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.

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 It also includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs of long-lost works and legendary, ephemeral urban artworks.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!

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.