Artist-led community engagement

In partnership with Cliff Garten Studio, Todd Bressi, and Via Partnership, Rebar is leading a novel public engagement process that uses artmaking as the primary driver in the planning process. The Central Corridor Public Art Plan will shape millions of dollars of public and private investment into arts-related programming along the Twin Cities’ newest light rail line. This new infrastructure will extend its reach beyond the light rail corridor to consider the entire public realm in all its cultural and economic diversity.

Rebar initiated this process with a two-day public bike tour across the Corridor. Referred to as a “mobile symposium,” the tour paused en route at various culturally rich locations that encapsulate the challenges, promise and particularities of this diverse urban landscape. Practitioners of art, activists, and designers acted as “hosts” at each stop, offering their vision for the future of the Corridor, and engaging in a place-based conversation with the other riders and members of the interested public.

As an extension of the bike tour, the collaborators created an interactive website, the Atlas of Fantastic Urban Futures, an open-source platform where residents can mark sites of art practice and public engagement on the map, activating their role in the larger planning dialogue. The website will evolve as the Art Plan moves forward, creating a dynamic snapshot of the process and a repository for video, discussion, and documentation of artwork into the future.

Date: Ongoing
Location: Minneapolis-St. Paul Central Corridor
Related:
Blades of Grass
Park(ing) Day
CommonSpace

Can the street be redefined through its patterns of use? Through engaging the public in a hands on workshop can we cultivate new ways of thinking about bike lanes, intersections and interactions between people on bikes, on foot, in cars or riding transit?

Reclaim Market street was a ride down Market Street where we created full scale physical mock-ups of potential improvements, discussed plans in progress for future trials and gathered ideas for how to design a better Market Street. The day featured talks with city officials, bicycle advocates and artists. We ended the day at UN Plaza where folks relaxed in Rebar’s Bubble Lounge with refreshments from our pedal powered juicemaker, the Juicecycle.

Special thanks to the Studio for Urban Projects for organizing this tour and the accompanying exhibit at SPUR. Photographs by Lucy Goodhart, courtesy of SUP.

Client: Sydney Laneways Art

Location: Sydney, Australia

Date: 2011

When social gaming titan Zynga wanted to rethink their new office space in San Francisco, they asked Rebar to play host. Rebar was brought on for an intensive innovation and design session that brought together marketing, branding, and facilities staff with project architects and sub-consultants to re-imagine the way that a gaming office is conceived.

By bringing our knowledge of the social life of urban spaces to bear on the social spaces within the workplace, Rebar created the conditions to support the dynamic culture of a creative, fast paced, social gaming company.

Rebar led the design of the outdoor patio cafe, bike areas, and the rooftop dogpark and playground. Rebar collaborated with Daren Joy Architects, Studio Myerscough, Nichols Booth Architects and the Zynga Creative Team on the design of the workspace interior.

Client: Zynga Game Network, Inc.

Location: 699 8th Street, San Francisco

Date: 2011

Tony has now extended this inspiration towards the creation of a new public space in the street, adding seating for his patrons, as well as neighborhood residents and vistors who pause to relax and chat on the parklet.

The lively streets of Naples served as inspiration for this parklet which creates a vibrant new social space in the street.  Fabricated from galvanized steel clad with bamboo decking, the parket is a model of sustainable construction. Rebar customized this parklet to fit Tony’s unique aesthetic.  Great food and great urban space go well together on the streets of San Francisco.

Want a parklet in your neighborhood? Contact Rebar

The five-story building fronts both Le Conte and Third streets and wraps around a large communal courtyard that features many uses for the enjoyment of all residents. A picnic area and playground are surrounded by an edible landscape, an 8,500-square-foot urban garden made of raised planting beds that allow residents to get their hands dirty and grow their own food.

Rebar led the planting design of the edible landscape that will feature groves of persimmon, apple, citrus, and fig surrounded by guilds of beneficial plantings. A series of sculptural steel and concrete planters provide space for annual vegetable production.  A custom picnic table, BBQ, playground elements, and mini court provide space for residents to play and share food together.

A wind-powered object of reflection.

Zephyros is a wind-activated sculpture in the form of a helix composed of reflective panels braided around tall masts. Three unique, tapered spirals–clustered in the landscape at the Palega Recreation Center in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood–will gently spin at varying speeds, revealing wind patterns that may be unnoticed at ground level. The reflective stainless steel panels will capture light and mirror the activity in the park and in the surrounding neighborhood.

Zephyros is both an environmental art piece that captures and reveals wind patterns, and a social sculpture that literally reflects the park and the neighborhood. Looking at the piece from below, the visitor sees her own reflection, but also the neighborhood and sky in an ascending collage high above. The movement in the sky will be made visible on the ground as the sun casts dynamic, undulating shadows across the landscape.

Zephyros is a permanent public artwork commissioned for the park by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2011 and is currently in design and fabrication.

Date: To be installed 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA

Popup instant summer in the far North.

Rebar’s Sho-Globe is like an old fashioned “Snow Globe” except, instead of trapping a bit of winter inside, it nurtures the carefree bliss of a summer day–in the middle of the cold, wet subarctic thaw of the far North. Deployed entirely by two people and two backpacks containing the inflatable bubble, power pack, lighting, sound and a 500-watt blower, Sho-Globe brings summer days to any outdoor public space, no matter the time of year. As it is inflated in various public spaces, it changes the dynamic of inhabitation and tests how places can be changed with the simple addition of warmth, light, sound, and softness. With a sound system to bring music (either live or recorded) and a full-spectrum light show, Sho-Globe tapped the potential conviviality of outdoor spaces that is often abandoned during the cold months of the year.

Commissioned for the Alaska Design Forum’s 2011 Common Space residency, the Sho-Globe was built, deployed and enjoyed in less than five days in Juneau, Alaska. During this week, Juneau hosted the Alaska Folk Festival, which saw live performances in many locations–including the Sho-Globe. Special thanks to the Alaska Design Forum and the citizens of Juneau for their support of this experiment in public spacemaking.

Date: April 11 -15, 2011
Location: Juneau, Alaska

Related
Bushwaffle

A Gigantic play experience at the Hunters Point Shipyard

Gigantry is an interactive public sculpture in the form of a scaled and stylized model of the 450-ton bridge crane that dominates the southern vistas from the hilltop of the Hunters Point Housing development in San Francisco. By referencing the formal characteristics of the crane, Gigantry samples a dominant visual element of the area’s historic military infrastructure and recasts it as a playful, interactive sculpture.

The bridge crane, designed and built to load weapons on and off ships of war, is an enormous and visually arresting landmark, visible from numerous points around the Bay Area. The crane is also the visual capstone to the military legacy of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard which reaches back more than a century. This legacy is often associated with an attitude of dominance and indifference to the long-term welfare and desires of the local community that has, over the years, called Hunters Point home. The crane stands as an enduring but contradictory symbol of this complicated military history that at once gives the community its identity, but burdens it with a history that is still finding its way toward justice and equality.

Gigantry – in conjunction with the ongoing Hunters Point Redevelopment project – is intended, in some small way, 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. Gigantry is designed to reconfigure this landscape and present a positive gaze toward a newly revitalized human habitat in this historically marginalized area of San Francisco.

Gigantry was commissioned by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and will be fabricated and installed in 2011.

Date: 2010-2011
Location: San Francisco, CA.

A modular mini-park in the parking lane

Walklet is a modular system for extending the sidewalk into the parking lane, offering an opportunity to redesign cities with a new kind of user-generated urbanism. Designed by Rebar to take advantage of the recent movement in major American cities to create a legal process to extend the pedestrian zone into the parking lane quickly and inexpensively (and leverage private energy to do so), the Walklet uses a “kit of parts” approach to creating urban public space. Various modules are available that link together along the curb line to extend the width of the sidewalk by about 7 feet / 2.1m. Each module works independently and together with others to create a customized living environment in the pedestrian right-of-way. Currently, available modules include high tables, benches, planters, bike racks and flat extensions.

Compared with traditional “bricks and mortar” approaches to permanently redesigning the streetscape, Walklet offers a number of benefits: it is fast, flexible, and can be adapted to changing conditions. When it is no longer needed (if a permanent streetscape improvement is completed), it can be re-used elsewhere. As such, it is like a specialized organism that operates at the edge of change in the urban ecosystem. Compared with costs of permanent sidewalk improvements, which can cost on the order of $1.5M per block, Walklet is less expensive by orders of magnitude–a potential boon to cash-strapped municipalities that want to initiate positive changes but don’t have the budget for large scale capital projects.

The Walklet system is built of durable steel frames which are galvanized to last outdoors, and decked with FSC-certified hardwood or rapidly renewable, composite bamboo lumber. Recent designs feature waterjet cut profiles and decorative patterns in the steel end pieces. The first three installation sites were made possible by the City of San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks Program and funded with private contributions.

Walklet are available for purchase. For more information on the Walklet system and ordering inquiries, see the project’s commercial website.

Date: Ongoing; First installed May 2010

Location: San Francisco – 22nd and Bartlett Street, San Francisco – Columbus Ave and Green Street. More locations coming soon.

Related:

Showplace Triangle
Park(ing) Day
Walklet product website