At the end of August, some of the best graffiti artists in the world descended on Nelson Street in Bristol as part of an ambitious urban street art project called See No Evil. Over the course of three days, these artists transformed previously bleak and grey spaces and their looming concrete walls into gigantic works of art.

US artists included world-renowned a href=”http://elmac.net/”>El Mac out of Los Angeles and New York based Tats Cru, Inkie and UK’s Zeus and Nick Walker.

images via antidote bristol

It is an interesting time as Seattle embarks on the adventure of redesigning its waterfront. And how exciting it is for me to have a front seat!

The big question being asked by Waterfront Seattle is, “what makes a great waterfront?” Tune in to find out what the people of Seattle have to say including a presentation on the analysis and aspirations of James Corner and the rest of the waterfront design team. You can stream the presentation live from the Seattle Channel on Thursday, February 17th at 6pm.

For those of you in the Seattle area, there are some great events coming up at the University of Washington as part of the multi-disciplinary, year long series – NOW Urbanism: City Making in the 21st Century and Beyond.

This months events on November 17th and 18th revolve around The Ecology of Cities. The public lecture on the 17th will feature Randolph T. Hester from the Landscape Architecture department of the University of California at Berkeley. His lecture is titled “Environmental Urbanism: Design with Ecological Democracy.”

Following on the 18th should be an interesting discussion featuring Randolph T. Hester from the previous lecture and joined by Chris Reed, principal of STOSS and Howard Frumkin, the Dean of the UW School of Public Health. The discussion is titled, “Environmental Urbanism: Ecological Design for Healthy Cities” and is explained further on the website,

“What does it mean to envision a healthy city – one that nurtures both people and the environment? Environmental Urbanism acknowledges and embraces the relationships between people and their material surroundings. This session will explicitly consider how the human processes of city making involve an ongoing negotiation with various non-human elements– soils, water, atmosphere, and animals. By considering the intended and unintended effects of urbanization, our goal is to better understand how and to what extent we can intentionally shape future urban landscapes.”

Future lectures include:
December 8: Networked Urbanisms: Connections & Communication Across Space and Time
December 9: America’s War on Immigrants
January 13: Informal Urbanims: Slum Cities and Gobal Health
February 11: Transcultural Urbanism: Immigrants In The City
March 10: Generosity of Cities: Arts, Humanities, And The City
April 7: Next Eco-Cities: Imaginations And Futures
April 8: Next Eco-City Symposium
May 5: Social Justice, Inquality And Cities
May 26: The University And The City

This coming week we’ll find out which team won for the Design of the Seattle Central Waterfront. Last week the four shortlisted teams had their formal interviews as well as a presentation to the public. The lead on the four teams are: Wallace Roberts and Todd, Michael Van Valkenburgh, James Corner Field Operations, and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, which presented at the public presentations last Thursday evening at Benaroya Hall in that order. To view each of their presenations, go here.

It was a unique opportunity to watch some great designers present to the public on their experience and design vision. It also really showed the value of a well-coordinated presenation and that even the great names in our profession can stumble without a little preparation. Although an interesting thing is that while those of us in the audience had some strong opinions on what we witnessed, those that watched it online had some differing views due to the choice views shown by the camera rather than witnessing the entire stage. Either way, it will be interesting to hear the outcome of the decision on what will only be the beginning of a dramatic change for the city of Seattle. What an exciting time to have moved North, where I can witness and document the changes as they take place!

Below is the raw footage from the public presentations. So get comfy, grab some popcorn and enjoy.

The non-profit organization of volunteers, Architecture for Humanity is teaming up with PechaKucha, an event for designers to show and discuss their work, to unite 277 cities around the world currently offering this event for one cause. Global PechaKucha Day for Haiti will broadcast a 24-hour wave of presentations on February 20th that will be dedicated to the rebuilding of Haiti.

The event will all be streamed online for everyone in the world to watch in real time and captured on the website and tagged with the idea that these ideas and people could be a great resource for future relief efforts as well as this one. This sounds like it’s going to be an incredible event. The video above features the offical announcement from PechaKucha night founders Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo and Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity. More information from the website:

Already presentations are being prepared – some are intended to offer hope and encouragement through stories of past disaster relief projects, while others offer simple inspiration by showing the power of great creative thinking. Some amazing people have stepped up to the challenge so prepared to be surprised

All of the 2,000 presentations generated from the one-day event – what could be the world’s biggest single day globally distributed conference – will be posted online at PechaKucha Presentation. All presentations will have a donate button to raise money.

All proceeds will go to Architecture for Humanity for rebuilding Haiti. AFH operates globally, and was instrumental in getting projects built after the Indian Ocean Tsunami and Katrina. The design costs for the new buildings in Haiti have been already covered so all donations will go to tangible built projects.

The beauty of the simple 20×20 format is the presentations are so easy to make and voice, so each month AFH will make updates in the 20×20 format which will be posted on line and shown at all the PechaKucha Night around the world in the coming month to show how the PechaKucha Fund is being used and to help keep the interest level high through until completion.

Santas take to the streets for the annual SantaCon in towns across the US and overseas in this lovely month of December. Santas have been seen riding bikes, boarding trains, eating and drinking in city pubs and gathering in public parks. Here’s a few street scenes from the event that took place over the weekend in Portland, including the initial gathering point at downtown’s newest urban park, Director Park.

Happy Holidays all!

images via ohhh_yeah808

Description from Yale University, “For one week in May 2008, leading architects, professors, and students from Yale University, organized by the Yale Urban Design Workshop in conjunction with Friends of the Earth Middle East, traveled to the Jordan-Israel border. On the site of the ruined Rotenberg Hydroelectric Station of the Palestine Electric Company, they collaborated with Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian architects on the design the first Peace Park in the Middle East. Two Yale undergraduate filmmakers followed the story with a camera, in an attempt to capture this significant moment and share this unique story with others.”

On September 8th, 2007, the City of Kent in Washington state celebrated the 25th Anniversary of Earthworks Park designed by Herbert Bayer. This celebration coincided with the one-day art installation, Chromatic Levee by Brice Maryman, as part of 4Culture’s Site-Specific program, that year the program was titled “Art Unearthed”. Brice explains it best in his own words on the City of Kent’s website documenting the piece:

The notion that design should be incorporated into the everyday—that aesthetics and humanity should be a consistent portion of our experience—is about as foreign to contemporary culture as are hand-cranked sewing machines. In an era where an almost surgical efficiency rules, we are quick to circumscribe times, objects, thoughts and beliefs into boxes. They define our commutes, our children, and our cities. It’s cleaner that way, we think; with so many neat compartments, it’s easy to know when something is out of place.

Given the stereotypes, you would think that an Austrian, who worked for the Container Corporation of America, would appreciate this ordered efficiency. But Herbert Bayer rebuffed this channelization of thought; above all else, he was a humanist of the highest order and embraced the overlaps, inconsistencies and the floodplains of thought that make the human experience richer. Of all of his Bauhaus brethren, it was Bayer who carried the ideals of integrated design the furthest. Whether wielding this power through typography or product design or exhibitions, Bayer’s raison d’etre seems to have been to dissect the boxes that were being formed all around him—to move away from the mechanical—which he saw as a tool, not an end—and to allow for the sediment of humanity to accumulate in order to see what might take root.

I wonder then, what Bayer would have thought about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina? The boxes that held people in at the edge of the Mississippi Delta were so starkly apparent after August 29, 2005. The Black Box. The Poverty Box. The Boxed Culvert of the Mississippi River, draining an increasingly urbanized America. The Box of White Consciousness. The Box of the Superdome. The Box of Apathy. The Box of Underfunded Education. Each was laid bare, scattered about for all to see when the waters receeded.

With his perpetual hope for the human species, Mr. Bayer might have sought to find ways to used those banged up cubes as the raw material for a new start. He would have believed that the inviolable shared culture of the swamps and bayous of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi could coalesce around a new infrastructure that honored economic, social and environmental considerations as a system, rather than as discrete boxes, without relationship to each other.

On a lesser scale, these are the same questions and themes that surround the future of the Earthworks. Mill Creek, a modest unassuming stream within the Puget Sound basin, would not give anyone pause if not for two quite consequential human choices. One happened largely before Mr. Bayer’s time, the other largely afterward.

When Kent was established, Mill Creek was a reliable power source for the booming logging industry, driving the whip saws that would rip timber to boards. In time, those boards formed the raw material for building the town around the mill. Decades later, the mill was gone, but the town remained, resting on the floodplain of the Green River Valley with the nozzle of Mill Creek aimed directly at what was now downtown Kent.

Gradually, the land that had been denuded by the lumbermen regained its forest, and the torrent of Mill Creek was slowed by the naturally regulated flow provided by the rich duff and canopies of the native forest. For a time, the walls between nature and culture were weakened and both were serving the same purpose–as it had been for 10,000 years before Euro-American settlers came.

But the siting of Kent, like the siting of New Orleans, already placed it in a precarious situation, hemmed in by natural systems that were beneficent for much of the year, but that could turn ruinous during a long rain. The careful planning and understanding of upstream impacts on the waters of the streams and rivers of the Kent Valley should have been of paramount import, but it was not. Like everywhere else in America, sprawl took root with little thought about how the dedritics of development would affect the hydology of the place. So Mill Creek flooded, salmon drowned, and downtown Kent sat waterlogged in the winter. Indeed, it was into this sad position in our history that Bayer entered the scene.

Bayer’s intention, again, was to obscure the traditional boxes by creating something previously unknown: a hybrid ecology where the boundaries between nature, art, landscape and infrastructure blurred into a coherent whole–separate from and greater than its parts. He states, “a dam in the ordinary sense constitutes a radical interference with the natural configuration of the land. My intent was, therefore, to give the dams a natural appearance conforming to the landscape (surroundings) and to become integral parts of the landscape being created.”

Breaking down barriers and establishing new frames was part of the intention of Chromatic Levee as well. Hovering between the ideas of art and infrastructure, social and economic identities, inertia and entropy, nature and art, the natural and the artificial, performance and sculpture, history and the present, I sought to portray a continuum of place—a richly layered stratigraphy, both lithic and dynamic, yet extricably borne of its endemic geography. Most directly, the piece is an homage to Bayer’s color explorations, which find their resonance in the colors of the Chromatic Levee. Reflected in the waters of Mill Creek, Chromatic Levee attempts to meld art, nature and infrastructure to remind us of a future we have only to articulate to achieve.

Afterword

On the other hand, like the Earthworks themselves, it was not solely the eidetic, but also Bayer’s humanistic ideal, that needed to be attended to. In achieving this, Catherine Eith’s assistance could not have been more welcome or timely. As I moved through the process of sorting out the materials and methods of construction, she suggested purchasing a particular, high-quality fabric. This modest investment would prevent us from sending this material to the landfill; instead, we could send these items to the Gulf Coast. We fashioned the sandbag modules here, used them once for the installation, then shipped them to our friends in the Gulf Coast. By the time you are reading this, the victims of Hurricane Katrina who lost so much are now sleeping under quilts and blankets made from the sympathetic reverberations found in Kent and King County, Washington.

images via Brice Maryman

Didn’t your mother tell you not to play in the street? Well, from October 29th to November 1st, three locations in the UK; Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough will be breaking the rules and taking over streets for some accessible and enlightening fun in the evenings after 5:30pm.

Media artists KMA will use projected light and thermal-imaging technology that, according to to the Great Street Games website, will “create jaw-dropping interactive arenas in which the physical movements of players determine the outcome of the games.” But not only are the games linked to the interactivity of the users, but they will be linked between the three cities as well through the real-time games.

KMA has created some other interesting, interactives works including the kinetic light installation titled “Waves” from February of this year. From KMA: “Projected into the street with no visible infrastructure in sight, it uses the heat of passers-by to allow them to interact with a projected environment that simulates physical interactions whilst encouraging playful interactions. Waves was commissioned by DanceDigital as part of their launch as the leading agency for dance and technology in the UK.”

images via KMA

“Waves uses the mathematics of electromagnetism, gravity and Newtonian physics to visualise simulated environments, in which the audience become key elements: a magnet in a field of iron filings, a disturbance in a viscous fluid, a foreign force in an ordered world of microscopic particles. By exploring how their own bodies interact with this space, the forces they bring to this simulated world will also begin to affect the movement of other participants, and a collective visual and physical exploration is created in an unexpected environment.”

White Nights festivals are all-night parties that take place between the end of summer and beginning of autumn. Traditionally, White Nights take place in cities near the Arctic Circle during the summer solstice where there are several days without darkness and many bright cities would hold events around the clock in celebration. Other cities have been inspired by the spirit of a round-the-clock festival such as Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris and Montreal to name a few and now there is even an entire European circuit of festivals. While the cities in Europe don’t experience a true white night, the spirit of the festival is alive and the idea of bringing out residents and visitors alike to explore the art, music and theater within the car-free city centers under the glow of the moonlight is enchanting.

In Madrid, one of the larger festival desinations, La Noche En Blanco 2009 itself was even split up into its own circuits; the Music Circuit, the Visual Arts Circuit, the Performing Arts Circuit and the Film Circuit. This makes for an overwhelming amount of events to entertain the public all the way through the night until 6am.

With lots of interesting events, I wanted to point out “Verde” by the fabulous Luzinterruptus. This was one of two installations that ran all night, this one including 1,000 street lamp posts covered by green living room shades that ran all through the center of Madrid. The soft green lighting transformed the atmosphere into a comfortable, warm and homey space.

The massive transformation from the typical vehicular buzz of the major city center streets to the intimate pedestrian ways encouraged people to stroll and enjoy the surrounding art and music. This installation just goes to show how lighting can make a dramatic difference in any space.

images via luzinterruptus