Living As Form: Social Practice Database

Maria Margarita Jimenez, "Adios Pues!" 2002

• Jimenez's project was based of the donation of her wardrobe to an art gallery, that gave her closure to exhibiting art: saying goodbye to all her precious, collected clothing as well as being her final participation in an art exhibition. Her selfless act, allowed underprivileged people to create and design pieces using a provided sewing machine as well as any materials they would need. I like this project most because I envision what I would make if I had the ability to design (for myself or people in need) using someone else's precious wardrobe that symbolizes a person's own archive, that defined her identity. Knowing that a woman donated all delicately chosen clothing she gathered throughout her life, makes the clothing pieces as valuable as irreplaceable herself.
  

Broken City Lab, "Cross-Border Communication", 2009

• Broken City Lab, designed a visual display of "direct and sincere" quotes as performative, public art piece. These images were displaced between Windsor and Detroit, two cities divided by a river. However, these messages were able to be seen across the water all the way from Detroit. This project in particular was interesting to me because it suggests the idea of balancing a relationship that maybe be considered long distance. Like these messages, communication does not mean you must be relatively close to a friend, neighbor or community to share thoughts and ideas. The groups focus is on dialogue and language.
  

The Canadian Centre for Architecture, "Actions: What Can You Do With the City", 2008 - 2009

• This large project is compiled of 99 action-based, smaller projects to persuade people to get active and involved with these unique activities, in order to develop a sense of communal participation. The activities were all proposals composed by artists, architects and designers, that took the typical idea of walking, jogging, biking, gardening, etc. and turned them into an innovative sort of engagement activity based off the original action. The suggested activities would all be implemented in a designated area, like an abandoned lot or unused parking lot space and turning it into a park or some sort to suggest engagement.  This relates a lot to what we are working on now in class, by finding a vacant area and designing a public space the community could benefit from. I like that all the activities were quirky and fun both with color and idea and support of physical activity. I could definitely see something like this happening in Manhattan for a short period of time.
  

Seminar: Research: What I'm Up to With Skillman Avenue..

For the Interpretation Bridge Assignment in class, I am designing my site to be located on Skillman Avenue, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. To get there from Manhattan, you would take the L subway line to Lormier Street. My site is located in a residential area, nestled between a street filled with markets and small miscellaneous shops and the other side a loud, busier intersection with a highway residing above it. However my exact location falls closer to the shops, making it a lot less quiet. The street is filled with apartments and houses and scattered trees and dead garden beds. The street is dull looking; it lacks color and greenery. What I intend to do with my site is create a greenhouse space, open to the community to come sit and read books, share time with neighbors and help support the greenhouse plants.
My research paper topic will primarily discuss gentrification, and how to resolve conflict between new and old residents in Williamsburg while it undergoes a social and physical transformation in the neighborhood. I will also touch upon benefits of a greenhouse and how the community will benefit from greenhouse health affects as well as how this is a good social aspect to have in a residential neighborhood. 

Up Close and Personal with Skillman Avenue, New York

Address: 44 Skillman Avenue, Brooklyn, New York,  NY 11211

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oHvIUwGqb8&feature=youtu.be

All the Words:
Centro Italiano
Stop
All way
No parking
Chroma
Vine wine
Tow away zone
Newport
Mobil
Lormier Street

What is on the block of Skillman Avenue?

• Residential buildings : Apartments and Houses mostly 2-4 stories. 3 on average
• Many parked cars
• Lots of traffic signs: one way signs and parking instructions
• Small Porches
• Lurking cats!
• Some graffiti at empty spaces on the fences
• Dead plants/ flowerbeds everywhere
• 13 buildings on one side. 7 on the other 
• 2 empty lots that don't allow parking but people are using the space for parking anyways
• This site is in between a street with a highway and shops / cafes / restaurants on the other side. It is a perfect cut through for people to cross town

Time Stamp:
5:09 pm - 7 people
6:02 pm - 2 people

Archival Investigations with Jenny

When Jenny the archivist for Parson's came to our Seminar class, she discussed firstly what archives were and how to identify primary sources.  Primary sources consist of the following:

• digital/ PDFs
• albums/ photos
• sketches/ garments
• notes

These can be found through a database or a collection at different places both tangible or in online form. There are many places that have archives in these forms, this includes:

• Business'/corporate
• Universities
• City of New York
• Federal Government
• Brooklyn Public Library- Brooklyn Collection
• Brooklyn College
• Interdependent Community Archives - interference archive
• Brooklyn Historical Museum

Jenny was helpful in giving us places to look at that worked with our final project in studio and seminar.  My group looked at a photo album that carried photos of visual displays on 5th Avenue for a department store. We noted the dates that took course over a year, and did enough investigation to find that the curator changed the displays every two weeks on a Tuesday. We also interpreted that these photos came from around the "Mad Men" era, and displayed only women which we suspected was the store's intention to attract females to buy the latest trends. I was surprised to find that archives were as interesting as they were! It allows you to act as a mini detective and interpret the stories of people and their cultures until you have enough pieces to answer your intended question. If I were able to choose a topic of interest in archives, I would choose a topic of mystery and murder. Perhaps, of how many dead bodies have been unidentified and found in NYC apartment buildings when new tenants move in. It sounds creepy, as well as intriguing!

The South Bronx of America

Mel Rosenthal suggests that the Bronx is affordable as well as the ideal space for growth of a business; is this even true? The passage accounted different newspaper articles that discussed the amount of deaths in the Hunts Point section, more that occurred from drugs and homicides, not the environment and atmosphere. With racism filling the streets, a person in the article claims there are not many neighborhoods they would feel safe in, besides the South Bronx because she knows everyone. What struck me most was Roger Starr's comment in the New York Times on November 14,1976, "These people come by, and stop, and take pictures. We are not animals. We are suffering. There is nothing to look at here. This is serious, this is people's business." With burnt down buildings, no
housing was provided for these people. They didn't want it either in the South Bronx. Instead they designed what they wanted for their neighborhood; casitas.
"Casitas can create an are of relaxation and quiet against the strains of the city. At the same time, they are a public display of the cultural and political loyalty to the island." (Rosenthal 292) These Casitas Projects, seem like a well-designed public yet private spaces for the people of the community, interpreted by artists, architects, and designers that use their memories and feeling of a "sympathetic space". But in fact, I don't find them that way at all. They tend to look worn out and messy from the pictures, which I don't find as appealing as their description. It seems these people of the Bronx don't want to feel like an eye sore or draw attraction because they look in need, however these casitas only offer reassurance to themselves, not New York.

Studio: History of a Building

This reading is about the history of a building in Harlem, that shows the financial process of selling, receiving and maintaing a building until it can reach a point for a livable condition. It shows a timeline of how long it takes for mortgages to be paid off by specific dates (ex: February 17,1951). It then goes through more dates of struggles with the city, then a dated transformation of interior demolition to build condominiums. One after another they were sold in 1989. William Lester initially bought those lots (3 of them) for approximately $12,000. Almost a hundred years later, issues with the city, fires and money were solved and finally, a single condominium was sold at $146,000. It is interesting to see a timeline with photos rather than a story of the building's transformation that increases its value.

44 Skillman Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211

Trip to Citizens Committee for NYC

On our field trip to Bowling Greens, many of us entered a new, unfamiliar neighborhood, somewhat briefing us for our final project in Brooklyn. Our instructor sat our class down in a conference room with a huge expo wall to write and plan their community project. Ways we learned to be a part of a community project is that the size of a particular group does not matter. That means we do not necessarily need a voice in community board meetings or be a neighborhood mayor, “make noise to change what is in your surroundings”, the instructor of CC for NYC suggested. There were a few projects we discussed that dealt with community organization from empty lots owned by HPD (the Department of Housing Preservation & Development) to superfund sites. They introduced us to new vocabulary, such as place making when talking about community organizations that are good insight for our own projects. With blurbs of information on how different projects are able to work and how Citizens Committee functions as a non-profit company, it gave us a bit of direction on what we were headed in to with our fieldwork and final project.

            The most popular and intriguing question asked by one of my classmate’s, which I am sure we all thought of within the first ten minutes of our instructor’s brief about the program; where does your funding come from? We were told that Citizens Committee for NYC, received funding from private firms, galas and sponsors, and with that demand there was a separate section of the organization that dealt with receiving funds. It is not as simple as just taking the money; the group must then have a grass-root project that is willing to work in the field of choice by the sponsor.

            Citizens Committee provides workshops to groups to help the team members have a better understanding if needed, on how they will accomplish their project. They also act as crutch to these groups and don’t necessarily get too involved, just give them the money to accomplish their goal. I wonder if Citizens Committee, ever though to have another branch in their organization that would be dedicated to being on-site and more hands on with a group, with physical and moral support. Also another question I have for them is, can a returning person and/ or group receive funds from Citizens Committee if they had already used money for another project? I think that the people that are bettering the community are the same people that once get involved keep helping and giving, so there should be no restriction as long as the money and project is approved.

            Since we are still in the beginning stages of planning, I am looking to apply a quote to my research, that was written up on the wall when we first walked in, “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go.” I don’t want to become hung up on an outcome for my project right at first, because as I learned on our trip you encounter problems when doing this type of work and you must be ready to adjust your ideas while still having your goal in mind. We also learned about our own roles in our community in NYC and our hometowns, and a matter of fact we play such a small role no one expects much. In this project however, I want to feel as though I can use my voice and facilitate a project that could actually have an impact on a community in Brooklyn if the plan was brought to real life.

Studio: The Creek That Connects It All

BPRF team  from National Taiwan University, worked together to design ways to rebuild the significant features of the small village, Kuo-Hsin. They suffered from numerous problems: earthquakes, deforestation, dwindling agricultural sector and an outflow of youth that needed to be halted within the community. The team wanted to give to this needing community without taking away the charm of the village by implementing technological advancements on the villagers way of living. "The damage and casualties caused by the earthquake put a number of small mountain villages in the national spotlight, attracting intellectual and financial resources while rekindling a desire to address the villages' ongoing problems." (58)

The passage discusses how a master plan allows the people of the community to feel more involved by taking an initiative in a public works project. With research, the BPRF was able to discover rich and historical parts the valley creek's, Chi-Keng geographical features had.

The Team's Goals:

• Extend participation to diverse community groups
• Base any physical transformation of the creek on scientific grounds
• They claimed this would be a difficult task initially to achieve. As a collaborative team of designers, is that the right approach to a project? When do you know what you can achieve and cannot?

Promoted slogan: "Just restore our place as it used to be."

"During the process the planners saw the villagers attitudes shift form indiffrence to investment." (60) This seems really symbolic for any plan that is introduce into communities, especially of areas that have more financial concerns of where their money is going. There will always be skepticism until further explained not only by mouth but seeing the project in action.

"The BPRF helped organize the residents into different working groups in charge of materials and equipment, food and drank, and publicity." It is interesting that even after the project, villagers attempted to add more swimming ponds and engagement to the creek. Like the BPRF team had done in Chu-Keng, designers / architects / artists who utilize their space efficiently by incorporating the area, really challenge themselves and preserve what may mean the most to a community.

Mental Map of Westwood, NJ

My mental map of Westwood, New Jersey my home of 12 years, is where I spend the most time. I work in the small town that tends to have as many visitors from other nearby towns as well as the locals. On the weekends, every store has people browsing and walking the avenue especially in the warmer weather. I drew a scene from where I spend most of my afternoons on Broadway Avenue. I work at my boyfriend's family restaurant, Jack's Cafe, a dinner-esque but delicious restaurant. I constantly am looking out the window from the counter and observing the type of people who come to Westwood. They are always familiar faces and friends from close and nearby. I tend to think of the restaurants around me as competitors not so much another place to have dinner at. There are stores where I know the owners first name and other stores I have yet to step foot in. From fro-yo to a camera shop to hair salons to vintage boutiques, my town has something for everyone.

There is a constant buzz of cars and people passing through town as you can see from my mental map, there are stores everywhere and two main roads. With the park and library on the other side of the train tracks it creates a multipurpose town where everyone can be accommodated. This aspect of Westwood reminds me a lot of what I see in New York City but this little town is just positioned in "suburgatory". My map is composed of a few places that come right to mind when I envision myself walking down the avenue. These places are good icons to describe where you are to someone and also what one would enjoy most!