| gilliamalex@gmail.com | 83 posts
Without a doubt, one of our favorite times of the year is the one week we get to spend every summer at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in Wisconsin, designing and building amazing structures with six incredibly talented teenagers from throughout Chicago’s public school system. Over the past three years, Public Workshop has been redesigning the [...]
July 29, 2010
As you may have noticed recently if you follow our Twitter feed, Public Workshop has been working with the great folks at Landon Bone Baker Architects and their community partners to develop a program that enables them to have an even greater impact in the communities where they work than they are able to affect [...]
July 23, 2010
Project: Wedesignawesomethings! Location: Chicago Project Director: Alex Gilliam for the Chicago Architecture Foundation and After School Matters Year: Summer 2010 What the heck is Tajmah making? An Aqua Man costume? Is Public Workshop gearing up to compete with Speedo? No sir, no mam. It’s one of our early prototype oven mitts for a local Chicago [...]
July 22, 2010
Project: Landscape Prosthetics Location: Chicago Project Director: Alex Gilliam Year: Summer 2010 Honestly, this super short project (one afternoon) was simply intended to be a device for quickly engaging my brand new crop of teen apprentices, forcing them to collaborate, bond and quickly feel empowered to change the world around them. Given that I have [...]
June 26, 2010
Every year the National Building Museum (here) in Washington, DC offers an accomplished practitioner or researcher the opportunity to use the full extent of the Museum’s collection to conduct research that furthers the practitioner’s work while expanding the understanding of the collection. We are very pleased to announce that the National Building Museum has chosen [...]
June 18, 2010
I am really excited to be able to invite you to the Children Changing Cities panel this Saturday morning (6/19) at 9.30 at the Association for Community Design Conference (here) in Berkeley, California. The panel brings together a compelling collection of thinkers and doers who are redefining how we engage youth in making our cities, [...]
June 3, 2010
You may or may not have noticed but our society has developed some pretty definite ideas where things such as play, exercise, industry or even work should happen. For a variety of reasons, over time we’ve built up infrastructures that reinforce where, when and how these things should happen. This has manifested itself in the [...]
May 27, 2010
Believe it or not this image is a fake…..sort of. This is what the street really looks like. Look closely, very closely and you will notice that these are exactly the same views. That’s right, the image above is exactly the same as the one below, minus a couple of tweaks in Photoshop. At Public [...]
May 20, 2010
In this day and age, Google has made satellite imagery of our neighborhoods and important landmarks an everyday reality. It’s such a pervasive part of our existence now, can you remember the day when we didn’t have ready access to such materials? Maybe it’s the lack of coffee, but I can’t. My brain inherently wants [...]
May 13, 2010
In some respects, the Polish Triangle in Chicago is remarkably congenial- there’s a rather nice fountain, there are numerous benches, a fair number of trees and it’s also a subway stop- however, it’s stuck in the midst of the intersection of three major streets and quite frankly it could generally use a lot more love. [...]
May 11, 2010
Learning From Snowstorms: Originally published on www.core77.com on 13 May 2010. ‘When it snows, children take over the city: they sleigh, throw snowballs, make snowmen and are more visible than ever. But what a city needs for its children has to be more durable than snow.’ It is hard not to adore this quote by [...]
May 5, 2010
‘When it snows, children take over the city: they sleigh, throw snowballs, make snowmen and are more visible than ever. But what a city needs for its children has to be more durable than snow.’ -Aldo Van Eyck A few months ago I wrote about my visit last summer to the rather amazing Kolle 37 [...]
May 3, 2010
From Public Workshop’s Project Archives: Project: An Outdoor Classroom & Community Space For PS 134 Location:New York, NY Project Director: Alex Gilliam with help from Thor Snilsberg from Project For Public Spaces Year: 2006 Is it possible for children to make meaningful contributions in design processes beyond doing crayon doodles or filling out questionnaires? ‘I want [...]
April 30, 2010
On the surface this one seems like a no brainer. When you give a building or a community project an award or some sort of public recognition, invite not only the designer to the stage but also the community partners, the funders, the developer, the builder and maybe even…….the user. Let them talk, thank people [...]
April 19, 2010
If they are not meant for children, they are not meant for citizens either. If they are not meant for citizens-ourselves- they are not cities. -Herman Hertzberger Herman, quite frankly I couldn’t agree more and therefore when the Association For Community Design decided that the theme of their conference this year would be ‘Toward A [...]
April 19, 2010
The see-saw is probably one of the most vilified pieces of equipment you will find on a playground. When I started writing this piece, my intention was to show some of the many examples I found last summer, while on a fellowship in Germany, of how designers have tried to make the see-saw safer. Anecdotally, [...]
April 19, 2010
It’s been in the works for a couple of months now but it’s now official, Public Workshop will be working with fifteen Chicago teenagers starting in late June of this summer to design-build food carts for a local community organization. Actually, we should clarify that they may not actually end up being food carts, depending [...]
April 19, 2010
How can we creatively re-imagine urban education? We’re quite excited to be presenting at the Ripple Conference (here) on April 24th at the University of Chicago and surprised to be sharing a program with none other than Bill Ayers! It’s too early to say how this is going to impact our future political careers but [...]
April 15, 2010
‘Good follows good.’ -Bernard, owner of Bernard’s Wear and Stepper Store www.bernardswear.com Project: We Live Here Location: Chicago, IL Project Director: Alex Gilliam with Brenda Gamboa for Landon Bone Baker Architects Year: 2010 Some of the most striking things about Landon Bone Baker Architects (here) are their confident but humble approach to their work and the [...]
April 10, 2010
‘Good follows good.’ -Bernard, owner of Bernard’s Wear and Stepper Store www.bernardswear.com Quite frankly we’re not really sure who is following whom but we couldn’t be more excited to have Brenda Gamboa join our team. A multi-year grand prize winner of Chicago’s Newhouse Architecture Competition (here) for high school students, Brenda is also an incredibly [...]
August 5, 2010
0