Client The Western School For Science And Technology Location Phoenix, AZ Year 2016 A few years ago when we first started working with the great folks at the Western School For Science And Technology (WSST) in Phoenix, AZ, there was great interest in design-building a path to connect the middle-high school with its sister elementary school that is […]
January 24, 2016
Client The Western School For Science And Technology Location Phoenix, AZ Year 2015 to present What began as a project to put our client’s–The Western School of Science and Technology–middle/high school’s students at the forefront of designing and building outdoor amenities–a path and seating–to physically connect the new building with its sister school, quickly grew into something much […]
December 24, 2015
Client Community Design Collaborative and Get Healthy Philly Location Philadelphia Year 2015 In the summer of 2015, working with our clients The Community Design Collaborative and Get Healthy Philly, through the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we led a participatory design-build process exploring what happens when play and exercise spill beyond a playground, becoming part of the sidewalk, […]
September 30, 2015
Client People’s Emergency Center, Community Design Collaborative and Get Healthy Philly Location Philadelphia, PA Year 2015 What began in November 2014 as creative intervention to put an end to the drug use and defecation that was occurring daily on a vacant lot on Lancaster Avenue has evolved into an ever-growing mini-park and playground for young and […]
August 13, 2015
Client Albemarle County Public Schools, Walton Middle School Location Charlottesville, VA Year 2015 If you don’t know about the great things happening in Albemarle County Schools in Virginia, you should. Superintendent Pam Moran, her compatriot Ira Socol and the many great teachers and administrators that make up the system are doing something pretty special. With not a lot […]
July 10, 2015
Client Playscapes and Industria Creative Location Boston Year 2015 Since first creating our cardboard Build-It! Disks in 2011, we have consistently gotten requests to develop an all-weather version. Until now we’ve held off for two reasons: they are pretty expensive and we’ve had some material concerns. Happily, our friends at Playscapes and Chris Wangro were working with […]
August 15, 2014
Client North 5th Street Revitalization Project Location Philadelphia Year 2014 Can community benches that are design-built by neighborhood youth in partnership with local businesses strengthen a business corridor? Public Workshop worked with our client, The North 5th Street Revitalization Project, and local youth through Education Works to design-build four temporary, prototype benches with four businesses along North 5th Street. […]
November 15, 2013
Last spring we were ecstatic to win the Greenbuild Legacy Project grant with our partners at Smith Memorial Playground from the Delaware Valley Green Building Council to work with youth in Philly to design and build an adventure play space at Smith. Six months later with many thousands of people starting to stream into Philadelphia for Greenbuild, […]
November 12, 2013
Last year we had the great pleasure of working with the ArtPlace funded Flint Public Art Project and some great teens from Flint-Genesee Job Corps to design and build temporary bus stop improvements. Needless to say, when the opportunity arose to work with them again this year and do another Tiny WPA project, we leapt at the […]
September 8, 2013
Four Tiny WPA Community Improvement Projects Design-Built By 100’s Of Teens In Three Cities In 45 Days, More Coming! Goodness it’s been a mighty busy summer. Last year we did four Tiny WPA projects in three months, this year have done that same number of projects in half the time and needless to say there has […]
March 21, 2013
‘It would be great if we had this (youth-built adventure playgrounds) all over Philly’. ~Jon (and many others) who helped design, build, and play on our TinyWPA adventure playground. We couldn’t be more excited to announce that a proposal by Public Workshop and our fantastic partner, Smith Playground (the second oldest playground in the country, to […]
December 12, 2012
Our Work With Demoiselle 2 Femme And Eleven Incredible Teenage Ladies Wins The Metropolitan Planning Council’s Placemaking Award (Grand Prize!). ‘I can’t believe that Roseland used to be known as the ‘Community of Hope’ but is now known as the ‘Community of No Hope’……….and our eleven young ladies are changing this attitude.’ In any community […]
November 30, 2012
Two weeks. One great organizational partner. Seventy teens and young designers from five universities and seven high schools. Hundreds of kids and their families. A few power tools and $2000 worth of materials. One awesome pop-up adventure playground at the very center of Downtown Philadelphia that begins to redefine our conceptions of risk, play, and […]
October 10, 2012
Friends, you have two great opportunities to help create and then enjoy something truly incredible (that doesn’t exist anywhere else) in the very heart of downtown Philadelphia. Over the past week, Public Workshop has worked with over seventy teenagers and young designers to design-build the beginnings of a fantastic play landscape in the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s PHS Pop-Up Garden between 19th […]
September 26, 2012
From October 1st through 15th, Public Workshop will be design-building a fantastic play landscape in the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s PHS Pop-Up Garden at 20th and Walnut. Working with a core group of Philadelphia teenagers and young designers, Public Workshop will engage families, schools, and children in creating this one-of-a-kind adventure playground. Initially taking the form […]
Our new 12″ Build-It! Mini-Discs are so new that they are not even up on our beabuildinghero website. Why in the world have we decided to fabricate 12″ Discs when the 15″ are pretty darn great? First and foremost, the 12″ Discs fall into a shipping sweet spot and the resulting shipping costs are significantly less […]
June 27, 2011
UPDATE- Our Build-It! Discs are now available for purchase + building fantastic things! Go to: www.beabuildinghero.com Are you as excited about our discs and building activities as we are? The response to and interest in our building disks has been simply amazing. The Today Show Parenting Blog, Kaboom!, on-air builds with children at a television […]
June 20, 2011
A travesty? Wheelchair and crutch bound children everywhere, and lawsuits galore? An unappealing jumble of bent nails and ill cut wood? A blight on the neighborhood? Certainly not. Balderdash. No way. Quite the contrary. The Kolle 37 bauspielplatz in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin is a wonderland. A place of imagination and exploration that […]
March 24, 2011
Originally, I had hoped to write a little bit each day about the design and intention behind each intuitive building exercise, and the many structures that you I’m sure you have now seen. In short, the resulting structures, although gorgeous, are not about form. Behind each structure is an exercise that is designed to test […]
March 22, 2011
I particularly relish giving people, especially youth, ridiculously hard challenges that directly engage them in finding and solving some of the most pressing design problems in their everyday lives. Whether they are redesigning and rebuilding their own physically and emotionally decrepit K-12 schools; making high and low tech sensors to gather the environmental data, and […]
June 13, 2016
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