Most people have probably seen this video, but I thought it was worth seeing again. Dave Eggers won the 2008 TED Prize for his education and literacy work with kids, and in this entertaining acceptance speech he provides a history of the project. He’s the founder of the fantastically successful Once Upon A School which develops free drop-in tutoring centres for kids. The centres are entirely manned by volunteers – writers (including Eggers), professors, grad students, and others with flexible schedules. Quite apart from the genius of the overarching idea, Eggers also intuitively understands the role design plays in making kids and teenagers actually want to drop in for one-on-one tutoring after school. The spaces are wildly imaginative and hilarious without looking childish. In fact they must – and do – appeal to adults as well, because they are all multipurpose centres with a retail front, adult office space and kids’ tutoring area. For example, at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, Eggers’ publishing concern McSweeney’s Quarterly operates out of the back; there’s a functioning “Pirate Supply Store” in the front, and the kids’ tutoring area is in between.
There’s nothing about this project that isn’t just total genius. Below is the facade of 826 Valencia, decorated with a mural by graphic novelist Chris Ware depicting the history of language, speech, writing and publishing. Exterior photo by David Hilowitz; sandwich board photo by Dan Rochman.
Above is the Pirate Supply Store, built to feel like the inside of a ship. Photo by Willy Volk from the Flickr Creative Commons. The shop is beautiful but funny, full of elegant-looking gags: for example, as you stand and read a framed list of ways to play practical jokes on pirates, a wooden hatch opens overhead and covers you in string mop heads. Below, a visitor to the store awaits his measure of lard in exchange for which he has bartered a lock of his hair. Kids who’d just finished a workshop rushed out to witness the transaction. Photos by rgr.jnr on Flickr. Eggers and co. were forced to dream up the store component because the building rental contract stipulated there must be retail activity – hence, of course, a pirate supply store, which just happens to be a retail success in itself. Every centre has its own shop: in New York it’s the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. All profits from the stores go to support the tutoring centres, whose extra projects include publication of the childrens’ writing and field trips. The further advantage of the shopfront is that the centres are easily accessible and embedded in the neighbourhoods they serve. To date tens of thousands of kids have been given chances they would otherwise never have had. It’s not surprising that the idea has taken off across the country. When Eggers jokingly wrote “You shall know our velocity,” he wasn’t kidding.
I spent hours as a kid making marble runs, using anything that was lying around my dad’s tool area. I’d usually start with a big chunk of solid wood (usually cedar, left over from deck-building) and make the marble wind around it in a spiral, down tracks made of elastic bands stretched between two pairs of nails, thin slats with grooves whittled out, leftover copper plumbing pipe etc. I was the artsy type l so I was trying for an aesthetic effect but that’s not necessary! My dad’s friends would play with the runs when they came over, so I know they’re not just for kids. On a whim I searched Flickr a few days ago and found many marble runs, none of which resembled mine at all, but all of which are amazing. This is only a tiny fraction of what I found. They’re not all DIY – there are some out there that span several floors and are permanently installed in museums, and there are many plastic commercial models – but they’re all interesting. Look at this ingenious one hipnerd made for his child. In memory of my childhood fixation, my sister recently bought me a beautiful, traditional woodblock marble run set, and naturalmom on Flickr has the same one! (Below.) Below that is a slightly less safe marble run made from glass tube, but it’s stunning. Click on the photos to go to their Flickr pages for more information. Thanks to all the photographers for designating these Creative Commons. If you’re searching, also try “marble roll” as a search term.
Sports and Leisure Center in Saint-Cloud by KOZ Architectes, via ArchDaily. Photos by Stephan Lucas. This building, designed for children, is so well thought out it’s worth going to ArchDaily and reading the well-written and slightly franglais rationale.
Excerpts: “The building uses colour very openly and assertively, with a wide palette ranging from red to green, by way of yellow, pink and orange. These colours cover the façade in wide stripes. Inside, the same colours are systematically repeated, like stepping in an oversized graffti. A colour coding that helps you locate from the outside the areas created on the inside. A means of spatial orientation for young children. An echo to street culture codes for those who crawl on what is dubbed the coolest indoor climbing wall in France, or practice on the pop fencing rows below!… Over and above the pure functionality of the activities identified in the project, the architects placed great hope on the imagination and inventiveness of the occupants. That’s why all corridors, access ramps and passageways, are wide and spacious, up to 3 times the regulation size… KOZ is part of the “environmentally aware” generation. The openings in the roofs and the glass facades bring maximum natural lighting everywhere to limit electrical consumption. Concrete was chosen for the reasons mentioned above but the preference was for prefabricated concrete, generating less waste and spill. The tinted glass facades provide good protection against setting sun and long-lasting colour. And of course all hot water is solar heated.”
Noah: ‘I can’t help buying Doctor Who cards’. Photograph: Caroline Irby
I want to sit next to Noah, age 6. He was interviewed for the Guardian’s Seen and heard series of chats with children:
The world is being destroyed. It’s like summer in the winter now. We basically need factories stopped, shut down, and we need electric cars with a battery.
I had a girlfriend once and I don’t have one any more. She was a bit annoying – she really couldn’t control her anger.
My favourite food is crab and octopus – I had it when I was miniature.
Daddy died a year and a half ago. He wasn’t a very good driver, so he was driving when he was looking for something and suddenly he just crashed into a big lorry. I was sad. Not as sad as my Mum.
Picasso’s my favourite artist. He doesn’t draw properly, he’s an impressionist, same as Van Gogh.
My favourite subject is singing, but it’s up to our teacher what we sing – we once had to sing Winnie The Pooh And Tigger. I’d prefer to sing adult songs like Viva Las Vegas.
I’m bad at helping myself. I can’t help it if I really want to do something. Like Johnny Cash doesn’t want to take drugs but he can’t help it. I can’t help buying Doctor Who cards or doing swapsies.
I know lots of people who’ve taken drugs. Like a friend of my Dad’s – he used to be nice but he isn’t any more because he took too many drugs.
I have two enemies. One’s an adult who I’m not going to tell you about because the adults might read it and get upset, but I’ll tell you about the child: he’s cuckoo and says he loves everyone, like our prime minister.
Love is for puny humans.
God has a big hood, black face, skeleton hands and a big axe.
In my ideal heaven you’d be able to sneak down, because you’re invisible, and steal sweeties from the sweetie shop.
When I grow up I want to be an actor. I want to be able to be the Doctor but I doubt I will, I don’t look good enough. Well, David Tennant only looks good in the film: the real David Tennant is ugly.
I kind of want this, but for practical reasons it would have to be upholstered to match the dog (white). Found on atelier29. Can’t determine the name of the company, because the original source is entirely in Japanese.
I long for WernerHerzog to drop by the studio and provide the voiceover for our daily activities, half of which are by definition absurd. Since Herzog is unlikely to come by the studio, though, instead we just periodically re-read this imaginary Herzog diary, below, and Herzog seeps slowly in, like a contagion:
Dear Diary: I am making a bag out of a trench coat. I find tissue in the pocket of the coat and think: someone has blown their nose in an alleyway. It was raining, so they wore this coat. It takes me three hours of work to realize the bag is quite pointless and, by extension, I am pointless. This does not worry me. A cat comes and sits on the unfinished bag. Nature is without sympathy, but I love it.
_________________________
The Occasional Diary Entries of German Director Werner Herzog
Friday November 24, 2006
Dear Diary: Calisthenics, shower, and breakfast. Then I water the garden because it is dry. After the water I put fertilizer into the soil. I feel the flowers growing stronger the more I talk to them. Accidentally with my trowel I kill a flower. The world is chaos. I am unsuccessful at crying.
Dear Diary: Today my car is stolen from the driveway. I am not surprised.
Dear Diary: Work all day, a short break, and then dinner. Routines please me because they put order into the day; without order, there is chaos and violence. But for dinner I make a cheese sandwich and I hate it. I want to spit on it and see what it does. But I eat it anyway. Everyone dies, but for now I must live.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
