The Doxa

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.

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.

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.

From Gregory, our man on the site at 45 Lansing:

The Urban Wildflower Meadow is almost complete! One last push this Sunday should do it. As you may have noticed, the wildflowering of this large vacant lot in downtown SF has not been a small undertaking, but we’ve made some fantastic progress this month. With your help we should be able to move the rest of the mulch, finish the irrigation and plant the remaining seeds this weekend. Come anytime between 10 and 5 and stay for as long as you want.

We will again have water, snacks and gloves on hand. Be sure to bring boots a hat and lunch (if you’re staying through midday).

If coming by car, parking is best done on Harrison in front of the lot (btwn 1st street and Essex street). Never mind feeding the meter as it will be Sunday.

Here is the location:

View Larger Map

The entrance is off of the northwest side of Harrison.

The neighborhood won’t know what hit’em.

Gregory

Last fall a group of CCA architecture students, led by Landscape Architect David Fletcher and Rebar art and design studio shared a meal together at a local taco truck for a class assignment.  Our research seminar explored San Francisco’s food and wastesheds. Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring. By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future. What resulted was a richly complex network of systems, flows and ecologies that we call the global Tacoshed. The research seminar was a part of the URBANlab, an innovative curriculum component of The California College of the Arts Architecture Program.

Please join us for a talk by Jessica Diaz of Gracias Madre, a new restaurant serving organic Mexican cuisine to the Mission District of San Francisco, a presentation of Back to Basics by Materials and Applications - a recirculating fish taco farm charged with rainwater at the beginning of the season, stocked with locally spawned tilapia and raising tomatoes, onion, and lettuce by harvest / party time; and a presentation, exhibition, and discussion of the results of our Tacoshed research.

Thursday February 25^th, 7pm

The Studio for Urban Projects

3579 17th Street
San Francisco, CA 9411

Suggested donation: $5-$15 at the door.

Mark Andrew Gravel of Bouwerie will be serving organic black bean tacos from his Spotted Rooster project.

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.

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.

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.