“In order to be really secure, we’re going to need to be secure in change.” With that mobilizing statement, a quote from his grandfather, Charles Eames, keynote speaker Eames Demetrios set the tone for Compostmodern ‘09, last weekend’s day-long conference on sustainable design at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. And the day’s speakers did, indeed, advocate for change at all levels: changes in the way designers work, the way they think, what they design, and for whom (“Your client is the planet” became another reigning mantra), even how we conceive of sustainability itself.

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If you go to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ new exhibit on contemporary Nordic craft expecting to see the pronounced stamp of Arne Jacobsen or Alvar Aalto, you may be disappointed. If, however, you’re looking for a show where a curator invites you to “step into the intestines” or you overhear an artist proclaiming, “I think circuit boards are beautiful,” or you can admire a curvy, deep-orange glasswork titled Talking Tits, this exhibit is for you.

Talking Tits (detail), Tuva Gonsholt
(Photo: The artist)

The title, “Irreverent,” is the first clue that stark white, glistening glass and teak will not be the order of the day. In their painstaking attention to handicraft, the 10 artists in this exhibit, from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, are distinct heirs to their revered forebears. The departure comes in their sense of play, penchant for narrative, and overt reference to social concerns. Read more…

You know a film screening is going to be good when, in speaking about the event, the presenter refers to things like “this incredible document about civil engineering.” In Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, self-described “guerilla archivist” Rick Prelinger draws on his massive collection of home movies, educational and industrial films, and other ephemera. From promotional films of the building of the Bay Bridge to footage of the construction of the Twin Peaks tunnel to the home movies of the Ransohoff Family (their Union Square department store was featured in Vertigo), Prelinger collages a range of “unofficial documents” to explore the history and built environment of the City by the Bay. The aim, he says, is to investigate how “models of the past inform models of the future.” The Prelinger Archives, amassed by Prelinger over 20 years and sold to the Library of Congress in 2002, contains 48,000 complete films and roughly 30,000 cans of raw footage. Read more…

This may have been our most digital election yet, what with candidate MySpace pages and YouTube debates and all. But when the electorate wanted to share its jubilance on Tuesday night, we did it the old-fashioned way.

(Photo courtesy: Ken Taylor) Read more…

First there were announcements. Then there was the fire drill. Finally, there was the dripping from the ceiling in our makeshift classroom. But once the poetry workshop at Philadelphia’s Charter High School for Architecture and Design finally began, the students were unstoppable. We began our day-long workshop, focusing on the theme of The City, by drawing maps of childhood neighborhoods. Then, after reading Quincy Troupe’s “Poem for My Brother, Timmy,” which lays out brilliant details of the poet’s life in St. Louis (“we use to walk streets/of river-rhythm town, counting/cars, that passed/for nothing else better to do”), students wrote about their own city memories.

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“Look away from the view,” our tour guide, David Buuck, instructed us as we approached San Francisco’s Treasure Island from the Bay Bridge. Operating under the auspices of BARGE (Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics), Buuck designed his “Buried Treasure Island” tour for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 5 triennial festival of visual art, film, and performance. The 400-acre artificial island’s history is both rich and unsettling. Constructed from fill dredged from the Bay, it was created to host the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Intended to be used as the city’s airport after the exhibition closed, the island was instead transferred to the Navy, which used the site as a base during World War II and then as a training ground through the early 1990s.

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Urban Re:Interventions, the flagship exhibit for AIA San Francisco’s month-long Architecture and the City Festival, promises a bold re-envisioning of the city by architects, designers, and “urban guerillas.” I’d say the curators may have overstated things a tad, given the preponderance of standard fare featured: a bandshell, a green schoolyard, rooftop gardens (though, somewhat intriguingly, on bus shelters), a pedestrian plaza. Still, a few standout projects take the exhibit’s revolutionary premise to heart, offering provocative (or, in one case, downright weird) challenges to ever-gentrifying San Francisco’s design and development status quo.

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It is probably fitting that I got diverted on my way to write about Intersection, the first publication in the ChainLinks series, which I had planned to delve into when it was published last spring. The volume, which is subtitled Sidewalks and Public Space, takes as its jumping off point Jane Jacobs’ groundbreaking investigations into that topic in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And, of course, one of Jacobs’ abiding lessons is that opportunities for diversion are hallmarks of a good public space. “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations,” Jacobs’ wrote in a selection from her book that is reprinted in Intersection.

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My co-worker must have been reading my mind after I mentioned that I would be attending a Friday-night panel titled, “The Politics of Craft and Design,” part of the American Craft Show at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

“What politics?” she asked, speaking aloud the very thought that had piqued my interest in the topic.

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A view of Detroit from the Windsor, Ontario riverfront. Photo by Kristin Palm.

Five years ago, Metropolis sent me back to Detroit, my former hometown, to see where the city was headed amidst a wealth of new development. I had only been gone for a year at that time, yet I was surprised by all the projects underway—a new stadium complex, an inviting software company headquarters, the restoration of two historic downtown hotels. More importantly, though, I was impressed by the uncharacteristically coordinated approach city officials, planners, and developers appeared to be taking, even as several projects were fast-tracked so they might be completed before the 2006 Super Bowl.

“Is long-suffering Detroit on the rebound for real?” the tagline to my article read. I wasn’t ready to answer a resounding “yes,” but I did offer a less-committal “quite possibly.” A recent visit back indicates that my caution was well placed, but so was my optimism. There is a tremendous amount of thoughtful development still continuing apace in Detroit, despite the faltering economy. And in true Motor City style, there is no shortage of planning and design conundrums either. Read more…