The Doxa

Right as the dust began to settle in our newly acquired studio space and workshop, we we’re informed by our landlord that a new large tenant was seeking to occupy the rest of the space in our building. In fact, they needed so much room that they desired to engulf our new studio into their production and distribution operation.

This led to some hard feelings among the ‘Bars seeing as this was our first home, having spent the previous five years meeting and hanging out in local bars and relying on the generosity of a certain fantastic local community gallery.

After a month or so of negotiations we came up with the idea of keeping our current mezzanine loft area with all its irreplaceable character of exposed wooden beams and brick, and expanding our workshop space into the adjacent studio.

So while our new neighbor tenant has engulfed the previous rebar shopspace, we are in the process of engulfing the adjacent tatoo parlor and shop space into a new, labyrinthine collection of shops, storefronts, mezzanines and lofts that will soon make up the Rebar Studio.

Having spent so much time thinking about how outdoor public space is a physical manifestation of social codes, and devoting our practice to exploring the niches, loopholes and voids in the public realm, its enlightening to learn through the visceral experince of building remodeling how plastic the built environment is.

How walls and ceilings can shift and move according to molten sets of values, economies, and relationships.

We look forward to returning from Paris to our new space, or collection of spaces, that will seemingly be quite appropriate for the diverse and dynamic practice that the new Rebar studio is growing to support.

Rebar will be in Paris, France next week to take part in Smart City: New Urban Challenges, New Artistic Practices, an international conference and workshop. This year’s workshop theme is mobile cities, which the program describes:

Mobile media, localisation media, new map-making and storytelling forms as well as other mobility instruments have infiltrated our cities and lifestyles.They have mutated city-dwellers relation to time and space; we are witnessing a multiplication of mobility practices and forms, of trajectories, of theintensity of the communication flow and trips. What is the impact on our perception of geographical areas, on urban forms and city planning, on ourlifestyles? This is the question that the artists are to explore in the workshop, developing varied artistic projects directly linked to the territory (strolling,mobile interface, urban game art, immersive systems, ephemeral architecture…)

Also at the conference are several artists and collectives from around Europe including Adelin Schweitzer, Ulrich Fischer, Studio 21bis, Antonin Fourneau, Zoom+Infraksound+Damien Masson, Collectif Zoom, Damien Masson, Christophe Goutes and Pixel 13. If you are in Paris, come see us. Rebar will be presenting on Thursday January 28th at 2pm, at the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe, Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. More updates on the Doxa, from the road!

Rebar’s Blaine Merker authored a chapter for a forthcoming book published by Routledge called Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, edited by Jeff Hou from the University of Washington’s landscape architecture department and available April 19, 2010. From the publisher’s jacket summary:

In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ‘insurgent public spaces’ challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighbourhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities.

With nearly 20 illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco.

Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilised in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.

Hey, looks like a certain project made it onto the dust jacket…  So pre-order your copies on Amazon now and check out Rebar’s ink under the section titled “Appropriating”, along with other great case studies in Beijing, LA, Berlin, Taiwan, East St. Louis and brothels around the world.

Aerial view of Año Nuevo Island, off the coast of Santa Cruz, California.

Rebar is very excited to be collaborating with Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, an extraordinary international conservation biology non-profit organization, to design some habitat restoration elements for Año Nuevo Island, a marine environment heavily altered by human intervention, and one of only four island systems off the coast of California.

From 1872 through the 1940s, Año Nuevo Island was an operative Coast Guard lighthouse station, and it seems like it was a pretty cushy gig: In addition to a steel frame lighthouse, island infrastructure included a Victorian mansion, outbuildings, an elaborate non-native garden, a cistern and a rail system. In 1948, an automated buoy replaced the lighthouse, the island was effectively abandoned by humans, and the “natural” world began its inexorable reclamation process. But the island still carries the evidence of successive human interventions: The lighthouse has collapsed into a rusting steel hulk, the cistern has fractured. The Victorian home is actually faring pretty well, under the circumstances.

The Coast Guard lighthouse station, circa 1953.

The house, circa 2008.

The Lighthouse, circa 2008.

The Rhinoceros Auklet. Photo by Frank Balthis.

The current ecological dynamics of the island have substantially degraded the habitat of two burrowing seabirds, both of which are state-listed “species of concern” — the Rhinoceros Auklet and the Cassin’s Auklet. The marine terrace soil that composes the center of the island is rapidly disappearing due to extensive landscape alterations during the “lighthouse” era, natural erosion, and sporadically high California sea lion densities. The approximately 300 breeding Auklets that rear their young in underground burrows depend upon undisturbed soil and soil-stabilizing vegetation. If left untouched, the habitat for these Auklets will degrade further until it is no longer a viable breeding ground. This is where we come in.

Led by Oikonos, a cross-disciplinary team of ecologists, habitat restoration experts, artists, designers and government agencies are collaborating to restore the degraded habitat for these nesting seabirds. Once the habitat has been successfully protected from marine mammal incursion, the team will rehabilitate the native plant community to reduce erosion, provide sustainable Auklet breeding habitat and, ultimately, increase the biodiversity of this unique island ecosystem.

Room for improvement: The current Nest Module design.

The Año Nuevo Island habitat restoration project includes two main design elements. To separate the sizeable sea lion population from critical bird breeding areas, Rebar is designing and constructing a series of Habitat Walls at strategic locations around the island. In addition, to facilitate the seabird species nesting and breeding while the native flora restoration is ongoing, Rebar will develop a system of Nest Modules to replace the current human-made modules, which are constructed from plywood and PVC plastic piping.

To develop the Nest Modules, we are teaching a interdisciplinary design course through the ENGAGE program at the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts. The course will be taught through the Ceramics Department with Nathan Lynch, the department chair, a very talented artist and, as you can see by his fine art work, just the perfect artist for a bird habitat project such as this.

We are excited to harness the design talents of CCA students to help solve this challenging design problem. We will also be investigating the role of the artist and designer in helping structure or mediate interpretations of “nature” and “restoration ecology” within a broader framework of the environmental movement, human interactions with natural landscapes, ideas of wilderness, the nature preserve, national parks and so forth. Basically, it’s another look at how human imagination and systems of regulation, organization and control are implemented in the landscape. It’s very Rebar.

We’ll post more as the project develops.

Until then, please check out the Año Nuevo Island Restoration Project website.

Stay tuned!

It’s official–Rebar has been selected by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency to create artwork for the new Hilltop Park at Hunter’s Point, in San Francisco, CA. The new piece, which we call Gigantry in honor of its gigantically miniature proportions, is a smaller version of Hunter’s Point’s iconic, 500-foot high gantry crane for servicing battleship guns–a feature that can be seen for miles around the Bay Area. Gigantry can be climbed on, turning the symbol of warfare (and the cultural dominance of the former Navy base) around to serve the playful impulses of human beings, especially the little ones. In our proposal we explained that Gigantry — in conjunction with the environmental remediation going on at the Navy Shipyard

is intended to signify the beginning of a process of social remediation, symbolically confronting this troubling legacy and reclaiming a visual landscape that has been dominated for decades by military infrastructure.

One interesting fact about the gantry crane is that 200-foot tower on top was used to test missile launches over the San Francisco Bay in the 1950s. Essentially, dummy missiles (that is, ones without nuclear warheads) were tethered to the tower with a length of cable so that they wouldn’t careen into the city of Oakland. How times have changed: in addition to its climbability, and we think this is quite neat, Gigantry can perfectly occlude the giant gantry crane, creating a kind of optical illusion that, we hope, transform children into building-dominating supermonsters. Or at least make them feel that way.

More on the Hunter’s Point art program is here, and there are pictures of the site and the gantry crane here and here. We’ll take the sculpture into production this year and will be installed by Summer 2011.