Alex Gilliam | alex@publicworkshop.us | 196 posts
Want to come build fantastic structures that challenge people’s sense of possibility? Sure you do, who doesn’t? In the coming weeks, in three different cities, we will be leading a variety of building workshops with our Build It! Disks. The focus of each workshop and the reason for using the Disks is varied: In Austin, our […]
September 14, 2011
Three hours of design-building and rapid prototyping structures on vacant lots in North Philadelphia was all it took to inspire two #teendesignheroes from Philadelphia to want to start a larger movement of community generated DIY neighborhood improvements. Needless to say, I am blown away by the energy, ideas, and conviction of Paul, RJ and the […]
August 16, 2011
Over the weekend we learned that Public Workshop has been invited by Architecture For Humanity to submit new design ideas for a forlorn skatepark under the Manhattan Bridge in New York City. Yes, we’re honored to be in the company of much of New York’s design elite including Balmori Associates, Bernheimer Architecture and others but […]
August 16, 2011
We are simply ecstatic to have won a grant, in collaboration with AIA Austin, from the Downtown Austin Alliance to create a series of events, participatory design tools and a crowdsourced ideas competition to engage citizens of Austin, Texas in re-imagining vacant and underused spaces on Congress Ave–directly across from the State Capitol! Working with […]
August 6, 2011
Young adults dressed in lab coats using over-sized thermometers to find heat islands in their neighborhoods? A two-foot nose, sculpted to make the process of measuring air quality more visible to community members? These are but two of many projects undertaken last year by Shadelab, a unique, community design leadership program in which talented young Chicago adults gather […]
August 5, 2011
Depending on how you count them, Philadelphia has 30,000 to 40,000 vacant lots. Next week–August 8th-11th—Public Workshop will be setting up shop on one of them in North Philadelphia and working with neighborhood #teendesignheroes from the Village For Arts and Humanities to prototype ideas, and structures that could start to fill up some of these […]
July 9, 2011
Who’s seen the Eiffel tower? At least in pictures? Most of us have. However, the people who haven’t don’t know the feeling of the wind breezing. Or the sounds of the car and actually smell the steel. So hearing about Taliesin and looking at photos is completely different from standing on the tallest hill and […]
July 7, 2011
Coming to Taliesin was scary for the fact that I felt a bit intimidated by the rest of the students. I knew for a fact that they had more work experience than I in the technical aspects of design, where I was doing a wretched job at figuring it out. But In the end it […]
July 6, 2011
This was our awesome team of design super heroes, all who have recently graduated from high school…except for our family baby, Diana…and we all worked tremendously hard to be a part of this journey through the Newhouse Competition. From that competition, we all won awards that showed the amount of endless work we put into our […]
July 6, 2011
Six super talented Chicago Public School students from diverse backgrounds. Two superstar Teaching Fellows. A rich architectural legacy that exudes experimentation and ‘doing’. Seven days and seventeen hours of relentless testing, building, experimentation, failure and play- challenging all assumptions about how learning and design occur. It’s a summer design camp on steroids- a ‘doing’ camp […]
July 4, 2011
I woke up with Michael Jackson blaring in my head this morning, a rare occurrence on a weekend morning that I can only attribute to a memorable moment on the second to last day of our design-build workshop and learning lab with my #teendesignheroes. Feverishly design-building our telephone booth porch with only a few hours […]
July 1, 2011
It is a difficult task finding sparks between varying personalities and wildly different skill sets, particularly for someone trying to allow peaceful coexistence among a static group and with a set goal that demands positive interactions and successful chemistry. For our team, with Alex and Katie being the ones in charge of setting everyone up […]
June 28, 2011
Spending sixteen to eighteen hours a day building things in rural Wisconsin with my #teendesignheroes from the Chicago Public School system leaves little time to share all of the amazing things that are happening with the outside world. This design-build workshop for teens is one of my most important laboratories for testing the limits of […]
June 27, 2011
Prepare yourself to build, tear down, build, tear down, and build again, so that finally, you can have what you may call your first draft. Sound tough? You’re telling me! Thankfully, while it is challenging, it’s also one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. During our third day at Taliesin, we were happily joined […]
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 24, 2011
‘Architects going into schools to talk about and teach architecture is like birth control for architects.’ -the president of a prominent architectural organization that focuses on design education At a recent summit on design education that pulled together an elite group of designers from across the country, I was struck by a deep, growing enthusiasm […]
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 […]
June 19, 2011
Only five days until our favorite week of the year! Taliesin was Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural playground. An ever evolving place, he and his apprentices were constantly experimenting with the structure, space and building materials of existing buildings on the property- adjusting, tearing things down and starting anew. They did this to better meet the […]
May 27, 2011
Come out and play! I regularly use games to accelerate learning, team building, design insights and establish an attitude of relentlessly playful testing, experimentation and failure in a learning or design process. As you can see from the recent posts by two of our #teendesignheroes, Jeisson and Diana, the transformative power of including games in […]
May 24, 2011
Recently, Bea Beste, an education entrepreneur who has started a number of schools K-12 schools in Berlin, asked me about the basic ideas behind Public Workshop. Bea was particularly interested in the role that play serves in our approach and work. Play is so embedded in Public Workshop‘s work that I rarely talk about it as […]
September 14, 2011
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