In Resilient Cities, Beatley presents four scenarios for the future of cities: Collapse, Ruralized, Divided or Resilient Cities. The first describes the nightmare scenario of writers such as James Howard Kunstler, which warn that skyrocketing oil prices and climate change will initiate a chain of events resulting in significant loss to human life, global economic failure and an end to civilization as we know it. Beatley doesn’t believe that Collapse is inevitable, but does warn against other, slightly less apocalyptic scenarios. Read the rest of this entry »
Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative/Pop Up City hosts Martin Papcun (Prague, Czech Republic) as he presents his newest large-scale, site-specific installation at 3601 Siam Road in Ohio City.
The artist, along with construction partners American Tank Fabricating and Affordable Demolition & Hauling Inc., will slice into the walls of a house and turn them inside out to reveal the interior of the home. The installation, House, turned inside out, a massive, yet intricate deconstruction, will be open to the public for one month.
The project is funded by a grant from CEC ArtsLink New York. For more information, email: info@popupcity.com
Early in the morning on Saturday, October 3rd, Edgewater Beach became the venue for a boat race meant to bring awareness to the exorbitant amount of plastic that makes its way to the world’s lakes and oceans. Led by Cathi Lehn of the Biodiversity Alliance and Dr. Marcus Eriksen of the California-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, teams from throughout Cuyahoga County arrived with their self-made boats. The eleven small boats, constructed entirely from plastic bottles and otherwise discarded objects, were carefully carried down by the teams to the water’s edge of Lake Erie. The large crowd watched nervously as the teams pushed their crafts onto the water and the selected team members got on board. Would their boats even float?
This question was certainly on the mind of the LoveCraft’s team, comprised of members from the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the Green City Blue Lake Institute and Environmental Health Watch. In a boat building workshop the week before, Dr. Eriksen had given the rule of thumb, “One two-liter bottle will support one kilogram.” But did he then say to use enough bottles for double the weight or was that just because of the metric system? Well, the team would find out when they hit the water.
As the brave skippers, Marc Lefkowitz and Mandy Metcalf, boarded the LoveCraft, the team was surprised by how little their recycled matress framed rig sunk in the water. The additional pontoons made from discarded wildberry sno cone syrup bottles must have done the trick! Now the LoveCrafters would have to face the 300 feet of Lake Erie out to the marker canoe, make the turn around it, and paddle back to shore against the prevailing wind. They would also have to watch out for the favored boat that day; a sleak two pontoon vessel covered in saran wrap designed by Medina high school students.
The LoveCraft held her own as the skippers paddled furiously to the shoreline, but was just edged out of third place by another Medina craft skippered by two students wearing batman and robin costumes. Maybe the extra pontoons could have been placed closer to the edge in order to make a more hydrodynamic design? Maybe they weren’t needed at all? When trying to determine the right balance of plastic needed, it might be better to favor on the side of simply using less.
For more info on what can be done to combat the plastic plague and for more photos of the regatta, visit the GreenCityBlueLake Institute blog. For behind the scenes shots of the crafting of the LoveCraft, visit our CUDC Flickr stream.
Are you interested in improving the functionality and aesthetics of RTA’s wayfinding signage? Well, now’s your chance to influence the design process.
The Transit Improvement Advisory Committee (TIAC), a sub-committee of the RTA Citizen Advisory Board, will have it’s monthly meeting this Friday, Oct. 2nd from 8:30-10:00 am at RTA’s main offices on W. 6th St. in the Warehouse District.
Ongoing areas of focus for the committee this year are system wide ease of use and facilitating more cyclists to use the system. The Oct 2nd meeting will focus discussion on the first implementation of wayfinding signage as part of RTA’s TWE (Transit Waiting Environment) program. This first implementation is at the Market Square stop on the corner of W. 25th Street & Lorain Avenue. Vince Reddy, Chair of the TIAC, has taken extensive photos of the implementation and the committee will discuss them in the context of best practices from around the nation/globe.
The committee has extended an invitation out to anyone in Cleveland’s design community who has an interest in wayfinding and schedule signage to attend this Friday’s meeting and subsequent meetings, which are held the first Friday of each month.
What if the Detroit-Superior Bridge lower level became a public space? How would you use it? Now is your chance to see it happen.
1. Visit www.BridgeProjectVote.com to share your thoughts on initial concepts developed by students involved in the Bridge Projectdesign[build] charrette. Leave your comments on the projects and begin a dialogue with the students. What ideas do you like? What would you like to see more details on? What new uses would you like to see included?
2. Share the link with co-workers, friends, family and smarter-than-average pets. The students would love to have your feedback so they can quickly develop and refine their projects. Only a few projects will be selected to be built full-scale on the bridge, so make your thoughts known!
3. Come to the public opening during the Bridge Project on Friday and Saturday September 25th (4pm-midnight) and 26th (noon-midnight) to experience the selected projects as built prototypes. Public input on the projects will continue during the two day bridge opening as people activate the spaces and students observe the interactions, then adjust the installations.
Oftentimes as designers the distance between conceptual plan and embodied user experience is too wide to be meaningful. The rapid prototyping concept for the Bridge Project charrette intends to collapse this distance and introduce user feedback earlier in the design process. The installations during the event should not be viewed as finished products, but rather as prototypes designed to engage and draw feedback from the future users of the space.
Many thanks to Jeff Schuler for constructing the drupal website for project voting: www.jeffschuler.net
Kent architecture alums Tedd Ferringer, Jeremy Smith and Michael Abrahamson are hosting the event, “All You Can Eat: A Buffet of Architectural Ideas for Cleveland.”
Here’s their write-up of the event, which will be happening in University Circle on Oct. 30-31:
What is a city’s recommended daily intake of architecture? Let’s exceed it…
All You Can Eat: A Buffet of Architectural Ideas for Cleveland, an upcoming exhibition to be held at The Sculpture Center, posits that the city has a high metabolic rate, burning through ideas faster than they can be ingested. In response, the exhibit will present a binge of possible futures excessive in scale and exhaustive in scope, ideas both raw and cooked, half-baked and hair-brained.
Join us in preparing a feast.
For more information on this event, including how to submit an entry (you don’t need to be an architect/designer, although you certainly can be), click here.
Cleveland Executive Fellowship and Pop Up City transformed the old Leff Electric Building at 1163 E. 40th St. into an Electric Roller DiscoTech on August 28th. Here’s what went down:
It’s a disco roller rink (sort of) in the old Leff Electric Building at 1163 E. 40th Street. It’s an old industrial building with great views of the lake.
Friday, August 28th :: 7 - 10pm
Should be a fun time.
from senior planner Terry Schwarz, posted by marianne.
Coming next Saturday, August 15th, from 4pm to 11pm…
It’s the 40th anniversary since the ‘69 river fire and as such, 2009 has been dubbed “The Year of the River” in Cleveland. Read: BIG Party. Be there or be square.
Let’s celebrate how far we’ve come in cleaning up our waterways since 1969 (when our Cuyahoga caught fire for the umpty-umpth time). Even though there was a cooking oil spill on the Cuyahoga in June. Time to drink some Great Lakes beer and think collective positive thoughts.
This video was made to promote the upcoming summit about creating a sustainable Cleveland by the year 2019. For more info on the summit from August 12-14, visit here.
