What makes this such an incredible opportunity for redefining what’s possible?

Although we are not part of the architecture school at Taliesin (here), we are lucky and thankful to have free reign of the house and school; the school’s resources and staff; and most importantly we are in the midst of a place that during Wright’s lifetime was about constant experimentation, refinement and learning by doing- Wright was constantly tearing things down, building anew and adjusting. This ‘embedded’ spirit pervades our time there and makes it easier for me to transform my teenage apprentices from thinkers to do-ers. The history, the powerful buildings and beautiful countryside make conversations about ‘place’ and context a cinch. Lastly, my apprentices represent a complete cross-section of life in Chicago and have actually competed in an amazing city-wide architecture competition (Newhouse Competition here) against hundreds of other students to have the chance to be a part of this unique experience- they are hungry. Typically this is not only a transformative experience for them but also for me and the awesome staff from the Chicago Architecture Foundation. This week helps us test and redefine our conceptions of process, and product not just for working with youth but also communities in general. Apparently word has gotten around about the unique nature of this time and the Association For Architectural Organizations has scheduled their yearly retreat at Taliesin next week so they can see the process in action.

Needless to say, I….we can’t wait and are looking forward to sharing what we’ve learned and produced.

Check here and at the www.wedesignawesomethings.com website next week (August 8th-15th) for live updates by the apprentices from the field.

-Alex Giliam

Two of the biggest challenges in gathering data that is useful for the neighborhood, the City, the community partners and the architecture firm (Landon Bone Baker Architects) are the tremendous meticulousness required to do it properly and then the ‘sifting’ to make the information legible. I must say that we have been absolutely blown away by the skill of our teen interns- they have churned through both gathering and processing data in a manner that is jaw-droppingly impressive to watch. That being said, recording temperature, humidity, air quality, time of day and location at sixty different locations in the neighborhood, particularly when that data is time sensitive, is a real challenge.

What if it could happen seamlessly, allowing for observation of neighborhood use, conversation with passers-by and exploration of other possibilities?

Although our interns have proven outstanding at gathering data, they are particularly skilled at engaging with community members and their neighborhood in ways that adults simply can’t do. Thus, freeing them up to have these conversations and interactions (to make critical observations) while gathering data is incredibly beneficial to Shadelab.

This summer we are really lucky to have the support and partnership of Sensaris, and the use of one of their incredible mobile sensors, the City Senspod. This sensor, no larger than a wristwatch, unobtrusively maps the aforementioned data sets, quietly geo-locating and time stamping data as you move through a building, neighborhood or city. When paired with a bluetooth enabled phone, you can not only immediately see the data that is being gathered but it automatically uploads it to the internet so that you can see live feeds of the data being gathered. We are really looking forward to lofting the Senspod next week in our homemade neighborhood air quality sniffing satellite (imagine an oversized nose floating through the air). We also will be using the Senspod next week to test mapping the ‘health’ of safe-routes-to-school, something that a couple of our community partners are currently working on.

Please stop by Sensaris’ website to have a look at the really cool ‘toys’ they are creating and also have a look at some of the other great projects they are supporting. For example, they are currently partnering with IBM, attaching Senspods to cars that are traveling from Italy to China.

http://www.greenhaviour.org

And make sure you stop by the Public Workshop website in the next few days for more information on Shadelab and the great folks at Landon Bone Baker.
-Alex Gilliam

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 baker named Anne. You see, Anne bakes the most amazing bread but given the tremendous dexterity required to make her very unique type of bread, she refuses to wear oven mitts and thus burns the bejesus out of her forearms.

Tajmah and Yaro (that’s Yaro’s arm in the mitt) are part of a prototype youth community design apprenticeship program that Public Workshop is working on for the great folks at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (here) and After School Matters (here). The program intentionally embraces the value of engaging young adults in positively changing the world around them yet challenges how they might do that, with real clients and real projects.

Quite frankly there are few precedents for this, particularly at the scale of nineteen apprentices. I have personally set up a number of programs that do this but at a much smaller scale, with a very different purpose. In these cases a few hyper-talented youth are seamlessly integrated within an architecture office to add value to the firm and their partners’ work while giving the young adults a degree of responsibility, experience and support that most people twice their age have never enjoyed- AND they completely flourish.

But a stand-alone, youth-centric community design studio with nineteen apprentices (a one point five staff members), some of whom are mostly interested in just having a job for the summer? There’s Sweat Equity in New York (here) but again, a much smaller entity with a highly competitive hiring process. And of course I have set up a number of design-ed programs such as the Charter High School For Architecture and Design that engage a similar number of youth but the end goal is not a usable final product for a client but the success of a student- two very different animals for teenagers.

What would the organizational design of the office look like? What can they produce in six weeks that truly is of benefit to our clients and not just a mock-up or prototype? How do you establish a culture of excellence and relentless questioning with a group that size, in a work environment (a public school) where they are conditioned to be otherwise?

We have just a couple of weeks left in the program and I must say that it has been a really interesting ride thus far.

The things that have worked?

Creating an organizational design that functions like a real office in which people work in small teams to manage various aspects of the business- design, research, marketing, business- has been great and has allowed the teens to find something they really enjoy doing but to still be in the midst of the design process. The scale of the projects we’re doing has also been a success but the big surprises have been the role of making our own healthy food (as a part of design) and documenting our successes, and failures through video- both been huge hits.

Challenges?

Establishing the culture of excellence and relentless exploration that is absolutely essential to getting great things done is really hard with nineteen apprentices working in an environment where they are conditioned to underachieve (a public school). Yes, they are doing great things but the difference between nineteen apprentices and fifteen or fifteen and twelve is huge.

What’s next?

Well, we’re not done yet, we still have to wrap up our oven mitts for Anne and we just started designing micro-farm stands for a local burgeoning farmer’s market. Make sure you check out their website, they’ve done most of the website design and content production. It’s still very much a work in progress design and content-wise but they’re doing a pretty great job:

www.wedesignawesomethings.com

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 been doing this exercise for awhile now, it wasn’t surprising that it worked. What was incredibly pleasing though was that it totally and visibly defied the expectations of the school (where we are in guests-residence this summer) staff. After building our landscape-improving prosthetics in the under-loved space behind the school, the public school’s staff was quite convinced that the creations wouldn’t survive the night- that the school’s students and the neighborhood would destroy them. They shook their heads in decisive dismay at our apparent waste of time.

Well they were wrong.

Not only did they survive the night but they lasted a week before the 4th of July came to pass- relatively fragile, delicate wooden structures mind you. The staff was pleasantly dumbfounded by these events. This continues to raise the questions that I ask everyday but are worth repeating again and again:

Why do we expect so little from our young adults?

Why don’t we give them control over the world around them, especially the physical condition of their often decrepit school campuses?

Can seemingly delicate, beautiful things defy expectations as well as disarm and change attitudes in places where everything else is designed to be defensive?

If four hours worth of work could have this simple but powerful impact on the school, my apprentices (and the neighborhood?), what would eight hours or a year do?

Better yet, I was really pleased to see this new batch of apprentices innovate and be the first one’s I have ever worked with to pull off the rolling landscape version that you see here. Believe it or not, this can comfortably support a gaggle of people and is quite pleasing to sit on.

Imagine what they could do if I gave them triple the materials, triple the time and they were working in optimally sized groups!

(These groups were a bit on the big size given constraints of time and materials)

-Alex Gilliam

Note:

Below you will find a few more images from their four hours worth of work.

If you would like to see some images of similar work we’ve done, click on the following: here and here

Who’s speaking?

Know-ability      Gever Tully of the Tinkering School (here), TED Talks and Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do (here)

Build-ability       Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop (here)

Engage-ability   Charlie Vinz of Design-Build-Grow-Eat (here)

Plan-ability        Damon Rich of the City of Newark Planning Department and former Executive Director of the Center For Urban Pedagogy (here)

It’s going to be great because…..

Children making robotic chickens. Suitcase sewer models that teach communities about water infrastructure. Teen-built healthy food carts for neighborhood vendors. Youth making sensors to measure the environmental wellness of their block and neighborhood organizations…….

What’s not to love?

This will be an in-depth conversation testing the full limits of possibility, covering inspiring projects as well as challenges, limits and unexplored opportunities. AND it is important to note that although the title suggests otherwise, this is not strictly about how we include young adults in the making of the built environment but a larger conversation about the limits of where, how and when we can better engage the public in the making of our cities.

In most cases we originally did these things with the best of intentions- safety and efficiency to name a few- but for the most part, this landscape of regulation simply isn’t working anymore. Minus interstates, car-centric roads simply don’t meet the social, ecological and transportation needs of our cities. Constraining activity in public parks and squares to singular, pedestrian pursuits leads to dead, and vacant spaces. Limiting play to playgrounds often makes our children entirely dependent on adults and in turn fat due to relative inactivity. I could go on and on but suffice it to say that, Houston, we have a problem.

The real challenge is that in addition to the massive physical and legal infrastructure we’ve built, our cultural attitudes have developed in a similar fashion. Taking down signs, changing a street or adjusting a law is relatively easy if the public will is there but quite often this will or culture is the harder nut to crack. And when we’re talking about public planning processes, this can lead to a huge amount of rancor and the missing of great opportunities to do something truly appropriate for the challenge at hand.

How do we change a culture of use or public space?

One of our favorite tools for doing this was created by a good friend of ours, Andrew Danziger. Andrew’s ingeniously simple Red Swing Project (here), embraces the ideas of individual initiative, joy and the temporary to challenge people’s perceptions of where play happens or how we generally use our city.

The process?

Get some rope donated from a climbing company, reclaim a 2 x 6, find some red paint, install your swing in an ‘challenging’ place, test it out and photograph people giddily using it. Sometimes they get cut down, other times they linger and every once in awhile, such as when Andrew installed one at the De Menil in Houston without permission, they are fully embraced and become a star attraction. The best thing about the Red Swing Project is that anybody can do it. If you were here right now, we could set one up over lunch. Interested? That’s right, you can change your city.

Andrew collaborated with us on Waller Creek Is For Lovers (here), installing a swing over the neglected Creek and the reaction was amazing. It drew people down into the under-loved space who had never before ventured into the Creek, it charmed local politicians……..it showed someone cared. And believe it or not- despite all of the rules and regulations that dictate it should be immediately cut down- seven months later, it’s still there.

Check out Andrew’s site (here), send him a congratulatory letter for such a smart, simple project. Hang your own swing, send him a picture and he will post it on his website.

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 Workshop we are constantly working to develop  new tools for helping communities more readily engage in and re-imagine their neighborhood or city. The more simple and joyous they are, the better. Particularly when talking about street use, given many people’s particularly heated passions on the matter, a little levity or an incredibly convincing tool can go a long way to catalyzing a reasonable, meaningful conversation about possibilities.

This one doesn’t necessarily fit into our fun, participation category but wow, five stars for effectiveness. David Yoon’s Narrow Streets Project (here) is an ingeniously simple way of using a little Photoshop magic to help people recognize how much more livable their streets might be if they were a little narrower, a lot less car dominant…….perhaps even a bit on the ‘snug’ and cozy side.

Too bad it’s not quite this easy to make such pleasing adjustments although we couldn’t be more happy to see that temporary-use tactics are finally having a demonstrable impact on helping change people’s minds about street design in this country. Whether you look at the recent changes to Herald and Times Square in New York (here) or the great Build A Better Block Project in Dallas,Texas (here), it’s hard to argue that these tools aren’t having a positive effect on perception and policy.

David, we think you should really stir things up by figuring out a way to make your work even more public.

Perhaps a weekly photo column in a major LA newspaper? Wait, do they still exist?

Regardless, keep up the great work.

Make sure you stop by his site and also check out his rather charming Microlawns project (here).

-

All photographs in this post are by David Yoon.

-

Alex Gilliam

alex@publicworkshop.us

Maybe it’s the lack of coffee, but I can’t.

My brain inherently wants to skip from what we have today and the wonderful, mysterious world of Cold War super satellites and faster than the speed of sound spy planes. Remarkably, Google and clan have done such a good job of making these and more images readily available, it almost feels like this type of imagery is now a god given right. I certainly find myself entirely unreasonably annoyed when an area on a satellite map is blacked out for lack of information or the bird’s eye view leaves something to be desired.

This sense of entitlement, of ease, of perfection is problematic for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, many people in the world simply don’t have any access to such information; their communities, their home simply don’t exist in the digital Google-verse. On one hand, you might argue that this matters very little and perhaps on some level it does but for many communities in ‘cartographic dispute’, being able to map your area and claim your territory is the difference between moving towards legitimacy and being bulldozed. In other cases, either the satellite images are too grainy to be useful, out of date or the community members simply don’t have access to the internet to create the maps necessary to validate their claims to the land.

The solution?

For Jeff Warren and his Grassroots Mapping project (here), it means going to these places and working with community members to make personal satellites out of balloons, kites and cast-off digital cameras.

Kids fly the kites, kites take pictures of the community, Jeff helps ‘stitch’ the resulting images together and voila, a really nice, real-time hi-res image of the community that can be used for land disputes, etc..

One of the most ingenious aspects about the project?

Community members flying balloon satellites attracts attention, curiosity and is disarmingly wonderful. This in turn builds social capital which can equal a heck of a lot of good things.A little magic and wonder, with a hair of spectacle can go a long, long way.Quite different than using a gps or tape measurer and in my opinion, a mighty fine replacement for the rocket ships, satellites and spy planes of days past.

Just a nice reminder of something we believe in very dearly at Public Workshop- sometimes the design of the process is more important than the product itself.

Jeff is clearly doing amazing things. Did I mention that he is currently working on the Gulf Coast to help map the oil spill in real-time? Yep, pretty darn cool. I highly encourage you to stop by his website and see he most recent photos of the spill, and some of his other work:

www.grassrootsmapping.org

Keep up the fantastic work Jeff and we hope to see you in Chicago this summer.

–

Alex Gilliam

alex@publicworkshop.us

Note: All photos and maps are by Jeff Warren. You can see more of his images on his website or on his flickr photostream (here).

Cue the heralds and trumpets.

We’re really excited to announce that on July 9th we will be leading a crack team of burgeoning teenage architects to work with Chicagoans to design-build a temporary structure that will help the neighborhood re-imagine how the Polish Triangle might look, and be used. In conjunction with the grand opening of the fantastic Wicker Park Bucktown ‘Make Believe: Reactivating Vacant Spaces’ (here) project in vacant storefronts in the neighborhood, our work, done in collaboration with the great folks at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (here), Metropolitan Planning Council (here) and Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce (here), will be part of a larger effort to think about new possibilities in the area.

‘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 the architect and playground designer Aldo Van Eyck. Of course there is the simple beauty and wonderment that we all feel when we first poke our head from under the covers, and gaze out the frosty window. But more than this, the first major snowstorms are so utterly magical because they completely reset what was true just a few hours before. Hard becomes soft, what was formerly loud is now a mere murmur, boundaries are erased, wide shrinks to narrow and decades of layered infrastructure, and regulation disappear in just a few short hours. These are some of the few days each year that are universally filled with possibility; where without hesitation you can play in the streets, you can easily reshape the world around you without permission and deeply satisfying challenges abound everywhere.

Now that the weather is finally turning pleasant (in Chicago at least), it’s a rather painful proposition to even mention the word, ‘snow’ but consider for a moment how much micro-experimentation, learning and innovation occur on these days; the jury rigged sled, the simple lever you devised for extricating your car from the ditch, the surprisingly tasty meal you were forced to cobble together from all that was left in the cupboard.

Don’t forget the collaboration that occurred when crafting that snow fort or digging out the block with neighbors when city services fell by the wayside. With the roads made a little narrower and a degree more uncertain by piles of snow, surely you noticed how much more carefully and, at times, considerately people were driving even when the roads themselves were quite clear. Heck, the driver of a passing car may have even waved and I bet you didn’t see a cell phone in hand.

Remember how extra-attuned your muscles and senses were when walking down those icy steps?

Please tell me you haven’t forgotten your whooping and hollering as you slid down the hill your children dragged you up or the deep contentment you felt while carving out a path to and from your house, despite the cold biting against your face. How about the empowerment and satisfaction you found while carving the shortest path to the store?

Now, consider how very different this experience is from how we typically engage with and participate in making the places we live; how completely opposite this is from the design of our educational system; and how our cities are designed.

When surveys, scantron test sheets and powerpoint presentations are the tools of the trade, it’s little wonder that our schools are suffering, public participation in planning processes is minimal at best and the great white hopes of innovation are not big corporations but the garage start-ups that are being fueled by the rise of open source movement, and low-cost rapid prototyping tools (both, virtual snowstorms). When our streets are designed to be as safe and efficient as possible for cars is it really that surprising that their ease of use and the resulting boredom encourages such bad behavior as text messaging or that drivers are surprised by such aberrations as a cyclist?

‘Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.’ William Shakespeare

It should come as no surprise that one of the most difficult, yet compelling lessons from Van Eyck’s snowstorm is the value of making things a little harder, a bit more complicated, a hair more messy and a lot more wondrous……for our own good.

At the very core of this ‘mess’, snow demonstrates that we can and should create situations that ask more of people, individually and collectively; that challenge, meaning and connection are often more important than ease. It reminds us of the value of designing opportunities that encourage a sense of innocence and opportunity, taking advantage of the transformative power of ‘doing’, and the deep seated desire of people to positively impact the world around them. Quite frankly it is remarkable that we ever forgot, but snow helps us remember how powerful and important it is for people to be able to see the tangible fruits of their efforts. And unlike the average classroom, sidewalk or planning meeting, snow reminds us of how satisfying it is to use our full host of mental and physical faculties to solve a problem, learn or traverse the landscape at hand.

It reminds us that we can expect more, much more.

Aldo Van Eyck was wrong. It’s not just our children that need a permanently snowy city, we could all benefit from a little lingering snow.

By Alex Gilliam on 11 May 2010

alex@publicworkshop.us

-Aldo Van Eyck

A few months ago I wrote about my visit last summer to the rather amazing Kolle 37 bauspielplatz in Berlin (here), where among other things, children design and build their own playground each year. It’s really hard not to be utterly charmed by their three story creations, the ridiculously low injury rate or the incredibly diverse mix of activities on the site available for children, and adults alike. However, no matter how much the Kolle 37 bauspielplatz helps us re-frame what’s possible in terms of public space use and how we engage children in ‘making’ our neighborhoods, it still fits within the idea of play happening in a particular space. Yes, children do need to have spaces where they can feel safe, and free to create, play and learn but in general we have taken this notion too far.

‘Playgrounds are prosthetics for society.’

-Herman Hertzberger

Hertzberger’s quote is a little dramatic but still hits the point nicely; when we make a playground we are often indicating that children and play are not welcome or able to happen elsewhere. On the most basic level this is problematic for children because this notion of a singular place for play is simply not how children explore, learn or play. It is little wonder that we have ‘lost’ our children to television and video games when we have designed our cities, neighborhoods and public spaces so that it is nearly impossible for children to explore and play on their own. Indeed, studies have shown that in 80 years independent childhood mobility has in some cases declined from six miles to approximately 300 yards. Throw in some of the recent near-insanity regarding risk, in which principals ban running or ball throwing on playgrounds and it’s little wonder that we have a childhood obesity epidemic.

Would you want to go outside and play if all you could do is go no farther than the end of your driveway or do no more than stand around on a rubberized surface staring at one another?

With all of this in mind I think it is important to challenge Aldo Van Eyck’s fantastic quote,

‘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.’

Yes, children do need a perpetually snowy city but so do adults. On one hand, isolating play means that adults often have to drive their children to a playground thereby making adults fat too. On the other, adults face similar health risks to children because we have similarly limited exercise and adventure to singular places such as gyms, requiring often a significant commute or time commitment. This is entirely contrary to what we now know about the value of exercise and movement. Yes, 20-60 minutes of continuous exercise is great but not only is it often a daunting volume for many, micro-exercise and movement throughout a day can often have greater physical benefit by reducing the negative impacts of such things as extended sitting on our bodies (click here for more information).

With all of the above in mind, perhaps my favorite thing that I saw in Berlin last summer were trampolines that had been built into a few of the sidewalks in Kreuzberg. Made out of segments of recycled tire, they were incredibly durable and safe, offering a moment of joy and adventure to anyone who chose to take the challenge. I only found a couple of examples of this in Berlin but they are wonderful because they represent an incredibly simple step that a community might take towards transforming their city into a continuous landscape of play and adventure.

Interested in reading more about childhood mobility and what a continuous landscape of play and adventure might look like?

Have a look at the following:

What If We Turn Austin Into A Continuous Playground And Outdoor Gym? (here)

How far were you allowed to travel on your own at age eight? (here)

Enjoy.

Alex Gilliam, alex@publicworkshop.us

Is it possible for children to make meaningful contributions in design processes beyond doing crayon doodles or filling out questionnaires?

‘I want this space to be wonderful so it will not only inspire my classmates to do better…..to work harder and take better care of the school but it should inspire the neighborhood to do better too.’

Believe it or not this quote was spoken (unprompted) by a third grader from PS 134, an elementary school in New York City, during one in a series of multi-generational design exercises that I had crafted to create a new outdoor classroom and community space for the school, and neighborhood. She not only stunned me, she left everyone there gobsmacked; the students, designers, teachers, curriculum advisors, administrators and experts from the Audobon Society that I had assembled to re-imagine an under-loved plot of land on the property of the school. It should be noted that this inspiring young lady went to a largely underperforming school in a largely underperforming neighborhood.

I mention this because it fundamentally asserts the value of creating structures, systems and processes where people of many ages, skills and interests can work together to re-imagine possibilities. Many planning processes and charettes have started to provide activities for children but in a vast majority of the cases this is simply baby-sitting in sheep’s clothing, and in doing this they miss the most fundamental of opportunities. Our third grader’s comment is a reminder that making children a part of rethinking the places we live, work, play and learn is not just something we should do because of the traditional notions of future ownership and responsibility. Making youth central, integral parts of our planning and design processes can be essential for not only germinating the very best ideas but entirely re-casting an entire design process, challenging everyone to do better.

Fundamental to this notion are the ideas that good design; ownership and empowerment; innovation; and having fun are not mutually exclusive. And that ‘with’ is better than ‘for’.

Is it as simple as integrating children into a planning process? Heck no.

The success of the project hinged on fundamentally rethinking how we imagine, create and build.

A perfect example of this is the garden’s branding pictured above and below.

The original idea was generated by a fourth grader working with an urban planner at the design charette. The basic concept was further developed by me and my seventeen year old employees who were part of the Citizen Designer Workshop that I designed and created for the Hester Street Collaborative. The graphic concept merged ideas about creating self-sustaining, user-driven branding that I had developed with the Sunshine School (here)- in this case the design was crafted by tearing masking tape because drawing skills at PS 134 are limited- with the really smart experiments of an eighteen year old employee. After we played around with how it might be deployed and used to build excitement and capacity, a sixteen year old employee working with two fourteen year old employees took the original and marginally offensive version, (Eat Me!) and designed a complete set for the school. The designs were ultimately used on signage, posters and on t-shirts that the school used to raise money, build awareness and more than a hint of excitement.

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 and maybe even show off a little.

In the midst of a snowstorm, not long after I arrived in the Windy City this past winter, I had the great pleasure of attending the Driehaus Foundation’s Neighborhood Development Awards. As we settled in for a series of awards given to the best projects the City has to offer, I quickly found myself totally impressed with the ‘smart’ design of the evening. We are in the midst of a very unique time in which young designers, graduating students and even old hands, really want to create architecture that is beneficial to the places, people and communities where they live. Despite the fantastic work of people like Bryan Bell and his excellent yearly conference, Structures For Inclusion, an honest conversation about what it takes to do this type of work remains somewhat illusive but not at the Neighborhood Development Awards. Likewise, it is so important that communities ‘grow’ and celebrate good design advocates who aren’t architects. When you consider that architects’ PAC contributes less to campaigns than the sheet metal workers’ union, it is important to remind ourselves that although it is imperative that we grow architect-leaders, we need not only need friends in high places but probably just more friends in general.

The banker behind a portion of the seventeen different funding sources, a school principal, the lawyer who wrestled with the titling of the land, the non-profit leader who had a vision, the developer who helped figure out how it could be financially viable………and the architect who helped give form to some of these pieces.

Yep, it was pretty great. Fantastic job Driehaus. For the good of our profession, for the bettering of this type of work and for the strength of the communities in which we live, I hope other places copy what you’ve done.

Just to confirm our thoughts on the matter, we asked our friend Mike Newman of Shed Studio (here) and Converge Exchange (here), what he thinks about the awards.

Well Mike?

-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 Just Metropolis’, it became a priority to make sure children will be part of this conversation. Well, the big news is that not only is Public Workshop now a part of the conference but I’m also organizing a panel on the topic mentioned above.

We are still working on confirming all of the panelists but we can tell you that Damon Rich, the founder of the Center For Urban Pedagogy (here) is one of them. More information will follow in the coming weeks but in the mean time you should stop on by the conference website, consider coming…….register. It’s a great conference and the organizers are doing a really nice job of putting together a compelling event.

For more information on the event click (here).