Community Garden Site

the heritage sign

I went out to the site for our proposed community garden to take some photos yesterday. It’s looking fairly likely that this will be the site for our community garden starting this summer. This park is located at Russell and Mill near the Sandwich windmill. We’re still working out all the details, but everything has been really positive so far. Many more details to follow, but for now, I just started to visually map out there area.

Continue reading “Community Garden Site”

Map Text

California Map Project

Pardon me for being a little behind the times, but John Baldessari‘s “California Map Project” from 1969 strikes a chord of creativity in me. Maybe we could find a way to blend the scale of this project with the plausibility of our Google Earth rooftop idea. Basically, John Baldessari took a map of California (bottom right) and went to the places where the map letters “California” would be located, and spelled out the letters in rocks or other ways.

From the artist – “Photographs of letters that spell California and of the map used for locating the site of each letter. The letters vary in scale from one foot to approximatly one hundred feet, and in materials used. The letters are located as near as possible within the area occupied by the letters on the map. The idea was to see the landscape as a map and to actually execute each letter and symbol of the map employed on the corresponding part of the earth. It was an attempt to make the real world match a map, to impose a language on nature and vice-versa.”

Planning for Spring

Cristina takes a look over the Text In-Transit Submissions

Despite the snow, the lethargy onset by exam schedules and year-end assignments, and a few core BCL folk leaving town for the summer, we had a great and productive meeting. We started going through the Text In-Transit submissions, continued working on our magnetic planters, worked on our Rhizome commission, brainstormed the idea of a book, and started to refine our ideas for our community garden (more details on this soon).

Continue reading “Planning for Spring”

Detroit UnReal Estate Community Lab

Detroit UnReal Estate Agency

Detroit UnReal Estate Agency has been making some considerable headway in their project that aims at “new types of urban practices (architectural, artistically, institutional, everyday life, etc) that came into existence, creating a new local ‘normality’ and a new value system in the city of Detroit.

For a while, I had some difficulty in pinning down exactly what the Agency was doing—certainly, they were doing research and writing on Detroit and its history and current conditions and putting up custom real estate signs  indicating specific unrealities. Beyond that though, I had some difficulty in understanding what the project was, likely limited by my own capacity in keeping up with their site and a fluctuating amount of posting ranging from solely photographs to heavier lengthy texts.

However, they’ve recently been very active again, no doubt thanks to the visit of their Dutch counterparts. They’ve recently published on their blog, a new strategic plan of sorts. Their most recent post reads, “One plan we’re working on now is a combination of a new masterplan + a cooperative ownership system + a business plan – A Community Lab.

This is incredibly exciting! Crisis leads to ingenuity.

Scavenge the City Recap

the algorithm

A week ago, on an incredibly cold, rainy, snowy evening, we headed out on an exploration of Windsor’s downtown guided by a randomly assembled algorithm for Scavenge The City. We only made it through the first 20 steps (we stopped checking them off though), plus a couple others we skipped to by the end, but for the two or three hours we were out, it was great to experience the city with new people in new ways.

To see the algorithm, you can view it randomly assembled, refresh it to see a new order.

Continue reading “Scavenge the City Recap”

Office Hours

Office Hours

Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, April 7, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. You’re invited. We’ll continue working on our paper planter project and brainstorm some others. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!

National Grass Theatre

National Theatre

The National Theatre in London, England completed another reiteration of living architecture display, this time a temporary grass covering consisting of some 2 billion seeds. Imagine covering the face of one of our parking garages with grass and leaving a concrete message sans grass. 

National Theatre‘s Lyttelton flytower (“flytower” is a part of a theatre above the stage), which is the artists’ largest exterior work to date, is the embodiment of Malevich idea in architecture, only it’s green and alive (though for a limited time). Sponsored by Bloomberg and produced by Artsadmin, this $100,000 “living’ installation has transformed the well-known London landmark into a vertical green marvel.” Continue reading “National Grass Theatre”

First 5 Text In-Transit Panels Installed

Everything is Possible - on the tunnel bus

Last night Danielle and I went to the downtown Transit Windsor terminal to install the first five test panels we had printed for Text In-Transit. The panels read: everything is possible, YOU MADE MY DAY, YOU ARE THE CITY, YOU CHANGED EVERYTHING, and changing the world starts by changing this city. We had to install these panels while the buses momentarily stopped at the terminal, so it was pretty quick. When we install the rest of the panels later this month, we’ll do it at the garage.

Continue reading “First 5 Text In-Transit Panels Installed”