The Doxa

Nomadic Grove was installed last Wednesday followed by a lovely opening reception at the Contemporary Jewish Museum to mark the beginning of the exhibit, Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought. Many thanks to the museum’s security, Rebar’s intrepid staff and volunteers, and the amazing crew from Treemover who stood in the rain all day to make this installation a success. The gems will be in the plaza until May. Come check them out!

image by Molly Fiffer

The rainy install day started with a very early morning at our studio. Lawson Drayage secured the gems on 2 flatbeds using a 15,000 lb forklift with 7-foot blades. The gems braved the city streets and headed for the Contemporary Jewish Museum for the install.

Loading the gems on 20th Street

In front of the Rebar studio and fabrication shop

The gems arriving at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

It was a rainy installation day.

Waiting at the plaza with Fernando from Treemovers were the two olive trees one an oak, ready to be dropped into the planters. As soon as they were unloaded from the truck, we were ready to place the trees using an enormous grade-all brought by the tree nursery.

Our trees, waiting for us in the plaza of the museum

Grade-All

Gems before lids

For more than a year, Rebar has been working on a monumental public art piece for Portland Tri-Met’s Clinton Street station, a stop along Portland’s new Portland-Milwaukie light rail line. The design is finalized and we are please to unveil the piece here:

Named “Intersection,” the sculpture comprises repurposed surplus light rail track extracted from a location mere feet from the sculpture site. The intersecting geometry is inspired by the abstract topological subway maps you see on train platforms the world over.  At night, the sculpture will be lit for dynamic views of the piece and to help it become a way finding landmark for folks in the Brooklyn or HAND neighborhoods who are looking to catch the train.

How do you get rail (which is called “light rail” though it weighs well over 100 lbs per foot) to bend at such impossible angles? We’re not giving away any secrets, but suffice it to say Portland fabricator and artist Jim Schmidt and his team at Art & Design Works, are alchemists, and may well be wizards too. We have also been pleased to collaborate on the piece with the excellent structural engineers at Grummel Engineering and the talented designers and engineers at Interface Engineering, who did the lighting design. Look for the piece to be standing tall sometime in 2015!

Rail like it’s never been bent before

Rebar’s John Bela was recently in DC to be part of a session organized by the National Endownment for the Arts (NEA), City Parks Alliance, National Capital Planning Commission, and Trust for the National Mall at the National Archives. Jason Shupbach, NEA Director of Design, moderated the panel and led a discussion about new exciting models that can guide the future of public space, including ”evolutionary parks,” which are older spaces that have creatively adapted to new uses, and “revolutionary parks” like parklets, which dramatically diverge from what’s been created before.

Panelists included Tupper Thomas, former administrator of Prospect Park, and  Theaster Gates, an artist and cultural planner. See press and video link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE6OeVsrj5s

ASLA The Dirt

The Future of Public Space: Evolution and Revolution

http://dirt.asla.org/2012/01/12/the-future-of-public-space-evolution-and-revolution/

Greater Greater Washington

Designers try to keep the Mall “grand and personal”

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/13364/designers-try-to-keep-the-mall-grand-and-personal/

You can't miss the brightly colored Nomadic Grove at the entrance of San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum on Mission Street between 3rd and 4th Streets.

We are just moments away from installing Nomadic Grove at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco, as part of the upcoming exhibition, Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought, opening February 16th. (more)

Our crew has been working around the clock on constructing gigantic planter modules, which are mobile, reconfigurable, gem-shaped islands sited at the museum’s entrance. Many thanks to Kristin Saunders, Noah Brezel, the Rebar family, and friends who have helped out in the shop in the past weeks.

Take a moment out of your day to sit calmly under a cypress, an oak, or an olive tree to contemplate their stoic demeanor amidst the city’s relentless motion.

Look out for these roving trees in Jessie Plaza at CJM, which will unveil on February 15th.

New project!

Nomadic Grove, commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in downtown San Francisco, is now under construction at the Rebar studio.  The project is an experimental outdoor landscape sited at the museum’s entrance and consisting of an archipelago of gem-like seating islands, each holding a specimen tree at its center.

The installation is a meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city. To sit for a moment, relaxed, while gazing up at a tree that frames the sky is a simple and profound human experience–one that is in short supply in modern cities. This is a rare urban experience because trees resist the city’s constant motion, the city’s ruthlessness, the impatient cosmopolitanism.

The wood-framed islands are suspended low on wheels, floating just above the surface of the plaza as if they were riding on a calm lake. The modules are anchored in one of several compositions at the museum’s entrance, changing formation from week to week. The trees–oak, olive, and 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 islands 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 configuration.

Nomadic Grove is open to the public in conjunction with the exhibition, Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought, on view at CJM from February 16th through May 28th, 2012.

Another new commission! Rebar begins 2012 with work on an exciting project in Seattle: an interactive light sculpture designed to activate the newly built Jackson Plaza at night. The piece will respond interactively to the motion and proximity of people who walk by, or walk through, the plaza. Installation is slated for early spring ‘12. More details to come in coming weeks, for now here’s a few teaser images.

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.

Rebar recently traveled to South America to participate in a conference hosted by the municipality of Chacao, Caracas, VZ entitled Sustainable City: environmental management and risk as a promoter of development.

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.

A group from Rebar, Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, and habitat restoration experts Go Native headed out to Año Nuevo Island on November 8th & 9th to finish work on the island for the fall 2011 season. We are excited to report that the habitat ridge on the island was finally completed!

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.