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.
Every year, graduate students at the CUDC take part in a community design charrette, which addresses the urban design needs of a particular site or neighborhood in Northeast Ohio. This year’s charrette will be part of the Bridge Project scheduled for September 25th and 26th.
During a typical charrette, students are asked to gather relevant data about the focus area in preparation for a community meeting where stakeholders and residents share their thoughts and desires for the neighborhood. The students then work along side CUDC staff to quickly develop design solutions and assemble presentations for the community. In years past, the student charrettes have focused on downtown Lakewood, the Jewish Community Federation site, the Howard Street corridor in Akron and Youngstown’s Oak Hill neighborhood.
Congratulations to our very own Terry Schwarz for being awarded the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize! Terry is senior planner at the CUDC and an adjunct professor at Kent State University.
Terry was awarded the artist prize in design for her work surrounding the Shrinking Cities Institute at the CUDC, which addresses local population decline. The multifaceted work of the Shrinking Cities Institute includes the Cleveland Land Lab, the Pop Up City! temporary use intiative and two editions of the Urban-Infill Journal.
The awards ceremony will be held Thursday, June 25th at the Hanna Theatre in Playhouse Square. Tickets are available by calling 216 321-0012 or by email at info@clevelandartsprize.org.
Today starts Cleveland Bicycle Week! Some event highlights for the week include an art and architecture bike tour on Tuesday from 5:30pm-7pm, which will begin at Progressive Field, the Northeast Ohio Cycling Forum on Thursday from 4-7pm at the Cleveland Public Library Main Branch, and the official Bike to Work Day on Friday. The GCRTA is also offering free rides to all bicyclists on Friday, so take the opportunity to ride in to work and let a friendly bus driver take you home after enjoying the Bike Week festivities on E. 4th St. after work.
Check out clevelandbicycleweek.org for a full event calendar that extends beyond just this week, filled with all sorts of activities for cycling enthusiasts and everyone that wants to learn more about cycling in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio.
If you’re on the fence about riding to work, here’s a little inspiration courtesy of that bike-lovin’ little town, Copenhagen:
Attraction #2: Palladio Exhibit @ CUDC
We invite you to join us on Friday, May 15 for an exhibit opening at the CUDC’s main gallery at 820 Prospect Avenue, from 5-7pm.
Andrea Palladio – 500 Years
The CUDC is pleased to host a photography exhibit brought to Cleveland by the Consulate of Italy in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Palladio’s birth and the declaration of a sister-city agreement between Cleveland and Vicenza, Italy (site of much of Palladio’s work). Word on the street is the mayors of both cities will be in attendance, so come early to beat the crowd to the bruschetta.
CircletheUSA.com, a website maintained by the Planning Commissioners Journal, is currently undertaking a cross-country road trip documenting notable city planning projects along the way. The recently concluded first leg of the trip stretched from Vermont to Cleveland and the second leg will continue on to Chicago.
While in Cleveland, the blog’s author met with Terry Schwarz, Senior Planner from the CUDC, Bob Brown, Planning Director for the City of Cleveland and Bobbi Reichtell, Senior Vice President for Programs at Neighborhood Progress Inc., to discuss the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland report. The visit and subsequent thoughts on Cleveland’s progressive strategy for addressing vacancy are presented in the Audacious…or Realistic? post.
Thank you to everyone that came out to Designerosa! All of us at the CUDC had a great time and we’re really glad to have met so many new people. We especially want to thank Heelsplitter, the amazing bluegrass band that travels to all their shows by bike, Greg Priddy, Indy and Greg Peckham for the miniature ponies (Cinnamon and Doodle), and Lois Moss from Walk + Roll Cleveland for bringing everyone together for Transportainment.
We’d also like to thank Kelly from KRA photography for taking the brilliant photographs shown below. You can see the entire Designerosa photo set and order prints at her client lounge, just type in “walkroll” as the password.
The new Pop Up City book we released at the event should be available on Amazon soon, but in the meantime, please visit our Shrinking Cities Institute website to order a copy.
If you haven’t been to the last two Pecha Kucha Nights, then you really should go and see what it’s all about.
Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.
But as we all know, give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to Pecha Kucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.
Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for the sound of conversation) has tapped into a demand for a forum in which creative work can be easily and informally shown, without having to rent a gallery or chat up a magazine editor. This is a demand that seems to be global – as Pecha Kucha Night, without any pushing, has spread virally to over 100 cities across the world.
Come celebrate the fusion of various local design communities including architecture, digital, fashion, graphic, industrial, interior, and mechanical design. This happy hour mixer, a part of Fashion Week Cleveland, is a great chance to get outside of our own particular disciplines and meet other Cleveland creatives.
The spring semester graduate studio at the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative focused on the location of the current Port of Cleveland as its site for investigation. The students were asked to respond to the Cuyahoga County Port Authority’s RFQ (Request for Qualifications) released in December, which stated its interest in selecting a design firm,
“to develop a comprehensive master plan for an iconic and transformational redevelopment strategy for a portion of Cleveland’s downtown lakefront. This area is approximately 100 acres of industrial waterfront land, in public ownership, located between the mouth of the Cuyahoga River and the North Coast Harbor public venue and currently is used principally for commercial maritime activities.”
