Hasta La Ideas

Chicago! Beginning next Monday, a group of 40 designers will begin a 6-week exploration on the issue of bike safety through a series of 12 interdisciplinary sessions. Their findings, an Intervention on Bicycle Safety, will culminate on August 28th with the transformation of Logan Square into Chicago’s first hub for safe, active mobility—where pedestrians and bikers rule.

Organized by Moving Design, a coalition of designers and artists working with community partners to lead initiatives that inspire change through the power of design, the group hopes that this year’s call to action will serve as a model for other neighborhoods intent on improving quality of life, public safety and health, and community cohesion across the city. The group will share their progress and findings over the next 6 weeks through a process blog and we’ll be sure to keep checking in as they begin to formulate solutions for a safer Chicago. Moving Design was founded by Rick Valicenti and John Pobojewski.

Check out their video about bicycle safety after the jump.

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Eric Hu’s astonishing 17-foot-tall poster tribute to 1960’s architectural group Archigram is built on a custom typeface with elements of Archigram’s body of work built on top. Although the final product is not immediately readable, this is perhaps intended to capture the way that buildings themselves are not completely “readable” at once, but often require stepping back to understand and comprehend. There’s lots of layering and fastidious detailing to discover as you pore over the poster.

Full poster after the break.

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Estonian studio Salto Architects have completed a temporary summer theatre in Tallinn made of black spray-painted straw bales.

Visitors climb stairs inside a stepped tunnel to access the Straw Theatre’s rectangular hall.

A system of trusses holds the stacked straw bales in place.

Located on a fortified hilltop, the site used to host regular summer theatre for Soviet Troops but has been abandoned for over twenty years.

The stage will be in place for six months to celebrate Tallinn’s status as a 2011 European Capital of Culture.

Temporary theatres and cinemas have been popular on Dezeen lately – see our earlier stories about a timber theatre elsewhere in Estonia and an English cinema under a motorway flyover.

Photography is by Martin Siplane and Karli Luik.

The following information is provided by the architects:

Location: Skoone Bastion, Tallinn, Estonia
Credits: Maarja Kask, Karli Luik, Ralf Lõoke, Pelle-Sten Viiburg
Project year: 2010-2011

NO99 Straw Theatre is an object standing on the verge of being a pure functional container on one hand, and an art installation on the other.

The Straw Theatre is built on the occasion of Tallinn being the European Capital of Culture, to house a special summer season programme of theatre NO99, lasting from May to October 2011. Thus it is a temporary building, operating for half a year, built for a specific purpose, programme and location.

The Straw Theatre is built in central Tallinn, on top of the former Skoone bastion, one of the best preserved baroque fortifications of Tallinn. At the beginning of the 20th century, the bastion worked as a public garden, and during the Soviet era it was more or less restricted recreational area for the Soviet navy with a wooden summer theatre and a park on top.

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With the summer theatre having burnt down and the Soviet troops gone, for the last 20 years the bastion has remained a closed and neglected spot in the centre of town with real estate controversies and several failed large-scale development plans. In such a context, the Straw Theatre is an attempt to acknowledge and temporarily reactivate the location, test its potential and bring it back to use, doing all this with equally due respect to all historical layers of the site.

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The rectangular main volume of the theatre is situated exactly on the same spot as the navy summer theatre, and one descending flight of stairs of the latter is used as a covered walkway and entrance area to the Straw Theatre. The building is surrounded by various outdoor recreational functions including an oversized chess board, table tennis, swings, and a baking oven, all with a non-commercial and pleasantly low-key feel.

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The dramatic appeal of the building stems from its contextual setting on the site and its black, uncompromisingly mute main volume contrasting with a descending „tail“ with an articulate angular roof. And of course one cannot escape the effect of the material – uncovered straw bales, spraypainted black.

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The Straw Theatre is a unique occasion where straw has been used for a large public building and adjusted to a refined architectural form. For reinforcement purposes, the straw walls have been secured with trusses, which is a type of construction previously unused. As the building is temporary, it has not been insulated as normal straw construction would require but has been kept open to experience the raw tactile qualities of the material and accentuate the symbolic level of the life cycle of this sustainable material.

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See also:

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Summer Theatre by Kadarik Tüür	Folly for a Flyover by Assemble	Mobile performance venue by Various Architects

In our telling of Becky Stern’s Origin Story, we ended with her dropping out of grad school, moving back to New York, and getting a full-time gig at Make. That wasn’t a snap-your-fingers proposition, of course; like her pre-Make video tutorials, it was something she toiled at over time—spurred by her own creative interests rather than a plan with concrete results—and it ended up being profitable for many besides herself (Make, for one). In our Q&A Stern fills us in on the details of that transition, then sounds off on workflow, the work/life balance, social creativity and artistic fulfillment.

Core77: When you say that you dropped out of grad school and “flipped into a full-time role” at Make, was it that easy?

Becky Stern: I had been incrementally increasing the amount of stuff that I did for Make over the two years I was in grad school—doing less grad school writing, more writing at Make and video stuff. It was a really nice overlap because I could interweave [school and Make], so if I did a [class] project that had a craft technique I was already working on a Make piece that used that technique. I’ve always liked to overlap projects that I want to do for myself and projects I want to do for work or school; I can always teach the audience how to do a technique while I am working on a project for myself.

My old boss at Make, Phil Torrone, was like “Hey Becky, do you want to write for Make?” and it progressed to “Hey Becky, do you want to write more for Make? …Becky, do you want a full-time job at Make?” He really got me in.

And you’re still doing that overlapping of projects?

It has to happen, in order to get all of the stuff done in the day that I have to do. I make silver jewelry, and in order to be able to stay in the mindset of silver jewelry—let’s say I need to make a bunch to sell at a craft fair or online—I will do a tutorial video on a technique about making silver jewelry. And it works the other way around, too. There always has to be a personal angle, especially because I do tutorial videos, which are highly dependent on the personality as opposed to just a photo tutorial that just has steps of a project in it. I’m in the video so it has to be about me and my things.

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