The Doxa

Rebar to host Park(ing) Day 2011 After-Party in San Francisco! (Click image for full size print version of the invite)

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.

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!