Alex Gilliam | alex@publicworkshop.us | 196 posts
A Longitudinal Study of Shared Space Street Improvements And Older People’s Quality Of Life– Catharine Ward Thompson, Susana Alves, Peter Aspinall, Jenny Roe and Affonso Zuin Examining The Spatial And Temporal Patterns In Children’s Neighborhood-Based Activity And Mobility Using Personal Monitoring Technology –Jason Gilliand and Janet Loebach The Effects Of Casino Design, Restorative Images And […]
May 15, 2011
We couldn’t be more pleased to announce that the National Endowment For The Arts recently awarded Public Workshop, in partnership with openhousenewyork and DreamYard, a grant to create an innovative youth-led community design leadership program in the Bronx. openhousenewyork is an organization that unlocks New York City’s architecture, infrastructure and hidden spaces in all five […]
May 15, 2011
Lady Bird Lake, Town Lake, or the Colorado River? It doesn’t really matter which name you choose to call the large swath of water that cuts through Downtown Austin, it remains one the natural features that makes Austin a particularly great place to live. Indeed, over the years it has become one the the quintessential […]
April 29, 2011
Why wouldn’t I want to share my work with and be a part of a program that describes itself as ‘A Design Laboratory For Modeling Change‘? Over the past couple of months I have had the great the pleasure of getting to know the students, faculty and the collective work of the Industrial Design Program […]
April 21, 2011
When is a tree not a tree? When you give a bunch of landscape architecture students and teachers the task of making a tree from scrap pieces of 1″ x 2″. In this case a tree becomes a lean-to, a passage way, a vertical lattice, the beginnings of an innovative sub-structure, a shed and goodness […]
April 8, 2011
At precisely 2.02 on Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, the texts and tweets started flowing in: Perkins and Will (one of the foremost architecture firms in the world) “Amen, Brenda! Mindblowing pictures, process, data, stories, indeed. Rock on#shadelab @publicworkshop” “@publicworkshop Totally rocks. You have a great group. What clever, dynamic kids.” Barbara Brown Wilson- Director, […]
March 31, 2011
Shadelab Receives A Special Recognition Award From The Association of Architectural Organizations. Although we were a little disappointed not to outrightly win this national K-12 design curriculum competition, we (the Shadelab team) are incredibly proud of the project and believe it makes a number of significant contributions towards rethinking the following: 1. Education and Learning. […]
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 […]
March 18, 2011
A Week Of Building Experiments And Adventures Interested in helping test the limits of learning, design and collaboration while making gorgeous structures in a fantastic space? Starting this Sunday I will be leading six days of fantastic building experiments at the National Building Museum and I would love for you, and your friends to come […]
March 18, 2011
What could be better than spending a couple of days in April in Davis, California talking about participatory design and working with a group of incredibly talented people, imagining the future of design education? I couldn’t be more excited to have been invited to give the annual Rob Thayer Lecture on April 15th at the […]
March 10, 2011
Okay, so my intuitive building and making-as-a-tool-for-dialogue experiments aren’t officially going to happen until the week of March 21st. However, when my newly fabricated, never before tested disks happened to arrive on the same day I was visiting the National Building Museum for a couple of days last week, could you blame me for not […]
March 4, 2011
Project: The Citizen Designer Workshop-Integrating Youth + Community Into Design Practice Location: New York, NY Project Director: Alex Gilliam for the Hester Street Collaborative Year: 2005-2006 ‘It didn’t work, nothing worked.’ In 2006, I arrived to work at Hester Street Collaborative on a Monday morning to find my talented teenage interns utterly despondent. The previous […]
February 24, 2011
Hesitant learners? Uninitiated collaborators? Contentious issues to discuss? Nascent designers who are used to talking and planning rather than doing? What happens if you gather your group and quickly build the space in which you are going to meet, collaborate, learn and discuss, before you actually do those things? Instead of spending endless hours talking about […]
February 10, 2011
Strangely, this trip to Seattle feels a bit like a quinceanera or cotillion. On the most basic level, I’ve never been to Seattle or even the Pacific Northwest. Amazing, right? What in the world have I been doing with my time? But I’m also incredibly excited to be presenting to and in the midst of […]
January 29, 2011
We are pleased to be heading to sunny Columbus, Ohio on Sunday to help the fine folks at Prototype Camp do wonderful things and generally be a part of the design adventure that they’ve assembled. Particularly unique because it is a youth design charette focused on the future of education in the midst of a […]
January 29, 2011
It’s taken a little bit to make the leap to Facebook. I’ve hemmed and hawed over whether it’s a step we should make but absent a massive international potluck dinner, Facebook is the best place to have a conversation with people like YOU about our work, to get helpful feedback and hear about the great […]
January 21, 2011
We are pleased to announce that Alex Gilliam is going to be regularly contributing to Metropolis Magazine, writing about projects, tools, programs and ideas that help us fundamentally rethink how we participate in and learn about design. Have a look at his first article on some of his research at the National Building Museum (here).
January 20, 2011
Can a building toy help homebuyers make better decisions about the style, location & financing of their house while teaching children how to be better community planners? Apparently H.O. Stone and Company, a prominent real estate developer in Chicago from the mid-19th to mid 20th century, thought so. Manufactured in 1928, their Model Home City […]
January 18, 2011
Project: Shadelab Location: Chicago Project Director: Alex Gilliam and Catherine Baker of Landon Bone Baker Architects Year: Spring 2010 to Present Young adults dressed in lab coats using oversized thermometers to find heat islands in their neighborhoods? Homemade Arduino sensors crafted to measure air quality in and around affordable housing? A two foot nose, sculpted […]
May 19, 2011
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