The proposed new State Center Complex in Baltimore

Last week, the Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun announced that it will be a consultant on both the State Center Complex in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Great River Park Project in St. Paul, Minnesota. As large-scale exercises in urban redesign, the two projects couldn’t possibly be more different, so Mithun’s multidisciplinary researchers and designers will definitely have their work cut out for them.

The State Center is a vital transit hub at the heart of Baltimore. When it was built in the 1960s, it replaced a vibrant urban neighborhood with a 28-acre, single-use campus of government office buildings.  Last year, the State Center began work on a 15-year, $1.5 billion project to undo that damage and re-invent itself. Mithun has been named as one of the design firms who will help integrate the State Center into the urban fabric, creating a mixed-use community through public-private partnerships. The proposed plan will introduce housing, retail, and parks while relocating the government offices currently occupying the complex. The transit hub will now also be a sustainable, walkable neighborhood, in keeping with the principles of New Urbanism.  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.

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…

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.

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.

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…