The Doxa

We won’t actually be in Bilbao, but we will be streaming live from our studio to the conference over the internet. If you’re in Bilbao…or near our studio!…you can come check out the talk titled ‘Temporary Transformations and Tactical Urbanism’. Rebar’s newest intern extraordinaire, Berta Lázaro, will be translating and moderating. The talk takes places at 7:30pm Central European Time, or 12:30pm PST. More here.

via Flickr: underbiteman

Our friend Scott Burnham just released a new article for the Royal Society of the Arts titled “Finding the Truth in Systems: In Praise of Design Hacking”, with a perspective on design that is, at least for now, the outsider’s view in traditional design thought. (Scott commissioned Urban Play in Amsterdam with Droog Design last year.) We are happy that Rebar’s projects serve as part of his argument in the article (available as a pdf here) because even though we haven’t much used the term hacking to describe our approach, it fits. According to Scott,

Hacking finds the truth in systems. The first thing software hackers do when they gain access to a program’s source code is explore and share hidden code and functions not documented by the original programmers. When design hackers open and take apart products to re-work them, the type and quality of wood found beneath the paint or the interior parts used are discussed widely. Hacking brings the inner realities of products to the surface. It reveals the complete aesthetic and exposes secrets.

True that… in fact, this gets at one of the apocryphal associations behind the name Rebar–the hidden structure of everyday things. Hacking, whether by way of remixing or repurposing, exposes hidden structures and in doing so, creates new meanings.

One of the other actors mentioned in Scott’s article is Santiago Cirugeda, a Spanish architect/artist working in the loopholes of law and the interstitial, liminal and transitory spaces of the city. He has a knack for marrying the performative and the architectural with some captivating projects. Back in 1997, Cirugeda was looking for a way to install a playground in Seville, but after being turned down by the planning authority he applied for a dumpster permit and built the playground inside the dumpster. The description of the methods for doing this are posted, open source, on his website, Recetas Urbanas. Total cost for the permits: 53 Euros … seeing kids playing on a stripey see-saw in a dumpster: priceless. While this kind of creative threading of the legal eye of the needle definitely belongs in the urban hacker’s textbook (which would, no doubt, quickly be hacked), other of Cirugeda’s projects such as throwing up some graffiti, then erecting his own scaffolding and donning a city worker’s uniform and painting over the graffiti, are elegant in their union of the practical, performative and the absurd.

The eventual end of this line of thought is that the notion of hacking as a separate, responsive act to design is unnecessarily dualistic. What if instead of this duality there were just people who made things and re-made them, over and over? The roles of hacker and designer are necessarily created out of a world where branding and authorship serve the ends of capitalism. The dominant definition of designer is one who creates value that can be sold, whereas hackers mostly work for free. Just think of John Lennon singing ‘Imagine there’s no designers and no hackers…” and it almost seems possible.

via Flickr: moses_namkung

We’ve been thinking about modular urban furniture lately, and not just because Bushwaffle went, en mass, to the Treasure Island Music Festival this weekend. We ran across this: in Budapest, Hungary the PRCCCS festival held an event last week that asked: What kind of street furniture would you make with 140 30-liter plastic drums? This carries forward a theme we’ve been exploring since Experimenta 2008 in Amsterdam last year and our residency at Texas A&M University, and to which GRL contributed some brilliance a few years ago with their Postal Chairs. And here in San Francisco, design students have been experimenting with “catch and release” DPW Adirondack chairs.

via Vimeo: Gergely Kukucska

We’re not sure what the Hungarian festival was all about–because all of the materials are in Hungarian–but it brings to mind the many lightweight, mass-produced objects in our detritus stream that could be pressed into service for grassroots customization of urban spaces.

via Atlanta Travel Journal: John W. English. http://www.ajc.com/travel/content/travel/southeast/ga_stories/2009/03/01/onetank_0301tr2.html

The yellow school bus takes a long, long ride before it finally quits. Besides occasionally getting remixed into a bus stop in Atlanta, GA as a part of an arts program, many old yellow buses continue their useful life outside the United States. In Congo, they have become the staple vehicle of public transportation in Kinshasa, first arriving in the early 1980s.

Boxy buses that once carted American children now haul Congo’s impoverished people, young and old — and their loads of preserved fish, powdered milk, beans, onions and cassava. Charging breakneck around the capital, the yellow buses rattle fiercely, as they hurtle through the potholes peppering Kinshasa’s roads. The blinking tail lights that had protected many a child are now either missing or broken.

While many castoff products from rich Western countries find new use in Africa, the ripped T-shirts, faintly treaded shoes and old computers haven’t had their original use quite as thoroughly inverted as the yellow school bus.

Yellow buses symbolize safety and restraint on American roads. Not here in Congo.

“This bus is all about speed,” says Alfonse Musambu, a 39-year-old pastor of a Kinshasa church called The Chandeliers of Gold, sitting in a bus as it barrels across Kinshasa. “Pedestrians are used to it. They know how to get out of the way.” (source)

The American school buses end up in Central and South America, too. Sonny Merryman, a Virginia-based bus company is one of several American distributors who re-ship the buses overseas after about ten years of shuttling American kids. Once they land in their new home, they are customized as needed.

via Flickr: mattbuch

Which leads to an interesting view of quintessentially American products (like the yellow school bus) as just a snapshot in time and space when Americans happen to be the ones using something. In the frame before, a mountain of Canadian ore, and after it, a vessel for transporting chickens. Quiet down in the back please…

Buffeted by rain and wind the last few weeks, we haven’t been able to get down to Pescadero, CA, to begin building full-size prototypes of the “habitat ridges” we are designing for Oikonos, a wildlife conservation organization working on Año Nuevo Island. Until last week. The sun broke through and we began testing “the hull” design. We are building it on the mainland, where we have access to tools (and the wildlife is absent). This design will span the isthmus on the island.

(Photos: Masha Slavnova)

Which is not too bad a scaling-up of the original model (base is the shape of the isthmus):

The ridge designs we’re testing are constructed from eucalyptus harvested from a conservation trust area near Pescadero. Eucalyptus is abundant, and invasive, in California, and if they prove usable for the ridge designs we will be solving two problems at once.

More on the habitat restoration project, and Año Nuevo, here.

NYC and SF are full of “wildposted” wheat paste poster advertising on shuttered buildings and construction sites. Apparently, in NYC anyway, they’re put up illegally by a private advertising company. Two people named Jordan Seiler and Posterboy launched a fullscale attack on the wildpostings this month, whitewashing all of them in a day and coming back with a crew of artists to repopulate the blank canvases with new artwork.

In the intro, the project is explained as a “takeback of public space”. Video here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKYwJ5wKeCU]

Civic Center Victory Garden in 2008

Rebar’s John Bela will be speaking at the upcoming Planting the City series at the Studio for Urban Projects on Thursday, October 22 @ 7pm.

This panel discussion moderated by New York Times writer Allison Arieff explores the strategies underlying sidewalk greening. From urban beautification, traffic calming, and rain water diversion to reclaiming roadway for pedestrian usage, these projects seek to enliven the public sphere. Participants include Jane Martin of Plant*SF, Gillian Gillett of Greening Guerrero, John Bela of Rebar, and Andres Power, the Project Manager of SF Pavement to Parks Program.

Space limited, RSVP is required, more info here.