updates

last semester i had the opportunity to learn from two teachers who were working on some amazing things. my concrete culture teacher, sarah doherty, and my open city teacher, dan d'oca. after my time with them ended, they kept on going.

sarah took the alley we used for our final projects (and the alley behind her carriage house) and turned it into a full-fledged installation space. definitely check out the hundreds of pictures on the "axis alley" blog and flickr. i won't attempt to do the whole thing justice with the photos i've pulled to post here.


dan went to rotterdam (along with two students from the class and his firm, interboro) and installed an exhibition based on our arsenal of exclusion/open city baltimore project at the international architecture biennial. (along with co-curating the us portion of the biennial.) these were some pics he sent to our class from the opening in september:



check 'em out!

the best things in life are free

my century of the city book finally came in the mail today. (i ordered it over break and gave them my home address. of course, it arrived in the mail the day after i went back to baltimore.) it's a hefty book (400 some pages) with beautiful photos (abbott actually designed it.) yes, it really is free. seriously. so you should go order one right now.

thank you, rockefeller foundation.

(more good news: my camera is fixed. just waiting patiently for momsie to send it off to me. i should be back to actually documenting and showing stuff soon...)

one week later...

what a slacker. i should have posted this long ago. someone passed it on to carey, who in turn passed it on to me. (i'm linking to his flickr because i know he loves when people look at it. especially moms.) so i'll just keep sharing the love. it's called the center for urban pedagogy. or cup.

it's a pretty amazing website. go check it out. so much to see. sensory overload. i especially liked their attention to detroit. and on top of the michigan shout out, who should appear as i'm looking through all of the pictures and downloading documents? dan d'oca, my old urbanism/current open city teacher. i guess he's worked with them before.

which brings me to some news for anyone at mica. come check out the "arsenal of exclusion" lecture series that dan organized for my class, but, in true open city fashion, is letting anyone attend. ( one of the lecturers will be the guy who started cup.) it starts this friday.

concrete

clearly this photo wasn't taken recently. yes, i am back in baltimore. no, it isn't that much warmer than the mitten. (exposed toes would be a bad idea.) but i finally had to send my camera in for repairs (could take two weeks... could take six...) so i'm reaching into the iphoto "archives." and recently i've been thinking about the cities/sidewalks/text combo.

one class i'm totally pumped (surprisingly) to be taking is called "concrete culture: the city as text." it's a studio/seminar sculpture class, and a much needed departure from graphic design all the time. over the course of the semester, concrete will become my new best friend. it seems foreign to be focusing so much on material. indesign and illustrator don't count. this is about science and experimenting. i have no idea what concrete is capable of, much less what i could capable of doing with it. one of the sculpture majors in the class asked how easily it could be made to erode. another responded by pointing out that we've been watching concrete erode our whole lives, without giving it second thought, when we walk on sidewalks.

our syllabus read: "concrete is the second most consumed substance on the planet after water." (mark kingwell, concrete reveries: consciousness and the city.)

part of the excitement for me about the class (besides it being another take on cities) is seeing how far i can push design when i take it out of the typical context of computers and throw it out into the streets. (stefan sagmeister style.) now i'm interested in words activating a space/stumbling across a message in the morning and how that changes the way you go throughout the day.

it should be an interesting one... we'll see. (as soon as i get my concrete gloves.)

st. paul paint

pictures from an urbanism project a few weeks ago. the task was to find, using census mapping, a wall in baltimore. anything that divides two starkly different sets of data. and then you actually go out to that wall, and photograph something specific that you see (in the style of bernd and hilla becher) i found this island of old people northwest of st. paul and north ave. and found an interesting difference in the paint color on either side of the street...

vision

tonight a vision for the charles north area was revealed to a packed metro gallery by the central baltimore cultural alliance. key word: vision. i like this approach. it isn't some private developer coming in and showing some final blueprints. and making it a matter of "when" instead of "what." it's current community movers and shakers coming together to invest in the area and dream big about what it could be. (mica among them.) nothing is set in stone, but steps are being taken. and, if their word holds true (which i know is a rarity with urban redevelopment) it will be an organic evolution of the area. with just a little prod.


north avenue has grown on me even more this year. i like the designs in the brickwork of the buildings. i like the layers of mismatched paint slapped on walls to cover up graffiti. this whole thought of redesigning kind of came out of nowhere. but apparently it's been a long time coming. and mica's been a key part of it all. fred lazarus is the committee chair. it was comforting to have him there. i know he has the best interest of this city at heart. and just look at what he has done during mica's time of expansion. one of the things that attracted me to mica before even visiting was their claim to mix the old and the new, to preserve existing structures (station building) and build innovative new buildings (brown) that somehow seem to fit right into the quirky campus flow. and he has always been the one to say, if baltimore goes down, mica goes down. and vice versa.

all this optimism doesn't mean i don't have my doubts. all the artists renderings feel odd. i'll miss the aesthetic of the old north ave. things like mechanical parking seem just stupid. (shouldn't we be moving away from accommodating cars like that?) and while i like some sort of penn station redesign, i think adding on a whole new wing is unnecessary. (one thing i like so much about this vision is the focus on abandoned buildings and spaces. let's work with those before we start from scratch.)

overall, this is huge. and won't happen over night. or over a year. or over ten years. but it's kind of cool to be down the street at the start of it all.

design (re)affirmation

after sitting through a day (plus some) of the social studies design conference ("educating designers in a connected world") being put on by the mica graphic design mfa guys this fall break, i am reassured more than ever that design can move mountains. even if it is by simply going back to the basics and designing a poster with a purpose. a message. i've been taking so many notes, but for now i just want to share a link, beautiful angle, that was suggested to me by someone during the conference. it's two artists in tacoma, washington who are using letterpress to design a discourse in their city. i can't think of a better connection between all of the design educator's discussions at the conference and my own focus right now on community arts/social design/urbanism by way of "studio baltimore." (scott stowell aside. obviously.) some really good stuff and thoughtful words.

visionary thinking

today i took a group to the american visionary art museum (part of my little "museum a month" series as a program manager.) they had just opened their new exhibition, "the marriage of art, science, and philosophy." and after being blown away by the last one ("all faiths beautiful") i was a little disappointed. the things that were so engaging before, like the wall text in particular, seemed to only be re-canned (the fonts were exactly the same), just with different content. i was able to get some awesome quotes. but, unfortunately the experience felt like nothing new. (i hold my praise for innovative exhibitions that flawlessly combine the two.)

spending less time at that exhibition did, however, give me the chance to venture over to a building of the museum i had never looked in before. upstairs was a small installation about jim rouse, a maryland urban planner. seeing this social visionary among the artistic visionaries shown in the rest of the museum (outsider art, obsessive compulsive creations, prison art) was a suprise. and much more up my alley. a social visionary, as defined by avam, champions and furthers what is best about being human. that simple. that huge. i sat infront of this wall text and copied it word for word. i love when i find a "manifesto" like this that says so much in such a straightforward way.

1. expand the definition of a worthwhile human life.
we must hold fast to the realization that our cities are for people and unless they work well for people they are not working well at all. as the peopl of the world learn what is possible, they will demand that their cities be geared to the humane and the beautiful.

2. engender respect for and delight in the gifts of others.
surely the most civilized city would be one in which the dignity of the individual human being would be so elevated that the bringing forth of his gifts and talents for his own fullfillment in the service of man would be the ultimate objective.

3. increase awareness of the wide variety of choices available in life for all - particularly students.
approach the world out there confidently, optimistically, with brilliant expectations. it is a world full of exciting opportunities beyond anything that you can imagine. i envy you your futures. pay no heed to the no-sayers, the preachers-of-gloom, and the heavy hearted who see the world dismally.

4. encourage each individual to build upon his or her special knowledge and inner strengths.
thus, the most important single fact is that we have in our hands the opportunity to make our city - in our generation - the most livable, the most beautiful, and the most effective city in america.

5. promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration, and creative self-reliance.
the best way to attack any problem is to ask what things would be like if they worked.

6. confirm the great hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age.
the way to find new opportunities is to discover needs or yearnings of people that are not being satisfactorily met. the way to prosper is to do that well.

7. empower the individual to choose to do that something really, really well.
for many years i have worked with the conviction that what ought to be, can be, with the will to make it so. may we rise up in this country in an army of thinking that this job aught to be done, can be done, will be done.

-the seven educational goals of the american visionary art museum, with wisdom from jim rouse.

i finally met with mike patterson on friday to share my leadershape project/vision. i mentioned it briefly before, but never really explained what the thought was. here it goes (this is from my leadershape "breakthrough blueprint"):

i want to create a future where mica students and baltimore communities are connected. where students are challenged to break the mica bubble and bridge the gap between art for arts sake and art that makes things happen. i plan to implement a program (using the "finding baltimore" foundation elective as inspiration) that gives the entire student body the opportunity to explore a batimore neighborhood in three stages. 1. visiting the neighborhood/debriefing the experience. 2. developing a plan of action. 3. returning to the community and implementing something that initiates change.

that's my project. distilled to its simplest elements. there is a lot more that i won't get into right now. before i could let myself start to really pin it down and putting it on paper, i was kept getting hung up on branding. what the heck do i call this? how do i sum it all up? the first idea out of mike's mouth? "studio baltimore." and that's it. perfect. i feel like things are ready to come together. especially after stumbling across the above words at avam. and getting an email from donaghy with this link to ideo's design for social impact guide. and finally sitting down to watch the wire last night. i'm excited to start fleshing it all out.

good timing for a fall break...

ps. here's a little glimpse into my crazy color mind. why orange? it's the color of my dorm walls in the gateway. the color of the post titles on this blog. the color of the couch in the wire. it's the color of the crab in the new baltimore logo. it's part of the extended palette of the new mica logo. and it was my class color in high school.

cities + creatives

i've been thinking a lot about that combination (cities + creatives) lately. it helps having urbanism, to kind of ground and perpetuate this thinking. and i find myself doing even more bouncing back and forth. baltimore and detroit. (our first day of class a slide was shown of the demographics of detroit and the surrounding area. it was stark. black and white.)

i sat in on a discussion group this past week with the maryland state arts council (there was free food) and they asked us to reflect on various things... mainly our most pressing concerns and things we would like to see happen in our communities. and i realized that baltimore is doing so many things well. artscape is a three day long celebration of arts, claimed to be america's largest free public arts festival. organizations like art on purpose, the creative alliance, school 33, and baltimore clayworks are popping up all over. and part of that is driven by the mica led community arts movement and graduate students participating in the newly created masters of art in community arts (maca) program. most of our major musuems are free. (baltimore musuem of art, the walters, etc.) the baltimore office of promotion of the arts (bopa for short) has allowed for an increased emphasis on grant giving and public art making. they spearhead programming initiatives like free fall baltimore.

& then i came across this really interesting article from back home (by way of an urban planning website called planetizen.) i love that after the mess kwame kilpatrick has made of detroit, someone can stand up and say that a solution to standing back up as a city might be more abstract, that art has validity beyond just image, that attention to aesthetics can seep into the subconscious of a community and build its confidence.

here's an excerpt from that metro times piece, called "wake up the neighborhood."

"Reading that reminded me that I love Detroit because of all you Ferdinands (cheval) who live here. You view buildings as vessels rather than "developments." You appreciate Detroit not just because of what it used to be or could be, but because the city has a special power and you feel plugged in. That's what you capitalize on. You recognize that far too many of our architects and urban planners — supposedly creative thinkers — are dreaming up lofts and paving over green space. And in the absence of globally minded government leaders, you consider artists visionaries. You literally take matters into your own hands, rebuilding your home or your neighborhood. In the scorched earth, you see potential for life to flourish again."

the picture above is from a guerrilla art effort in detroit. (called "disney demolition") abandoned buildings were suddenly getting coated with this pumpkin orange paint. and the thing is, it didn't take long after they got this face lift that the city finally reacted and demolished them.

urbanism assignment

here's what i actually did for urbanism. (look familiar?) the assignment was to read five different visionary (of the likes of antonio sant'elia, frank lloyd wright, le corbusier...) city planning texts and to look for ways in which their ideas have trickled down today in baltimore.

le corbusier and his "guiding principles of town planning." got me going right from the start. this "believe" connection seemed almost too good to be true.

the bold white on black believe banners were something that i immediately loved about baltimore. anytime graphic design can use one word to alter the spirit of a community i'm intreguiged. in so many ways it was one word ("advokate") that led me to an art school, after all. and without knowing anything about what it meant, "believe" appeared to be attempting to do that for an entire city.

looking into it more, i found a progress report on the campaign, which turns out was a full-fledged media effort under mayor o'malley launched in 2002 (and was technically shortlived although the ripple effect still exists in remnants of believe things still around the city.) here's the resoning behind the campaign's creation:

"... it has been difficult for the people of baltimore to embrace with hope and confidence the possibility that human intervention could really drive the pestilence of illegal drugs and their violent effects from the midst of their city. facts alone do not change habis of mind and pessimism of expection long warn into the public psyche. the baltimore believe campaign was concieved as an attempt to set in motion a change that facts alone could not accomplish. it was constructed by the politcal and business leadership of the city to light a fuse of popular will and determinaton that would alter behavior inside and outside the drug culture to undermine its horrific effects on children, on adults, and the city in which they live. nothing like it has ever been attempted before."

a few things worth calling attention to:

first, a leader stepping up to tackle a problem of monumental proportions in the most optimistic way. and not relying on a typical response, but instead doing something so innovative and risky, and trusting that the people of the city would rise to the responsibility. (mayor o'malley is quoted as asking them to "risk action on faith.")

second, there were tangible results. through tv commercials, newspaper spreads, a website, and a hotline, progress was made with programs for career services, the police academy, big brother/big sister mentoring, and drug treatment. (to see the actual data, here's a link to the report itself.)

now i realize i am only seeing one piece of the puzzle in this research. it is impossible to ever fully know the intricacies and layering of a city. i am sure this idealistic project was not without controversy or criticism. but i am still wondering why it officially ended. (though i have some ideas. politics, money. cough, cough.) i am left to only imagine what could have been accomplished if the believe mentality had been continually promoted with such vigor.

and back to corbusier...

"a flood of action which leaves purposes way behind it, taking shape according to the special capacities of the people, stirs the emotions and comes to dominate developments; it issues orders; it establishes behaviour and gives events their deeper significance. at first this flood of action disappoints; but on closer consideration it encourages men and arouse confidence."

summary:
between believing and not believing. it is better to believe.
between acting and disintegrating. it is better to act.

the thing with cities, again

"it was only as these old shops began disappearing that i realized how much i counted on them - that this layered, frayed, and quirky beauty underline my own life. new technology is usually pitched to us as an improvement but progress is always an exchange. we gain something. we give something else up. i'm interested in looking at some of what we are loosing."

-zoe leonard discussing her photography project, analogue, in
"block by block: jane jacobs and the future of new york city."


down time during pre-college = time to catch up on thinking about things like cities. i checked out "the life and death of american cities" from the mica library. it was published in the early 60s, so it's pretty crazy how relevant most of it still is today. lots on planning and people, problems and solutions, cities and suburbs. there are three chapters on the subject of sidewalks alone. needless to say, i'm loving it.

we went there to feel alive

spending time on my laptop today, i started to organize all of the websites i've bookmarked this past year, putting them into their respective categories (design, art, blogs, baltimore, museums, etc.)

i came across a link to something called sweet juniper, and couldn't remember what it was. i clicked on it, and from what i could gleam at first, it is some sort of a blog. it appears to be a stay at home dad discussing diapers and the necessity of low expectations. i scroll down to find this relevant post about the validity of "blogging" to begin with. (something i am agreeing with now that the school year is done and i am finding fewer things of worth to write about...)

and that post leads me to a link discussing a recent discovery of his: the abandoned detroit public schools book depository. and i am in awe. he writes first about growing up and going into abandoned buildings "back in the day." how he puts it, "the town had died, but we went there to feel alive."

i think it is hard not to feel something (whatever that something is...) when looking at these. i find the whole thing enthralling. below are some snippets of text that had particular resonance with me, but i urge you to flip through the pictures and read the blog entries and comments on your own, too. find the meaning for yourself. let the links take you where they may...


"books that once sat in boxes on shelves are now strewn about the floor in post-apocalyptic confusion. perhaps the missing shelves were made of some metal worth hauling to the scrapyard for a few dollars that could be traded for crack. who knows, maybe some kids just got bored one day and wanted to make a big mess. there is no longer any organization in this warehouse. there are no longer any supplies here that appear 'usable' in the sense they would have been in 1990. here, chaos will reign until it all is destroyed"

"the photos, it seems, spoke for themselves: to some they said black people couldn't be trusted to govern themselves, to others that the taxes we pay for education are inevitably wasted, and that our system public education itself is a failure. and here I just thought they were beautiful."

"all that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. it is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear."

"what seems clear is that sometimes a system simply breaks down and fails."

"were the warehouse to be destroyed, like any other of the hundreds or even thousands that are torn down in detroit every year, its bricks, its crushed concrete, rebar, and its contents would be hauled away in garbage trucks to be dumped in a landfill somewhere, covered up by more trash, and lost to us, forever. instead, because this is detroit, it just sits there. it is left unsecured, open to scrappers, looters, crackheads, graffiti artists, suburban taggers, vandals, prostitutes, and local bloggers."


under one of the pictures, he included this quote as a caption:

"but instead of the old gods, [it] is a greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the olympian forces. it’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason... individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. in this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of american empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak."
david simon, talking about his show, the wire.

hmmm. back to baltimore. i'm taking that as a sign that i finally need to figure out how to see some of that show....