Surely it’s

The contents of their canon proved that point. "Books" on the shelf ranged from a Buddhist monk to a quadriplegic journalist to a gang member-turned-doctor to a formerly homeless businessman (apparently, the curators’ tastes skewed to realist epics over comedies of manners). And, even as the concept of human texts playfully undermines some sacred library traditions—card catalogue searches; shushing—the program does seem to hit on the discovery experience, even the literary populism, at the core of a great library. Might there be a long-term place for people in the stacks? “We are seriously considering making it a permanent part of our collection,” says Aikins.

Photos courtesy of the Toronto Public Library

Odds are,

DesVaux co-founded El Origen on opposite principles. Working with Montevideo, Uruguay-based textile designers Victoria Varela and Florencia Bianchi, the Chicago entrepreneur conceived a vertically integrated line that didn’t run from natural colors—it specifically embraced them as a style point. El Origen designs (all are merino wool) tend towards the ochre and mocha end of the spectrum, in thick cuts. All seem to beg for a good autumn sun-dappling. “We don’t believe in using resources to flatten nature’s designs,” DesVaux says.

Conscious construction pairs with fairly compensated, artisanal labor. “We produce in collaboration with the cooperative Ovillo y Punto (Ball and Stitch), a group of handknitters from the old industrial neighborhood of Cerro in Montevideo,” says DesVaux. That partnership is tied to efforts to encourage knitting among Uruguayan women, and to make it more viable (both Varela and Bianchi led textile design workshops for women before the line was founded). Paying workers above market prices adds a few dollars to the designs (they range from the $40s to low $200s)—but minding that would kind of be like complaining that the sweaters aren’t whiter. In DesVaux’s words, “We value so many things that are ‘inefficient.’”

Photos by Laura Dart

El Origen Online Store

Sometime in the aughts,

"We decided this was an interesting medium," relates Rob Walker of the Hypothetical Development Organization (which we previously covered here). His fake realtors ask artists to imagine inventive uses for neglected city buildings, and to render these on ad-style signs that will be hung on the buildings themselves. The concepts are, in Walker's words, "blatantly implausible," and this is by design. If an ad for a glossy high-rise is only a pipe dream, their thinking goes, why not have more interesting pipe dreams?

The signs produced so far include "Museum of the Self," which is adorned with a massive Facebook "like" thumb; a designated "Loitering Centre" (above), which envisions tasteful malingering in a dilapidated shed on Magazine Street; and the "Velvet Rope Artisan Workshop," whose description defends its premise quite reasonably: "If you need a velvet rope, you want a handmade, custom velvet rope, from a recognized velvet rope artisan."

The artist Candy Chang, who created the door hangers that appeared in GOOD 019,  recently contributed a "Mobile Cornucopia," which plunks a building onto the back of a pickup for extreme produce truck service;  Walker expects six to eight more to be posted by April.

Freed from concerns like cost per square foot, HDO weren't scientific in selecting which buildings would (not) be revitalized. And Walker emphasizes that this is foremost a creative project—not an urban planning commentary: “To some extent the project draws attention to overlooked and underused structures. But our main goal is to tell entertaining stories.” 

Photo of Loitering Centre installation by Morris Brum

“The constant passage of the cargo ships is part of everyday life there now, but has been so for literally thousands of years,” notes David Codling, arts director for the British Council’s My City program, which commissioned the work. The temporary theater was even built from shipping containers of the same sort that float past. Naturally, Wallinger’s film is called Ulysses.

The “Sinema Amnesia” installation, which is located in the city of Çanakkale on the Asian side of the waterway, is part of an artists’ exchange run by My City and tied to Turkey’s bid to join the EU. The group has commissioned pieces by European artists in five Turkish cities; in turn, six Turkish artists receive residencies in five current EU countries. In Codling’s view, the program is a way to make a political discussion about something other than politics—at least for a little while. “This project is all about bringing culture to the heart of the conversation between Turkey and the rest of Europe,” he says. “Wherever people come from they can relate to a work of art in an outdoor urban setting.”

"Sinema Amnesia" by Mark Wallinger, 2010. Commisioned by British Council, Turkey for the city of the Canakkale. Photos by Murat Aksu.

When Jesse Finkelstein

How can a shirt be like an heirloom tomato salad?

Finkelstein’s company has structured itself on a model he calls “vertical/horizontal”: vertical because they own the process at all levels, which allows them to control costs; horizontal because they work on a “guild” system that employs skilled artisans—rather than assembly-line workers—in studios in India and China. “Everyone is a creative participant,” Finkelstein says. “Each beader or sower is in charge of their garment.” The result is a piece of clothing that is sourced, designed, made, and sold in one swoop.

Working this way has aesthetic effects, too. Sidestepping the industry’s production schedules—JF & Son doesn’t do seasonal shows—allows for creative agility, and, Finkelstein says, clears room for customer input. “We design a master collection about three to four months before delivery and then we'll keep on adding in designs a week till delivery. Everything is very immediate.”

And for Finkelstein, there may be added reason to run the company as a label that wears its heritage proudly: It’s tied to his own roots. “JF & Son was started by my great-grandfather, importing goods from overseas to be sold on the Lower East Side,” he says. “When I took over it was with a specific idea of how design should be done.”

It’s a situation

“I’ve traded my work dress for my personal website, for a photo shoot, fencing gear, laundry access, research assistance, and designer bike attachments,” says co-founder Caroline Woolard. Woolard sees a huge benefit to skipping cash for strapped but skilled artists—and to the conversation that goes with pricing a dress in terms of epées. “Barter asks both parties to talk about value.”

The site was launched by three partners from Trade School, a barter-for-instruction pop-up academy that ran for 35 days on the Lower East Side last winter (Woolard says it will be opening again, and for longer, this year). The OurGoods model—though it also includes live barter sessions—is structured for self-service, tailored trades. Users toggle between two main columns, “We have” and “We need,” and can filter for objects, skills, and spaces. A recent search spotted everything from kimchee pancake lessons (had) to bolts of satin (needed).

Importantly, these swaps aren’t happening in a vacuum. “All ‘needs’ are contextualized within ‘projects’ so people get to know why you need the thing you need,” Woolard says. That’s in keeping with the community focus of the project, which simultaneously keeps it honest—bad barter partners can be rated down—and ups the social capital. Because doesn’t money really mean not needing to talk? “When cash is removed, discussion is key.”

Photo: Caroline Woolard's often bartered self-designed work dress, courtesy of OurGoods

Tommy Wilson

It’s all part of Wilson’s new Bomb the Blight project. Launched last week in Memphis, Bomb the Blight is a cross between public art and madcap ecology in which the artist fires paint-studded seed-bombs into neglected lots. On landing, the bombs produce colorful splatters of paint; spread across an area of several acres, “they build up into an abstract painting of sorts,” according to Wilson. The project gets its artistic second wind later, when these bright splotches bloom into a mix of plants picked for their appeal to bees, birds—and humans. “Considering that the materials used by the first artists were derived from plants, I think it is quite fitting to consider flowers to be my final medium” he says.

The weapon itself was Wilson’s inspiration: “I came up with the idea when I went to a fall festival and saw a ‘pumpkin chucker.’ I read about seed-bombs and decided to try and blend the two.” (The air cannon he uses is the same you might see firing into the stands at an NBA game—liberated at last from XXXL T-shirt duty.) And he’s expanding into hand grenades for small lots, with the bonus that residents can join the assault. Important as the flowers are, an engaged community seems central to what the artist is after.

Photo by Donna McGlothlan

It’s tempting

The inspiration for the hotel, which opened in July, came from a documentary called The Tree Lover, a return-to-nature film that starred a lofty treehouse. After renting out the shelter used in the film, the Lindvalls—Kent also runs fishing expeditions—had the idea to commission several more for a year-round mini boreal resort. “One evening on Kamchatka by the fire, [Kent] presents the idea of the Treehotel to his guests on the fishing trip, and that happens to be some of Sweden’s best architects,” Sofia Lindvall recalls. “They are invited to draw one room each.” 

The designs those architects produced included the above “Mirrorcube,” a branch-thatched round room called “The Nest,” and a bi-level space orb named “UFO” (all have incineration toilets). Even the hotel’s sauna is raised off the forest floor. And in keeping with the back-to-the-forest theme, the trees themselves will be well looked after. “All the rooms are hung up with adjustable clamps around the tree,” Lindvall says. “As the tree grows we can adjust the clamps so we never choke or damage it.”

Photos courtesy of Treehotel

When the Brooklyn-based 

Figuring that a simple way to extol that community was to literally chart its crisscrossing paths, the pair came up with Contrail, a receptacle filled with colorful chalking fluid that attaches to a bicycle’s frame and leaves a bright line in the rider’s wake. “It turns your bike into a paintbrush,” says Gelardi, explaining that the rear-wheel action powers the device’s pump. In the aggregate, the effect—which the pair recently showcased at Los Angeles’s Opportunity Green conference—is striking and sweet: a grosgrain of distinct but weaving lines that seems to point up the cycling (and the urban) experience. It is also low-impact. The fluid is nontoxic and washes off within a few days.

Gelardi and Herrmann are currently fundraising to make Contrail publicly available. For the pair, its conceptual purpose is augmented by practical possibilities: As a safety device for groups, as a way to stamp the road on fundraising rides, and more. “The path [at Opportunity Green] sparked a lot of creative discussion,” Herrmann says. “‘This would be great for my kid's tricycle ride’ or ‘This would be great to lead a marathon with!’”

An up-close look at the device.

Here's the final product.

Learn how you can support Contrail at its Kickstarter page.

For Natalie Jeremijenko,

Jeremijenko's new xAirport project is working to reconstruct a better flight culture from the ground up—quite literally. It turns out one of the most destructive things a plane can do is land, which they commonly do on huge patches of tarmac paved onto fragile wetlands. But what if we no longer relied on these "airports"? The xAirport team has been working with the makers of the ICON A5, a light amphibious aircraft that makes wet landings. And at an exhibition at the San Jose Biennal in September, the group built their own wetland strip to represent the ideal landing zones of the future, which participants could cruise across on a zipline. "There's a weird public discourse about 'protecting' the wetlands," Jeremijenko says. "The only way is to build more wetlands."

xAirport has also done holistic redesigns on everything from in-flight menus to a pilot's cockpit position. And in San Jose, they passed out "hand flyers," shaped on the curvature of different bird wings—a more sophisticated take on sticking one's hand out a car window (Jeremijenko claims the experience is actually "more transferable to flight" than the standard flight simulator). The larger theory is simple: Get people to recall the organic pleasures of flying and they'll start thinking about the process more naturally. In Jeremijenko's words, "xAirport is about reclaiming the wonder of flight."

Photos and video used with permission. Urban Wetland Design: Fletcher Studio; Construction: Five Elements Design, photo by Troy Martinez.

His latest project is one of his most practical yet. Dismayed at the high cost and downright hassle of private space travel—“I didn’t have $200,000 to spend on Virgin Galactic,” he says, adding that “freeze-dried ice-cream is really disgusting”—Keats wanted a way to bring the extra-terrestrial experience down to Earth. So he formed his own space agency—the Local Air and Space Administration, or LASA—and has designed several convenient tours for Earth-dwellers. In one, the artist embedded pieces of meteorite in the soles of slippers, allowing space walks inside any apartment. Not wanting to exclude plants, he also smashed bits of asteroid into dirt, then planted cacti in the foreign soil. Why cacti? “Initial test pilots tend to be brave and a little bit stupid. And I realized that kind of described a cactus.”

But the simplest way for people to tour space will be to drink it. In an upcoming show at San Francisco’s Modernism Gallery, Keats will be selling bottles of water mineralized with pieces of the Moon, Mars, or a star. Call it the opposite of Neil Armstrong sipping Tang in the LEM. (Keats also offers a trip to potatoes, through osmosis.) And like any good travel agent, he’s ready to cut a deal for the ambitious voyager. “There will be package tours for people who want to experience all three.”

The show opens to the public at Modernism Gallery Thursday, October 21, at 5:30 p.m.

Just try to

“There are a lot of companies who give a portion of proceeds, which is great,” says Yamaguchi. “[But] many consumers cannot see where the proceeds are going... With the 141 model, it's clear.” Like a perfectly polished lens.

For Yamaguchi and Wu, the 141 vision has focused in a particularly personal way, at the intersection of her work as an optician and his in design at Nike, where he got an insider’s look at how TOMS could pull off its bold concept. The pair held their first clinic this year in a typhoon-ravaged area of her parents’ native Taiwan, where they got connected with a junior high school. And their next major project will target recipients of free or reduced lunches in the local Portland public schools.

There also seems to be something uniquely personal about eyewear. “I've worn glasses since the fifth grade. Without them, I’m blind.” Yamaguchi says. “A pair of glasses is so simple, yet it can make such a tremendous impact.” That empathy is evident in a charming 141 quirk: “All of our frames are named after Portland streets and bridges which are relevant to our relationship. We had our first date on Glisan. The building we live in is bordered by Lovejoy and Kearney.”

The Jewish

Designed by the Bay Area firm Rael San Fratello, Homeless House: The Sukkah of the Signs was constructed with signs their team collected from people living on the streets. "Ten years ago, we started to collect signs from the indigent ... with the idea of creating an exhibit that brought attention to homelessness," recalls Ronald Rael. When the Sukkah City contest was born, they realized they had a more pointed way to put them to use. "We felt that the marriage of our previous ideas about signs and the traditional meaning of the sukkah was perfect."

The contest also offered the firm grant money, which they turned into a clever direct donations tool by buying signs straight from their creators. These signs were made on everything from corrugated cardboard to cereal boxes to real estate placards, with pens ranging from Sharpie to lipstick.

As building materials go, the signs, which clad a wooden skeleton, produce an arresting effect, looking a bit like oversized, rough-hewn shingles. And that roughness highlights the point, both of the sukkah and the cause it speaks to. "The form is designed to appear unstable or in motion," Rael says. "Some suggested it looks like Noah's Ark or the Jawas Vehicle from Star Wars."

Photos courtesy of Rael San Fratello

According to Rikin Gandhi,

But it’s not just any kind of seeing—it’s seeing your friends and neighbors. Participation is the key to Digital Green’s system. Their team trains community members to produce the videos with low-cost cameras—shorts showing local farmers reaping the benefits of new techniques. These are screened on battery-operated pico projectors at village gathering points like bus stands and schoolhouses by paid “community facilitators,” who encourage dialogue. As important as the content are the subtle cultural tics that build trust. “Farmers perceive relevance ... based on audio and visual cues,” Gandhi says. In one case, “a plastic drum used in a demonstration turned away some farmers because they possessed only earthen urns.”

So far, the team has produced close to 600 videos, and they’re hoping to expand not only within India, but also in Africa. According to Gandhi, a bit of human nature has helped their work: “The appeal of appearing ‘on TV’ is incentive enough for some farmers to adopt a new practice.”

Photos by Emil Kuruvilla

During World War II,

Or so it should be. According to Haggerty, neither system is being optimized. "What we noticed in Solo was that local government wasn't collecting this information and aggregating it," he says. He and several colleagues launched the Solo Kota Kita project in 2009, believing that organizing this data—and making it more digestible and public—could make a strong infrastructure start producing real results. They started by dispatching "Community Facilitators" to gather local statistics from Solo's 5,000 RTs. Their team then compiled these into a series of Mini Atlases: highly visual fact sheets that profile each of the city's 51 neighborhoods, mapping details on such topics as clean-water availability, education, and disease incidence.

This fall, the Atlases will be available both locally—at musrebang meetings and in community centers—and online. Solo Kota Kita's hope is that approachable design will do what raw numbers can't. "The main idea is to make urban data something that people will engage with," Haggerty says. "Indonesia is actually an incredibly visual culture, and it turns out that infographics go over really well."

Storey founded Saving Cities last year with several other twentysomething Rust Belters, folks from places like Detroit and Akron who believed there was a fresh case to be made to young professionals: That same poor economy has also made these downtowns ideal places to live. “We offer so many things that larger cities can't,” says Storey. “Affordable daily living, manageable commuting and public transit, the opportunity to own something substantial without drowning in debt.”

That last one’s a biggie. And one of the group’s main current initiatives—they brainstorm daily around a “Rust Belt Hierarchy of Needs”—centers on reclaiming vacant properties in “developing” neighborhoods and marketing them to the creative class. “These are homes that would otherwise be torn down [or] left to rot,” Storey says.

But the project’s most significant new move may be symbolic: the way they’re pooling not just resources, but identities, to get behind the “postindustrial” theme. “[We’re] not trying to create a competition between cities,” Storey notes. Emphasizing the common experience of these cities is a clever way of pointing out its value.

Logo by Michael McFarland at Design Monkey, Ltd.; photo by Angela Jarden

When you’re bequeathed several vintage gumball machines, the gift comes with a mandate to do something creative. But what? That was the dilemma recently facing Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud of Los Angeles’s Commonstudio design firm. “A family member had a vending machine hobby for years, and we we're lucky enough to inherit a handful of them,” Phillips says. “[But] it didn’t feel right to just fill them up with candy.” Then they lit upon a new version of an old idea: seed-bombs. Originally conceived in the 1970s by an activist group in New York, these “bombs” are essentially seed packets bundled for optimal urban deployment: Toss one in a vacant lot, and soon you’ll see flowers growing.

Of course, few people are likely to concoct these on their own. But what if they could simply drop some coins in a slot and pocket a seed-bomb for the road, then wing some beautification at the next blight they saw? That’s where the candy machines came in. With proliferation in mind, Phillips and Karlsrud decided to try designing seedbombs that would fit in the old machines. “We came up with our own recipe, scaled these down to the size of a gumballs... and it worked!” Phillips recalls. They suddenly had an instant dispenser of urban improvement.

Since placing their first seed-bomb vending machine in Los Angeles’s Chinatown neighborhood, the pair have added approximately 20 outposts to the initiative they call Greenaid, mainly around West L.A., and they have funding for 12 more in other locations. (Nearly needless to say, they customize their wildflower blends for regional accuracy.) But the project is less about total plantings than making it extremely easy to make cities slightly better.

Photos courtesy of Common Studio

Of course, those blank spots—typically in distant corners of the American West—weren’t actually blank at all. And Paglen has spent the last several years photographing these secret airbases and unproven proving grounds, a project now gathered into a new monograph titled Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes.

The difficulty of Paglen’s work is coded into the shots. He commonly takes them from more than 20 miles away—on whatever mountaintop gets him closest—and they tend to have a blurred, flattened quality that borders on surreal. For Paglen, who sees the project distinctly as art, not documentary, this haziness was precisely the draw. “I would drive out to Nevada and look through binoculars and get very shimmery images, and that seemed like a microcosm. Half of seeing these places is imagining them.”

Invisible also features an array of other ephemera from the classified industry: fuzzy false passports and fake signatures written in multiple hands; mission patches from missions that supposedly don’t exist; the streaks of secret satellites in the night sky. It’s enough to make the reader wonder if the author has considered classifying his location. “A lot of people have gotten really angry about this work,” Paglen says. But surprisingly, the opposite has also been true: “I get fan letters from a lot of these guys.”

Photo by Trevor Paglen, the Altman Siegel Gallery in 0San Francisco, and Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne.