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.
The blog YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME does, as its title suggests, provoke an uncanny feeling. If not a feeling of deja vu, then at least a sense of the mysterious life of objects. No snapshots of the blog that I can include here will reproduce the feeling you get from the way David John, its creator, exhibits photographs and information; you just have to go there for yourself. YHBHS’s atmospheric collection of dopplegangers and doubles and triples is part of the effect. How does he find these art and design objects that echo each other in this way? The simplicity is deceptive, and the geometry is mesmerizing. I also appreciate the way he combines design with art – mostly midcentury, 60s and later sculpture. And with lamps, because on his blog everything is illuminated. And the white space, which the internet virtually never allows you. Sometimes when I can’t stabilize my mood, I just go to you have been here sometime and I feel better. David has remarked on the importance of art in a community, and he’s right. YHBHS is from L.A.
Why can’t cooperative housing look like this more often? The Avenel Cooperative Housing Project in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, supposedly built either for “a bunch of communists” or for a “group of motion picture cartoonists and their families” (click above for informative Wikipedia article) was affordable when it was built in 1947 and of course is now ridiculously expensive. It was designed by architect Gregory Ain for a group of ten families who each contributed $11,000. Ain built ten three-bedroom units of 960 sq ft (89 sq m), each positioned along a common path. They were meant to be a model for low-cost housing, but these particular units have proven so well-designed and constructed that they’re now too prized to be affordable. Someone needs to copy these, both for their looks and for the fact that though a relatively small square footage for a family, they’re so well-laid out that they apparently feel spacious. See comments here for a possible explanation why. As a plan for affordable urban living these days, it’s unlikely that a single storey would now be considered an efficient use of an expensive urban lot. Or would it? Photos from LA Curbed. See also the LA Times and here.
These stills were shot during the filming of Coast Modern, a documentary film about West Coast modern house architecture, spanning from LA to Vancouver, by Vancouver filmmakers Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard. The film “speaks with the architects and their patrons and asks if Modernism’s time has finally come or did it never really go away.” It is currently in the editing phase and is set to be completed this coming fall. The filmmakers talked with an impressive number of well-known architects and designers up and down the coast, and based on the preview the film has a great feel – entertaining and informative. You can follow the film’s progress on their blog, watch the preview trailer below, and there’s a set of stills on Flickr. I’m hoping the film will spark increased appreciation of modern architecture in Vancouver before the current spate of house demolitions proceeds any further. Photos here are: the Stinson Beach House, top; DJ Greyboy’s Opdahl House by architect Edward Killingsworth; Barbara Bestor’s LA House; the filmmakers talking with Julius Shulman; and the Etenza House where the idea for the Case Study project was hatched. I’ll post more information on the film and its events closer to the release date. All photos posted here by permission from the filmmakers.
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!
