The Doxa

It’s not generally our habit to recommend products or put together holiday gift guides. Rebar’s art and design practice is rooted in creative re-purpose and re-use, waste stream reduction, and the development of urban and social abundance through sustainable, ecologically-sensitive means. That often means looking for ways around the consumer culture this season so encourages.

That said, it seems this year the recession has got more than a few people looking for creative, non-traditional gifts. We figure, why not play along? Here are a few fun ideas that fit our ethos.

The gift that breathes

Kamal Meattle on TED: How to grow your own air

This TED Talk explains how with proper maintenance a few particular plants can vastly improve the air quality of an enclosed space. Sure, seven or eight plants per person sounds like a lot, but most people don’t have a need for completely fabricated air in a sealed-up bubble, just better air in homes and offices that increasingly house more chemical and airborne particulates. Even a few plants will help clear the air, brighten a space, and live well beyond the holiday season.

If you were wondering what to get us as a housewarming gift for our new Rebar studio space, bring on the Money Plants!

The gift that feeds

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is super-trendy right now, and with good reason. Not only does subscribing to a local farm’s yield on a weekly or monthly basis get you a wide range of delicious, interesting fruits and vegetables (or even meats!), it connects you to the land and food supply, and gets you moving in the kitchen. Tough economic times mean more eating at home, but that doesn’t have to mean a return to Ramen and frozen dinners.

Locate a participating farm in your area using Local Harvest’s finder tool.

If you’re intimidated by the task of cooking, consider splitting the box or preparing meals as a group. In other words, build a community around food. It’s one of civilization’s great traditions.

The gift that grows

Charitable gifts are always popular and especially satisfying when you can see your donation make a direct impact in your community. San Francisco’s Friends of the Urban Forest offer just such an opportunity with their Tree Tributes: a $25 donation goes directly toward planting a new street tree in the City, commemorated with a lovely dedicated card.

The fun part is how the City transforms after such a gift, every tree in sight becoming a new friend and inspiring the thought, “Could that be my tree?” And why not? Nothing better than having a friend on every block.

Season’s Greetings!

Rebar recently developed a proposal (an awesome proposal, we think) for art at the transit hub of Church and Duboce streets in SF at the invitation of the SF Arts Commission. The basic idea was to re-use the streetcar rail that is being torn out as a part of the streetscape redesign and manufacture them into abstract, industrial street furniture for use by the patrons waiting for Muni. From the propsoal description:

Off the Rails is a re-use and re-imagining of the venerable rails that have kept Muni trains moving through Duboce Triangle for the last 40 years. Light rail tracks—recycled from the construction project that is re-shaping the streetscape—are transformed into gestural art pieces that define the space of the boarding island, offer a grounding point for commuters to pause and rest against, and create a distinctive gateway element for the neighborhood. They are reminders of the mutability of infrastructure and their clean, industrial lines speak to the brawn of the commuter system that makes Duboce Triangle the transit-first residential nexus and a model for neighborhoods across the city.

The three sculptures are composed of six stacked rails each, approximately 15 feet long, rising obliquely out of the boarding platform almost as if they were lifting themselves out of the pavement, then diving back into the ground again. Suddenly along their length, the parallel rails bend, separating and converging to create sculptural “moments”: a seat for one, a plank to lean against, a place to tie your shoe.

Now while the idea wasn’t ultimately picked by the SF Arts Commission (congrats to Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe, who was selected for the commission), we thought we’d post it here until it finds a home somewhere…for real, we’d love to see some old rail re-bent into a new transit station somewhere. Until then, you can read our public proposal here.