Nomadic Grove is a meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city. To sit, relaxed, looking up at a tree framing the sky is a simple and profound human experience, but one in surprisingly short supply in modern cities. Perhaps it is because trees resist the city’s constant motion, the city’s ruthlessness–they are specific in a world of impatient cosmopolitanism.

Nomadic Grove is an experimental landscape that attempts to straddle the poles of stability and movement: a seemingly solid environment where the sense of place defined by a tree can be easily disassembled and reconfigured. The grove consists of an archipelago of gem-like islands suspended low on wheels, floating just above the surface of the plaza as if it were the plane of a calm lake. Fragments of this floating terrain are solidly but temporarily anchored in one of several compositions that change from week to week. In the abstracted islands, large specimen trees are rooted, defining the center of a small world. The trees–oak, olive, cypress–are adapted to the climates of both Israel and the Bay Area, representing the Mediterranean biome that is shared between the two regions.

The gem islands, singly and in relationship with one another, provide a means for visitors to inhabit a familiar urban space in novel ways, creating amphitheaters, seating, lounging decks, informal classrooms, or social spaces, depending on the day and the configuration.

Playing on themes of migration, rootedness, local adaptation, and miniature landscape, Nomadic Grove is an inhabitable sketch of the ever-evolving relationship between human and non-human nature.

We just got a copy of Taschen’s 2012 Street Art Calendar, featuring uncommissioned urban art projects everywhere!  A photo of Rebar’s very first Park(ing) Day in 2005 is featured on Week 16.

Join us at Rebar, and someone may just bake you a cake.

Emerging designers, artists and urban instigators take note: the Rebar studio in San Francisco is now accepting applications for Apprenticeship positions starting early in 2012. Actual start date and duration is flexible, but we do have an application process. Applicants must be available at least two days per week. To be considered for an interview, send us a portfolio and fill out our Apprenticeship questionnaire, available here.

Rebar will be accepting 2-3 applicants to join its workforce of eight talented staff next year. The experience is fun, varied, rigorous and involves a wide range of pursuits from pushing pixels with a mouse to pushing logs onto an island with heavy machinery. Previous apprentices have included international graduate students, builders, architects, landscape architects, urban planners and artists. We guarantee an interesting time.

Please send us your materials by December 31, 2011. Questions and submissions to apprenticeships [at] rebargroup.org.

Apprentices taking a break on the roof.

We were part of a group of international participants that included Allan Lavell, PhD. in Economic Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Jose Rosas Vera, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Shimoji Kuniki from Okinawa, Japan; Jean-Pierre Moure from Montpelier, France; Leila Taouil Mancia from Curitiba, Brasil; and Juan David Arango Gartner from Manizales, Venezuala.  The conference was hosted by Ana Liz Flores, President, Civil Protection and Environment, Chacao, who presented “Chacao experience. Towards the city as possible.”

John Bela from Rebar presented “Elasi(city): User generated urbanism and the adaptive metropolis”,  focusing on three tools used in user generated urbanism; the temporary intervention, interim use, and iterative placemaking.

Following the conference we were led on a fantastic tour of the municipality of Chacao and some of the innovative projects creating public space in this dense city of 6 million inhabitants. Caracas contains large areas of both formal and informal development. We visited some of the great new streetscapes, public plazas, theater buildings and public parks created by the passionate urbanists in Chacao.

The following day we toured areas in downtown Caracas and then ascended into the Barrio San Agustin to check out the recently completed Metrocable, a gondola lift system integrated into the city’s public transport network.

On the last day of the trip we were invited by a group of artists and architects to participate in a brainstorming workshop at Ecodar hosted by Carolina Tinoco. Attendees included LAB.PRO.FAB, Bisa Urbana, Micra, and Penelope Plaza and Luis Bergolla from Conciencia Visual.  Each of us presented briefly on our work and then discussed ways of sharing tactics. Several important themes emerged from the day including the necessity to engage with city residents at the level of their sense of responsibility as citizens. We discussed some of the challenges facing the city of Caracas such as the fear of being in public space due to violence, the dominance of car culture, and the necessity to integrate informal developments into the city’s infrastructure and services.

At the end of the session, John Bela led a public space Kecak (a rythmic vocal chant from Bali) workshop,  and we tested the social codes that govern various public spaces in the city.

Overall it was an amazing group of people and an incredible experience. We are so grateful to Diana Lopez and Ana Liz Flores of the Municipality of Chacao for inviting us to the conference, and to Sandra Zuniga and Carolina Tinoco for introducing us to the amazing artists, designers, and urbanists of Caracas.

The ridge, which serves as a physical barrier for the California sea lions on the island as well as a blind for biologists studying the birds, now stands at six feet tall. Cormorants and other bird species make use of the ridge as nesting habitat because it provides excellent shade and a solid wind-break. The completed ridge will allow the birds to utilize their habitat without disturbance from the biologists and researchers who occasionally inhabit the island. The ridge is built out of all natural materials with no metal parts. Eucalyptus logs make up the wall and red cedar dowels were used to pin the logs together.

Aerial photo credit: Northern California Aerial Photography

Replanting of several species of native plants took place over the course of the fall and was also finished on the November 9th trip. We were happy to see the survival of several plant species from the previous year including yarrow, salt grass, and many more. We were able to supplement these with more native species including beach bur, salt grass, American dune grass, lizard-tail, coyote brush, beach morning glory, mock heather, beach strawberry, coast buckwheat, and dune tansey. Several species of seeds were also spread, among which were beach bur, yarrow, lizard-tail, coyote brush, mock heather, and Farallon weed.

For more information about the Año Nuevo Island Restoration Project please visit the project site.

The name alone makes you want to check out what these guys do. And what they do is pretty neat:

Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms. We are activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers interested in new ways to promote action, intervention, and awareness through a participatory research model.

Check out the balloon mapping and DIY touchtable. Also, some of this has been used in the recent Occupy protests. Cool stuff: http://publiclaboratory.org/home

Thx Kristin for the find.

For more info on the Año Nuevo Island restoration project look for our previous post or our even earlier post – and be sure to visit the restoration project blog.

Check out the below videos of the log move and look for future updates as the project continues!

Rebar’s contribution to Art + About is Bubbleway — a modular, inflatable social furniture system designed specifically for Laneways 2011, the fifth installment of Laneway Art. Utilizing an inflatable system enclosed in a brightly colored skin, Bubbleway serves as a fun, comfortable, and inviting place to relax. The skin, which was designed in collaboration with the San Francisco-based messenger bag company Timbuk2, is a resilient ripstop nylon perfect for the urban playground. It was also made locally in San Francisco. Bubbleway modules can be reconfigured and adapted to support a variety of interactions and the space it is occupying. Bubbleway was created to encourage a rethinking of preconceived notions of public space, and to develop new forms of informal social interactions and play.

Other commissioned works for Art + About and Laneways included artists from around Australia and Americans Janet Echelman, whose work can be seen as locally as at SFO, Bay Area native Barry McGee, and Austin-based founder of Knitta Please, Magda Sayeg. Rebar would like to extend a profound thank you to the city of Sydney and to acknowledge the curators who brought us to Sydney, Amanda Sharrad and Justine Topfer for their hard work and commitment to experimental and innovative public art.

Bubbleway is available for viewing and playing on for free 24 hours a day from September 23, 2011 to January 31, 2011 and is located at Bulletin Place, Sydney, NSW 2000.