In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

The ripple effect of the stalled housing market has impacted countless industries—including the purveyors of those storage pods that pop up on the curb when someone needs to move. A few months back, Charley MacKenzie, the owner of the Maryland-based SmartBox USA, told his friend Gregory Pitts about his company’s overstock of plywood storage boxes, each about the size of a walk-in closet. Pitts, a designer with the furniture company David Edward, had an idea. What if the pods could themselves become home? Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Yolande Daniels’s Tea Cozy. All photos: Will Kirk

New York has P.S. 1’s courtyard installation; Baltimore has Sculpture at Evergreen. Every two years, the 26 acres surrounding the historic Evergreen Museum & Library transforms into a lab for artists. This year, equal presence was given to installations by architects, including New York’s Matter Practice and Yolande Daniels, the founding design principal of studio SUMO.

Sculpture at Evergreen’s curators—the University of Maryland architecture professor Ronit Eisenbach and the artist and curator Jennie Fleming—directed the ten individuals and teams to develop work responding to the site, a Gilded Age house with Italianate gardens owned by Johns Hopkins University. For architects, this kind of impermanent installation can become an extension of the studio, offering an opportunity to play with materials and processes in a fast and temporary setting. “It allows them to experiment,” Eisenbach says, “and take what they learned back to their practice.” Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Baltimore, like most urban environments, is lousy with graffiti. The culture of tagging is well established here. Street art, though, is just starting to take off. In the last few years, wheat-pasted posters and hand-painted imagery have been popping up on abandoned buildings, sidewalks, and light poles. These works of art—and these are art—evoke the likes of Banksy and Swoon, with subject matter that arrests us in our daily travels and reminds us to again see and question the city we occupy.

Perhaps the most accomplished street art in Baltimore right now is coming from a young artist named Gaia. Read more…

Upon first encountering the new chair and bench prototypes from the Dutch design duo Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen, of Atelier Remy & Veenhuizen, you’d be forgiven for not immediately registering the furniture’s material. From a distance, the objects appear to be inflated. Are they vinyl? Plastic? Then again, they could be leather; they look malleable and seamed and just a bit overstuffed in places. It’s only on closer inspection that you see the telltale pocking on the surface that can only mean one thing: The chairs and benches are fabricated of concrete. Poured into plastic molds and structured with steel, these pieces read one thing (light, airy) and are another entirely (cement and metal). Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.
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In the winter of 2009, Ryan Patterson had an epiphany. The community-arts coordinator of Parks & People, a Baltimore non-profit that greens neighborhoods and connects residents to the outdoors, was participating in a charrette when the conversation turned to new ways of delivering design services to underserved communities. Patterson wondered what would happen if you created a DIY design center of sorts, a mobile, modular structure that could become whatever the community needed. He imagined plunking an industrial shipping container into a neighborhood and creating a resource center. “The shipping container is a basic, modular thing that could be turned into any type of community center,” Patterson says. “It seemed a blank canvas that we could design on.”

A year and a half later, Patterson has taken this idea from concept to reality. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Photo: Emily Pilloton

Nothing—not even well-intentioned design—is above reproach. The confluence of organizations and individuals working to bring design practice to those who might not normally get it seems to have hit a critical mass, and with it comes the inevitable backlash. In an entry written last fall on his Design Altruism Project Web site, David Stairs lit a firestorm of debate when he argued that “social networking has struck the design world with the force of the Indonesian tsunami bringing changes of sorts, but no guarantees of lasting change.”

So what do we mean by humanitarian design and is it really making an impact? Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

On January 16, Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum kicked off its 20th year in the city with a winter party celebrating both its anniversary and its latest exhibition, Participation Nation: Art Invites Input. Entering the packed gallery that evening, I was confronted with an incredible noise. Not the usual din of opening-night gallery chatter, but raw, hard sounds created by a couple of well-dressed guests toying with what looked to be the control panels of a radio production booth.

Nearby, brand-new digital cameras were perched on a single shelf, with an invitation to take one. Across the room, a series of photos rotated through a projector; the fuzzy close-ups, oddly cropped street scenes, and neat rows of buildings resembled the kind of amateur city snapshots that clutter my own camera disc. To the left of this projection, a nearly empty set of shelves mounted to the wall held a few scattered items—a Gatorade bottle, a vintage kitchen appliance, candy wrappers.

Participation Nation is the first in a series of 20 exhibitions that will run over the next 18 months at the Contemporary. In honor of the museum’s anniversary, Irene Hofmann, its curator and executive director, invited 20 people from the institution’s past to select one artist whom they believe represents the future of contemporary art. From that list, Hofmann put together small group shows.

The remarkable thing about this first art exhibition is the lack of, well, art. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

In 2004, the graphic designer Kat Feuerstein gathered a group of friends, rented a U-Haul, and drove from Baltimore to an outlying county to see a man about a letterpress. In this case, it was a platen jobbing press built at the turn of the last century by Chandler and Price, an Ohio-based manufacturer that specialized in movable-type printing. Founded in the 1880s, the company set the standard for letterpress machines, but went out of business in the 1960s when offset printing eclipsed the market.

The man selling the antique had once owned a printing business and he couldn’t understand why a young woman would be willing to pay $350 for a piece of heavy machinery that had been gathering rust. “He told me, ‘I don’t think there’s really a market for this,’” Feuerstein recalls today. “And he kept reminding me that it wasn’t a toy.”

Five years and five antique presses later, Feuerstein’s business, Gilah Press + Design, is booming with a line of letterpress greeting cards retailed through clients like Anthropologie and Kate’s Paperie, and a custom-design business that thrives on the market’s desire for tactile, deep-impression letterpress. Gilah also runs letterpress print jobs for other area designers. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Perkins Eastman’s Small House is one of several recent examples of better-designed (and greener) retirement housing.

I remember when my grandparents had to leave their home. They were in their seventies. My grandmother could no longer navigate the stairs to the basement and my grandfather couldn’t maintain their large yard. They moved to a continued-care retirement community, or CCRC, outside of Baltimore. It was your classic CCRC design: a large campus in an isolated spot off of a suburban artery road, accessible only by car, with different levels of care stationed in a smattering of lifeless, mid-rise buildings. You checked into independent-living apartments and as your capacities decreased, you worked your way into assisted and full-time nursing care.

I never liked visiting my grandparents at the CCRC. At the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason, but now I understand it was the design. This CCRC, like many in the United States, was designed for dying; it was a hospital cloaked in residential cladding. Double-loaded corridors were wide enough for food delivery to the massive cafeteria, nursing stations peppered the hallways, and machines and radio calls made an awful racket throughout the night. Survivors of the Great Depression, my grandparents were adept at making the most of any situation, but I suspect they never felt fully engaged or happy there. It just didn’t feel like home.

Today, there is a revolt brewing against this type of senior living. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

As a part of the Baltimore Architecture Week held earlier this month, AIABaltimore invited me to moderate a forum titled “The Role of Design Centers in Urban Regeneration.” The topic is one that has been up for discussion here for more than a year as the community looks to form a city-wide, comprehensive center that could galvanize the profession and the community around design excellence. Baltimore isn’t alone in this endeavor. Cities from Philadelphia and Dallas to San Francisco have opened centers in recent years aimed at bringing architecture and design to the fore of civic life.

It’s a trend that Maurice Cox (left), the director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts, has seen firsthand. He says that 2008 grant applications to the NEA saw an “unprecedented spike” in requests coming from community design centers. Cox (along with Gary Gaston of the Nashville Civic Design Center, in Tennessee) came to Baltimore to talk about this trend and how a city like Baltimore might structure its own center. Read more…