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…

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.

Elevation drawings of a former Baltimore mill that now houses some 90 businesses, including the author’s small corner office

Last year, I spent several months working in New York and commuting back to Baltimore on the weekends. One night I sat in the audience of an event in Manhattan where the Baltimore-based firm Post Typography explained the benefit of inexpensive office rent. Freed from high overhead, the designers are able to take more personal and creative risks in their work.

In recent years, I’ve noticed more designers setting up shop in Baltimore in a variety of building types, from the archetypal Baltimore row house to the massive mills erected in the boom years of the Industrial Revolution. 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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For as long as I can remember, designers and educators in Baltimore have invoked the name of the Rural Studio. They looked south to Hale County and wondered how to adapt Mockbee’s full-immersion program for design students in an urban setting like Baltimore. The conversations were, pardon the pun, purely academic. In spite of a high number of colleges and universities in the region—with several programs in architecture, planning, and landscape design—curricula rarely called for students to venture beyond the quadrangle (save for the requisite study-abroad programs). 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: Chrissy Nesbitt (detail) from A Public Space: Hopkins Plaza

It begins with six photographs. Paul Druecke asks six people to snap photos of the same urban public space. Those individuals then invite one person to do the same, and so on until 24 people have photographed the setting.

The Milwaukee-based artist began his project, A Public Space, in 2003, while living in Chicago. “Going into it, it was very experiential,” Druecke says. “I like to do a lot of walking and am fascinated with public spaces and the sense of self in relationship to the city. I wanted to create a system that gets other people to experience the place as well.” 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.

John Ruppert’s Orb, on the grounds of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ruppert’s sculpture helped earn him a prestigious Mary Sawyer’s Baker Prize this spring. All photos by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson unless otherwise noted.

When you see John Ruppert’s Orb from a distance, it looks as though a large soap bubble has floated to a landing. Draw closer and you realize that the seemingly delicate sphere is, in fact, fabricated from industrial chain link. Read more…

The Member’s Club at Pimlico Race track in the 1950s

Moments ago, it was announced  that Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird will, in fact, run the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore on May 16. Thus the stage is set for another dramatic race and potential upset by this Canadian gelding. Pimlico Race Track, home of the Preakness, has witnessed many a great showdown since it first opened in 1870, not the least of which was the famous 1938 standoff between Seabiscuit and War Admiral. The event in two weeks may well go down in history, but not just for the horses that take to the dirt track. On the eve of its 140th anniversary, the historic Pimlico may be razed to make way for a shopping mall. Read more…