace outside of the BMA using found materials and billed it as a place for the community to gather. (It was a nice idea when Fritz Haeg conceived of it nine years ago and turned his home—a geodesic dome in California—into a community schoolhouse with a garden.)

The BDC clearly won over the judges for its “social justice” approach, a phrase that was bandied about quite a bit on Saturday night. One top BMA official told me, “Isn’t this great? Social justice won the day.”

But is this social justice?

Dig a little deeper and you learn that the real intent of the BDC is to stir up trouble. It’s very name, a riff on the Baltimore Development Corporation, is meant to draw attention to the city’s sanctioned development process and to compare and contrast the Cooperative’s actions to those of Baltimore’s quasi-public development arm with the same acronym.

An important component of Participation Park is that it is an illegal squat. In an interview with Alyssa Dennis on the Go For Change Web site last year, BDC artist Scott Berzofsky explained why the group explicitly decided against protecting the land that they garden. They do not want to raise the funds to buy it or take the steps to make it a 501c3 and put it into the community land trust. Why?

“Both of these approaches reinforce the dominant relations of private property ownership that we want to question,” he said.

More than building community, they want to build conflict. They want to bring something to a head. “If there were an attempt to evict us,” he continued, “I would invite it because I think the struggle over the space would generate a productive dialogue about who has the right to the city in Baltimore.”

The BDC believes cooperating with the system perpetuates the system. And the system is the problem. They are not wrong. The system is flawed. It is, at times, unfair and unbalanced.

Trouble is, this neighborhood has been through all this before. They know full well that the system doesn’t work in their favor. They know what it means to fight the city and the private developer and lose. A very organized and passionate group of activists in East Baltimore has worked tirelessly to challenge the eminent domain process and to bring real change. Activist like Glen Ross. The BDC approach is not offering social justice for those in the neighborhood. Rather, the group is traveling over well-worn territory with careless regard for the outcome. Participation Park is less about the community’s needs and more about sticking it to the man.

Let’s say the young artists of the BDC are still around and interested in this plot of Earth in East Baltimore in five years. Let’s say the land is thriving. It becomes a viable and vital gathering place and a means for fresh food. Then the landowner decides to build or to sell. A fight ensues. With no legal claim to the property, Participation Park is closed. Perhaps a few articles on the struggle appear in the paper. Perhaps the artists get more press. Then what?

A more “productive dialogue" would be to find solutions rather than merely poke the bruise. What is the answer to diminishing public space in urban environments? Or the lack of fresh food and jobs?

Compare Participation Park to the work of Milwaukee’s Will Allen. Since 1995, Allen’s Milwaukee-based Growing Power, Inc, has worked a modest 2-acre lot to create fresh food sources as well as innovative and progressive food distribution models for the city.

The layout of Growing Power's headquarters in Milwaukee. I don't see a "radical planning studio," or an "adventure playground," but I do see classrooms, a kitchen, training studios for community members to learn job skills, and a fully sustainable urban farm. (Click on it for a larger image).

Allen won the MacArthur Grant in 2008 for his work. “Rather than embracing the ‘back to the land’ approach promoted by many within the sustainable agriculture movement, Allen’s holistic farming model incorporates both cultivating foodstuffs and designing food distribution networks in an urban setting,” the MacArthur site explains.

A diverse community gathers at Growing Power. Image from their Web site.

Allen is in it for the people in the community. He took the time to form the 501c3, he got the land into a community trust, he partnered with existing entities in the city—those same kinds of entities that the BDC shuns—and he changed policy in order to forge new programs and make real connections.

Social justice is not about whining about how things are. It is not about generating a conflict for conflict’s sake. Social justice is about working the flawed system to promote a new approach. It is about commitment, longevity, and standing up to the harder injustice: the slow and painful process of realizing actual change.

To call Participation Park social justice is wrong. Call it what it is. Activist art. Performance art. Performance farming? But, please, do not call it social justice.

An Additional Note: After posting this, I learned that Will Allen will speak in Baltimore on Friday, July 17. For more details, visit Baltimore Green Works.

More Human-Centered Design

2009-07-08T12:34:00.004-04:00

From the IDEO Web site.

After publishing this morning's post, I opened my daily e-newsfeed from ArchNewsNow and the lead story is about IDEO's Human-Centered Design Toolkit. It's now available online for free. Check out the article in Fast Company.

Architectural Surrogacy

2009-07-08T09:52:00.019-04:00

Don Norman, an advocate of smart social design, giving a lecture last year in Chicago.

In the ebb and flow of architectural trends, human-centered design (HCD) is a rising tide. This is a process where the end user is king. The client (or customer or constituency) is asked to define their wants and needs for a space and the architect works to incorporate this information into the final product. This process is linked, in no small part, to the growth of social design. Think Bryan Bell and Cameron Sinclair. Architects and designers engage for the benefit of the community at large. The architect is no longer the sole purveyor of ideas, but rather a surrogate for the needs of the user.

There are instances where human-centered design makes eminent sense. Take hospitals. Kaiser Permanente in California includes nurses, doctors, and patients in the research phase of creating a new building. Understanding how medical professionals, patients, and families use a space can reduce human error and inefficiency and improve patient outcomes. Stroke victims, for example, cannot see or react to people approaching them on their debilitated side. Nurses insert IV's and take blood pressure readings solely from the patient's functioning side. It makes sense, then, to orient rooms so patient beds align the functioning side of the individual with the door. This makes the experience more palatable for the patient and it means the nurse is not forced to walk around the bed to the other side with equipment and IV bags several times a day. This type of insight can only come after consulting with medical staff.

As the concept catches hold in a broader way, human-centered (also called user-centered) design is beginning to see its critics. The process is predicated on one potentially flawed concept: that we know best. Don Norman, who writes extensively about social and human-centered design , uses computer software as an example of HCD gone awry:

One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their complaints and critiques seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their software gets more complex and less understandable with each revision...If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.

Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” The case of Apple Computer is illustrative. Apple’s products have long been admired for ease of use. Nonetheless, Apple replaced its well known, well-respected human interface design team with a single, authoritative (dictatorial) leader. Did usability suffer? On the contrary: its new products are considered prototypes of great design.

Norman goes on to say that a fundamental problem with HCD is that it frequently emphasizes the person, not the activity. In a new post on Core 77, Robert Fabricant raises a similar concern.

We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences. But what if the 'users' themselves are the problem?

In architecture, do people actually know what they need from physical space? With HCD, aesthetics and architectural acumen take a back seat to "pragmatics," when in truth, the user is frequently anything but pragmatic. Their desires can be fickle and flawed.

Hub2's virtual park design on Second Life.

Public parks offer a good example of the disconnect between how we think we want to use a space and how we can actually use it. During a Baltimore Design Conversation—a monthly event where people gather to discuss design in its many forms—conversation curator Ben Stone invited Eric Gordon of Boston's Hub2 to speak. Gordon joined the conversation via his avatar in Second Life, where he and his team have set up a virtual city called Boston Island. When Harvard wanted to expand its campus (again) the university threw neighbors a bone in the form of a new public park. Hub2 was invited to help the community visualize the park using Second Life as a map. A handful of users insisted that they wanted a baseball diamond. It took a few clicks of the mouse to show that a baseball diamond could never function in the space allotted. In this case, the user was shown that their desired intent could not actually work.

Hub2, however, is the exception and not the rule when users are brought into the process. Today, the pendulum threatens to swing too far to the side of the "H" in HCD. By relegating the architect to the users' surrogate, we run the risk of neutering the architect's efficacy. They are rendered neutral and that, I believe, is a mistake. (I am certainly not advocating that we return to the days of the master designer dictating from on high. There is a balance to be struck.)

Fabricant argues in his Core77 post that to effect true social change, we need to design for systems (or for activities, as Foster says above) and not for individual needs. "Over and over, I have seen how a UCD process will tend to emphasize certain benefits of an experience like 'convenience' over other, more meaningful sources of social value," he writes.

By way of example, he shows a utility bill that pits neighbors' energy useage against one another. It is highly unlikely that a user would ever suggest such a strategy. But by bringing this into practice, the designer has created a situation where social comparison has the potential to impact behavior for the better.

Image from Core 77.

Artscape: Temporary Architecture

2009-07-06T09:58:00.006-04:00

Sanjit Roy's proposal for the Midway at Artscape.

For the second year, Artscape, Baltimore's annual outdoor arts event, will include a temporary architecture installation on the Charles Street Bridge known as the Midway. Located next to Penn Station, the Midway includes twenty-four 8’ x 8’ Baltimore City festival booths that line both sides of the bridge and face each other. Designers were asked to submit proposals to the city in March for an architectural facade to house these booths and the winner of the 2009 competition is Sanjit Roy (last year it was Gabriel Kroiz.)

You can see Roy's project, titled Art Serpent, during the festival, July 17, 18 & 19.

The 411:

Artscape hours
Friday: 12-10pm
Saturday: 12-10pm
Sunday: 12-8pm

Location of the festival:
Mount Royal Avenue & Cathedral Street / Charles Street
Bolton Hill neighborhood & Station North Arts & Entertainment District

Location of the Midway:
1600 North Charles Street

Testing the concept.

(Thanks to Gary Kachadourian at BOPA for the photos and renderings.)

The Pleasure of Your Company

2009-07-02T12:53:00.004-04:00

For those of us who loathe Evite (and I really loathe Evite) there is a new "card" company launching this month. Called Cocodot, the service offers online invitations and greeting cards with more stylish designs. I've read that there is an annual subscription of $29.95 and that it's $12.95 per event, but don't quote me on those numbers.

Here are two samples I pulled from their site (my brain is still clearly preoccupied with food.)

Will I use it? The jury is out on that one. I am a big fan of good ole printed invites. But there are those times when a quick email is a lot easier...

Food and Architecture

2009-07-01T09:23:00.029-04:00

Steve and Melissa at the stove.

Cooking is like architecture; cooks are like designers. The same ingenuity and reverence for material and craft are key to both. It is that inventive spirit that draws me equally to design and the kitchen and it is what the two can tell us about ourselves that is so intriguing. How we build and how we eat are inextricably linked to how we live. French historian Pierre Gaxette once said, "La cuisine is not a bad observatory for studying la grande histoire." The same is certainly true of observing cities and buildings.

Matt and I just spent several days in Charleston, South Carolina with our friends Steve and Melissa. They are a couple who represent both sides of this architecture/food coin.

Melissa is an architectural historian who specializes in vernacular architecture. She is a reader of culture. She can analyze layers of history, research a structure and its surroundings, and put a building into the greater context of the human experience. She seeks to understand place and meaning and to articulate those elements to the rest of us. And she does it beautifully.

Melissa introduced me to the writing of MFK Fisher. The way Fisher writes about food is the way, I hope, to write about design. In her autobiography, The Gastronimcal Me, published in 1943, Fisher explains why she chooses food over other seemingly "important" topics:

"People ask me: Why do you write about food and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others...

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then and their deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hunger. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity."

While Melissa studies vernacular architecture, Steve, it could be said, is a vernacular chef. Self taught over the years, he is equally inspired by place, season, and indigenous resources. While on a trip to Maine last year, he whipped together a hearty fish chowder from local ingredients. On a recent spring day, he made a dish from the season's first tender peas. He is constantly tinkering with new ingredients and crafting recipes.

I've learned a great deal by watching Steve in the kitchen. There is an economy to his cooking—he is frugal and efficient—yet in his simple and smart approach he generates incredibly flavorful and rich dishes. He is the one who taught me how to make three meal out of one roast chicken. (You can also be inspired by Steve by signing up for his Recipemail.)

During our stay in South Carolina, we brought along some basic pantry items: olive oil, sea salt, soy sauce, honey, garlic, etc. Steve then discovered the local resources: A farmer's market in downtown Charleston for fresh herbs and shrimp; a local store supplying short ribs and fresh fish.

He also used every bit of food available and wasted nothing. He took leftover brown rice from dinner and turned it into rice cakes for breakfast by adding eggs, seasonings, and crushed up stale crackers that had been left out overnight by accident.

Rice cakes.

Steve purchased a nice fillet to mariante for gravalox. He asked the fishmonger for leftover salmon heads. The man offered Steve an entire head plus the spine for free. "Sometimes when you ask for a head, they'll just give you all of this," he said when he got home, referring to the remains of a whole fish.

The fish head with the spine.

Sloppy butchering left lots of meat along the spine, so Steve broiled it and picked off the flesh to make salmon cakes. He then used the remaining bones for fish stock (which eventually became a red curry soup with buckwheat soba noodles). He created three meals—salmon cakes, gravalox, and curry stew—by purchasing just one fillet of salmon.

Steve pulling the meat off the fish.

The fish yielded about a pound of salmon meat. Steve combined it with shaved zucchini, egg, bread crumbs, and seasonings to make salmon cakes that we took out to the beach in a cooler and ate for lunch.

Marinating the fillet to make gravalox. We ate this on bagels one morning for breakfast.

The fish stock.

While we (and by "we" I mean Steve and Melissa) cooked a lot, it's impossible not to go out for a few meals while in the low country. The first stop on the way into town was my husband's favorite BBQ joint, Melvin's. He grew up on this stuff. The pork is cooked over hickory and tossed in a yellow sauce made with mustard and vinegar.

No trip here is complete without boiled peanuts from a roadside stand. My husband turned me onto these. When prepared well, they taste more like salty beans than peanuts. You scoop them out of a hot vat into paper cups.

One night we drove onto Sullivan's Island for a burger at my favorite bar, Poe's Tavern (Edgar Allen Poe was stationed at Fort Moultrie in 1828 and his short story, The Gold-Bug, was set here.) Sullivan's Island is a spectacular place, surrounded by the Atlantic and the Charleston harbor. The houses are primarily bungalows and cottages, with a few oversized new-builds mixed in.

This small bungalow shrouded by palms is typical of the houses on Sullivan's Island. (So, sadly, is the Range rover in the driveway. This island isn't cheap)

A dog stands guard on the steps of a Sullivan's Island home.

An atypical concrete house on Sullivan's Island. This is one of my favorite places, built after hurricane Hugo levelled the stick-built home here.

Poe's Restaurant

The "Gold Bug" burger comes with cheese.

On the way to Poe's, we noticed a sign on the side of the road for the annual volunteer firemen fish fry. One thing I have learned over the years is that you should never miss a local church dinner or a fish fry. We decided to come back the next night.

We weren't disappointed. The fish was incredible. Crispy, flavorful, with just the right blend of flour, cornmeal, salt, and pepper in the crust, it was accompanied by coleslaw and hush puppies. The grand total for the meal: $8. Cold draft beer was only $2.

Melissa, Steve, and Matt walking to the fish fry.

A band played under a tent on the lawn. Several more tents housed beer and hot dogs, while a large tin-roofed pavillion sheltered the diners. (A good thing since a serious thunderstorm rolled in off the water that night.)

A hand-painted sign from a past fish fry.

The overstuffed fish fry platter.

Can this be right? $8 for three pieces of fish, coleslaw, hush puppies, and just $2 for a cold draft beer?

Close up on the fish. Notice the nice mix of cornmeal, flour, and cracked pepper.

Mmmm. Hush puppy.

We were curious about how this fish turned out so crisp and tasty, so Steve and I asked to pop back in the kitchen. The cooks told us that they use whiting, a mild fish that is often overlooked, Steve believes, because it's not marketed as heavily as other species. The fish batter was store-bought, made by a North Carolina company called House of Autry. The hush puppy batter came from them as well.

Volunteers plate the food.

Behind the line of volunteers, the cooks fry the whiting in large vats of oil.

I also picked up some of my favorite Southern food while in Charleston. I always buy a five-pound bag of White Lily flour, which is made from winterwheat and is the perfect consistency for baking fluffy breakfast biscuits (the best recipe I have found for homemade biscuits is in the Gourmet cookbook).

And one of my all-time favorite southern appetizers—first introduced to me by my mom— is hot pepper jelly served with cream cheese and crisp crackers. It reminds me of growing up in Virginia.

Design Convo #10

2009-06-22T08:18:00.003-04:00

It's hard to believe, but it's been almost a year since the launch of the first Baltimore Design Conversation. The event came together shortly after a public meeting regarding the formation of a design center here. A group of volunteers (myself included) realized how much interest there was out there and decided to create a get together in an informal setting to talk about subjects surrounding design. The event is now held the first Wednesday of every month at the Windup Space (12 W. North Ave.) at 6:30 pm. It is free and open to the public and loosely curated by volunteers around a series of topics related to design, art, architecture, cities, and whatever else is on peoples' minds. There is a cash bar and an A/V hookup available, so people have brought presentations to project via laptop and we've had the occasional live feed from another city.

Past topics have included things like "making sustainability visible," "cultural containers," "projects," "food," and "waste." You can see pictures and flyers from the events on the new D-Center Baltimore flickr page.

Design Conversation #10 is next week, Wednesday, July 1. For those of you familiar with these events, it will be a slightly different approach. Having done this for about a year now, we wanted to take the chance to just meet for happy hour and discuss where this thing is going next. No presentations, just talking about ideas with friends. We'd love it if you would join us.

The crowd at a previous Design Conversation.

Street Fair

2009-06-18T12:37:00.003-04:00

Speaking of links, I found this great short video by Drury Bynum from last weekend's Honfest in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. He was set up outside the clothing store, Shine Collective. You can check out more videos from Drury (and see the clothes, accessories, and such available at Shine) on the Shine Collective blog.

HONFEST - 2009 from SHINE COLLECTIVE on Vimeo.

Follow the Links: Insulated Studio

2009-06-17T15:38:00.007-04:00

One of the beautiful (and time-sucking) aspects of the Web is clicking from one site to the next following a series of links to a new discovery. I started off by checking in on Karrie Jacobs' blog The Itinerant Urbanist and randomly clicked the Atelier A + D site on her link list. It was there that I saw reference to a project by Berlin architects Davidson Rafailidis originally published in Dezeen, the online design magazine. Called Selective Insulation, the architects designed a smaller, insulated room into a larger room. The architects wrapped double-ply bubblewrap (often used in greenhouses) around a wood frame to create an office space inside a chilly artist's residence in the UK. An interesting solution for all those mammoth warehouse spaces here in Baltimore...

Photos by Steve Mayes Photography. Originally posted on Dezeen.

Capturing Place

2009-06-17T10:07:00.006-04:00

The painting of Scotland is on the cover of Susan McCallum-Smith's new book, Slipping the Moorings. You can hear the author tonight at the Roland Park branch of the Enoch Pratt Library.

I grew up in a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. My father taught history at a college and the four of us—mom, dad, my older brother, and I—lived nearby on an acre of wooded and hilly land. It was a magical place for a kid, with its hollow boxwood bushes converted into forts and the deep and mossy woods to explore. Tinker Creek flowed out of the mountains and edged along our backyard, providing miles of sandy beds to investigate. There is something about growing up in the south (and growing up the daughter of a history professor with a knack for weaving a good narrative) that imbues you with a reverence for stories and a kind of aching nostalgia for place.

It's no wonder, then, that I have an affinity for fiction with a strong tie to the landscape. Susan McCallum-Smith, a Baltimore writer by way of Glasgow, Scotland, recently released her first book of short essays, Slipping the Moorings and I was immediately drawn in. The writing jumps from Scotland to Mexico to New York and Canada and in each story, place is a main character (with the exception, perhaps, of "Housekeeper," which is very much character-driven).

In a darkly funny and tragic story about life in a Glasgow high rise, the main character dreams she is a child again flying above the land below:

She swoops high, high over the top of the high rise, and down its other side, brushing the tips of those red and gold and orange leaves all stirring together in the park, skirting the gravy-brown burn, and the Maxwell's prize-winning Highland cows that stop chewing and lift their marmalade heads to watch her.

In a few brief sentences you are transported to that topography. It becomes personalized—those aren't just any cows, they are the Maxwell's prize-winning cows—and the choice of "marmalade" to describe their heads adds to the wonderful image of them lazily chewing their cud and eyeing this child as she soars overhead.

In the title story "Slipping the Moorings," an ex-pat son returns from America to visit his father. The son struggles with the competing nature of two places: home in America and his familial home on the shores of Scotland:

I left him refilling his pipe and went outside to look at the stars. There were no stars. Low clouds smothered the peninsular. I tasted their thick dampness. I walked away from the cottage until its lights cast no relief on the heaviness around me and stopped when my stumbling was liable to lead to hurt. The sea breathed behind me while the soil sucked at my feet and swallowed the soles of my leather shoes. The nearest a man can come to death is to stand at night on our land. I'd forgotten how much I missed it in the constant brightness of America, where the day's end brings not true darkness but merely the temporary absence of light.

McCallum-Smith's focus on place does not mean that the people who populate Slipping the Moorings are pale sketches. Quite the opposite. They are strong characters inhabiting a rich topography, a keen reminder that we are products of both where we are now and where we have been. Place, even in its absence, defines us.

McCallum-Smith (pictured above) reads from Slipping the Moorings tonight at the Enoch Pratt's Roland Park Branch at 6:30 PM.

WPA Redux

2009-06-15T11:00:00.004-04:00

I've lived downwind from a major sewer replacement project in Baltimore for several years and know firsthand the impact of aging infrastructure. Recently another sinkhole disrupted business and traffic downtown.

Infrastructure has been on my mind for some time now, so I was happy to see the announcement from UCLA's urban think tank, cityLAB, about a new competition focused on the topic. WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture is an open competition that seeks "innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery."

It caps off a year that has been full of WPA references. There's been lots of discussion about bringing back the spirit of the New Deal's Work Progress Administration. Ready Made magazine did a nice spread back in January honoring the WPA's signature design aesthetic. They asked contemporary designers to re-imagine WPA posters for today's world:

Poster by Nick Dewar

Poster by Open Design

Deadline for registration for WPA 2.0 is July 24. The jury includes Stan Allen, Cecil Balmond, Elizabeth Diller, Walter Hood, Thom Mayne, and Marilyn Jordan Taylor.

Design Within Reach

2009-06-09T08:19:00.009-04:00

The Infinity Bench by Paris-based architect Carl Fredrik Svenstedt is fabricated out of flat sheet furniture grade plywood. The rings are concentric hoops, sliced like the layers of an onion.

With the way the development market is going—even Frank Gehry is getting value engineered out of projects —architects may want to turn their creative energies elsewhere. Architects often design their own furniture for site-specific projects and more and more they seem to be creating replicable lines. There is now a new Web site dedicated to furniture designed by architects: Lerival. I met the (slightly bleary-eyed) co-founders, James Coombes and Dominique Gonfard, at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair several hours after the site went live. They told me that they developed the online store because there is a dearth of outlets for furniture coming out of the architecture community. "Often you find out about it by accident," Dominique told me. When you visit an architect's Web site, she said by way of example, you rarely see a portfolio of furniture.

Dominique Gonfard and James Coombes in their booth at ICFF.

The Infinity Bench, pictured at the top of the post, definitely caught my eye. Other pieces for sale on the site include:

Endless Sofa by Incorporated

Plate Shelf by nARCHITECTS composed of solid planks of naturally finished White Oak support moveable, lightly brushed aluminum plates.

A screen system comprised of a series CNC milled panels created by New York's Moorhead & Moorhead

Kindled

2009-06-04T09:14:00.004-04:00

I'm on Amazon the other day looking for a book and the first thing I see on their homepage is the following:

Ooh, that's a tough blow to the Gray Lady. As if newspapers weren't in enough trouble, here's a reminder that you never need to buy one again.

Design Convo #9: Projects

2009-05-29T08:23:00.005-04:00

Click on image to see a larger version of the invite.

It's that time of the month again: Baltimore's design conversation returns to the Wind Up Space on Wednesday, June 3. This time the topic is "projects" and you are invited to bring new work and ideas to share with the group. Or just swing by for a cold beer and some good conversation. For more information, contact the "projects" organizer Fred Scharmen:

sevensixfive@gmail.com

The 411:
Design Convo #9: Projects
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
6:30 - 8:30 PM
Wind Up Space
12 W. North Avenue
AV set up available for presentations; Cash bar.

Dismantling Prefab

2009-05-27T15:58:00.012-04:00

The 2,380 sq. ft. Sidebreeze by MKD.

Sad news came in over the Memorial Day weekend about California-based Michelle Kaufmann Designs. As the L.A. Times reports, Kaufmann will close her firm after 7 creative years pioneering sustainable prefab designs. She is probably best known for her Glidehouse:

Kaufmann says a confluence of factors resulted in her needing to shutter the business, including the fact that several major prefab factories have gone out of business. On top of that, increasingly stringent rules for mortgage financing have impeded clients' ability to underwrite their homes. Having just refinanced myself, I was shocked at the difference in process from a few years ago. Some of this is understandably necessary to combat the laissez-faire banking practices of the last few years, but the pendulum seems to have swung in the extreme direction. As the owner of my own small business, my "non conventional" employment meant that I had to jump through some serious hoops. I can only imagine the challenge of getting an experimental prefab design past the processors at Wells Fargo. What we may find is that financing will continue to impede design innovation.

That said, contemporary prefab hasn't exactly captured the home buying market. Even with all the hype over the last few years, it represents an infinitesimal percentage of homes in this country. Why hasn't architecturally-sophisticated prefab taken off? Writer Karrie Jacobs has an interesting theory: What if prefab were in the hands of product designers, like IDEO, instead of architects?

Well, you may never be able to live in a Glidehouse, but you can at least take a virtual tour:

House File: Updating the Porch

2009-05-21T07:39:00.000-04:00

The porch.

Next on the list for the house: painting the porch. In truth, the entire roof of the porch needs to be replaced, but that's going to have to wait. In the meantime, Matt and I need to fix the peeling paint and broken trim and try to spruce it up a bit.

The view from the other side. This is a duplex, so there are two doors to contend with. We live on one side and rent out the other.

One of the challenges is that we replaced the gutters last year and decided to match them to the existing green paint. Which means we have these forest green rain spouts.

It makes it a bit of a challenge in picking out exterior paint colors. I really wanted a bright red door with a little orange or ruby tone to it, something that might match the rose bush that blooms at the front of the house. But combined with the green, it would look too much like Christmas.

My mom made a trip to a Budeke's, a paint store in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore, and the staff helped her select some nice exterior color combinations from Benjamin Moore. Here's what we've decided...

The porch itself will be painted Rainforest Green, which appears to have enough gray in it to match the mortar. I really wanted to get rid of that evergreen color.

The doors will get a deeper burgandy red, to keep it from looking too garish with the green:

And the trim between the front door and the screen door will get a lighter accent color to make the door pop. (This was suggested by the experts at the paint store). Again, we went with something that picks up the mortar of the stone house:

There is a crew coming today to help wet-scrape and sand the flaking paint off the porch. We hope to have the paint job done by the weekend.

We still need to pick out a screen door for our side of the duplex. I want a French screen door that can be switched out with glass in the winter months and can therefore function throughout the year. Opening the doors lets in so much light on our first floor. I've been looking at the doors at Walbrook Lumber and online at Vintage Doors.

So do we try to match the style of the adjacent screen door? Or do we pick our own?

I tend to lean towards a simple screen door made of wood that is split in two sections.

Imagine these painted in that Burgandy color to match the front door.

This has a more intricate split: two pieces of wood in the center instead of one.