The Doxa

Rebar is seeking 4 volunteers to represent Rebar at Park(ing) Day San Francisco at SPUR on September 17. This year, Rebar will provide several Walklets to demonstrate a new modular, flexible sidewalk system that can create pedestrian plazas in the parking lane, outside SPUR on Mission Street. Our team of volunteers will transport 3 Walklets from our shop to SPUR around 10am, set up in the parking lane (just like all good Park(ing) Day events!), and stay to enjoy the party and answer questions about Walklets, which will be available throughout San Francisco this fall. At the end of the afternoon, the volunteer team will de-install the Walklets and return them to the Rebar shop.

We will provide our excellent volunteer team with a truck for transport, Rebar and Park(ing) Day t-shirts, lunch and Rebar schwag by way of thanks. Volunteers should be comfortable with lifting and a little physical work during installation, and familiarity with tools.

To participate, email blaine [at] rebargroup [dot] org.

As the culmination of its Pavement to Parks parking space pilot program, the City of San Francisco will soon (late summer/early fall) make a permit available for businesses wanting to convert the on-street parking spaces in front of their storefronts to pedestrian plazas, mini-parks, or “parklets”. Rebar has prototyped a plug-and-play, modular system that will be available for businesses to specify as their design of choice when the City releases the application. To connect with Rebar about purchasing Walklets for your storefront when the City permit becomes available, contact us by email.

Rebar is featured in Trespass. A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, by Carlo McCormick, Marc and Sara Schiller (of Wooster Collective), Ethel Seno, and published by Taschen Books. We are excited to be part of this collection. From Taschen’s website:

In recent years street art has grown bolder, more ornate, more sophisticated and—in many cases—more acceptable. Yet unsanctioned public art remains the problem child of cultural expression, the last outlaw of visual disciplines. It has also become a global phenomenon of the 21st century.

Made in collaboration with featured artists, Trespass examines the rise and global reach of graffiti and urban art, tracing key figures, events and movements of self-expression in the city’s social space, and the history of urban reclamation, protest, and illicit performance. The first book to present the full historical sweep, global reach and technical developments of the street art movement, Trespass features key works by 150 artists, and connects four generations of visionary outlaws including Jean Tinguely, Spencer Tunick, Keith Haring, Os Gemeos, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Gordon Matta-Clark, Shepard Fairey, Blu, Billboard Liberation Front, Guerrilla Girls and Banksy, among others. It also includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs of long-lost works and legendary, ephemeral urban artworks.

Paper Magazine calls the book “a high-brow meditation on and comprehensive journey through the history of street art.” The title is set to be released in September and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

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The Danish cultural organization Råderum will bring Rebar to speak at its October 14 conference, “Contemporary Art, Play and Temporality” in Copenhagen, Denmark. The principal objective of Råderum:

is to create new opportunities for contemporary art, and the ambition of the office is to work across the boundaries of established genres and institutions. The idea behind the office is to shape new constellations and develop new formats within the contemporary art scene.

The working title of Rebar’s talk is ElastiCity – User generated urbanism and the adaptive metropolis. We will post more about the conference, and Copenhagen as the date approaches.

Protyping "Blades of Grass" in San Francisco

In partnership with the French art and culture organization Dédale, Rebar will travel to Paris September 10-19 to launch that city’s first large-scale Park(ing) Day event. The trip will include a weeklong residency by Rebar at the Cité Internationale Universitaire, where the Rebar team will create a mobile, public participatory art piece that inspires urban residents to re-imagine the way that we create and occupy public space.

In an “open studio” style workshop at the Cité Universitaire, Rebar will fabricate “Blades of Grass” during the week prior Park(ing) Day. The concept is to create a mobile, distributed, personal public space that can be transported by bicycle. On Park(ing) Day, each individual participating in a cross-city ride from the Second Arrondissement to the Cité Universitaire will carry a single blade of grass. The route will recall an unrealized proposal by the early 20th Century landscape architect Jean Claude Nicholas Forestier for a greenway across the city. Groups of individuals gather together in parking spaces and other sites to create temporary pubic spaces providing shade and enclosure.  Participants can assemble and disassemble at will, acting like a colony of bees or slime mold, aggregating and dispersing according to the environmental situation. Our goal is to fabricate at least 50 blades over the course of the workshop.

If you are in Paris between September 10-19, let us know and get involved!

The Hayes Valley Farm–a Rebar project created in collaboration with the SF Permaculture Guild and others–occupies an urban site where San Francisco’s Central Freeway once touched down. It’s been recognized alongside the High Line, the Tate Modernand Lima, Peru’s Ghost Train Park as among seven of the world’s best “recycled architecture” projects by the Huffington Post. Rebar has been busy finishing up the modular greenhouse, which is made from recycled scaffolding and water-filled highway barriers.

Awesome organization, founded by former pro-basketball player and MacArthur genius grant recipient Will Allen:

Growing Power is a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in all communities.  Growing Power implements this mission by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.

Info on the organization’s programs, including aquaculture and bees, http://www.growingpower.org/

Rebar will be represented on a discussion panel at the Just Metropolis conference, 9:00AM-10:30AM, at the University of California Berkeley this Friday. There is a full slate of conference topics ranging from ecology to decoding military landscapes, so it should be an interesting event. Rebar’s panel will include other authors of the forthcoming book Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, which we’ve mentioned here a couple times before.

Just checked out the website and a friend’s photos from Figment in New York City (Governor’s Island). Looks juicy, especially this. Wish we had a Rebar jet.

Living Pavilion by Ann Ha and Behrang Behin via Flickr | Benchun.

We’re covering this a little late on our own blog, but in case you haven’t caught on a posting elsewhere, Rebar’s prototype for modular, extensible, iterative public space in the parking lane is now in use in the Mission District. This is the latest installation for San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks program. See it for yourself at 22nd Street and Bartlett Street, in front of Cafe Revolution, Escape From New York Pizza, and Lolo.

Perhaps these guys say it best… Streetsblog SF, San Francisco Chronicle, the Design Blog, Yelp, Trendhunter Magazine, PSFK. And we also say it on the SFMOMA’s blog.

We are developing “Walklet”–a plug-and-play system that makes it easy to instantly create a pedestrian public space in a parking lane (which San Francisco is developing a new permit for as we write). Retail inquiries welcome as we are going into production now. Email us through the product’s new website.