Danielle and I spent Wednesday afternoon making some more planters, patching up some of the planters made last Friday, and adding magnets to other planters. Hopefully by Friday these will be dry and ready for departure from my studio.
I’m anxious to see these up (and this project finished, many other things to do!)
Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, May 29th, at 2:30pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll finish up some projects and brainstorm some others. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!
The panels for Text In-Transit have been sent off to the printers. We should be able to install these on Transit Windsor buses in the next couple of weeks!!!
We settled on 90 unique panels + 10 title card panels.
Again, we can’t thank everyone enough for the support and participation—I’m hugely excited to see these all printed and installed!
I almost didn’t believe this sign existed. The few times I’ve been out to the Windsor Airport, I’ve usually been coming from the south, which (if my understanding of the geographic location of this photo is correct) might explain why I’ve missed it in the past.
Thankfully, Steven has a photo of it and presents two good options for working with it (it’s either a t-shirt or a lightbox (or fodder for Ron Terada)).
Signage has been discussed before at BCL, and while we’ll leave it to Steven to work with this sign in one way or another, it actually collapses two things that I often loosely discuss in introducing Windsor’s cultural landscape (so to speak) to people who aren’t from the area. The level of design (demonstrated above) and this kind of amassing of public art in the form of a dumping ground, ghetto, “tax shelter,” park while the rest of the streets remain the place for bland infrastructure and advertising is a prime example of what may be wrong in Windsor.
And, if you aren’t already reading Steven’s blog on a regular basis, do yourself a favour and add it to your reader.
At last night’s Media City screening, I ran into Samantha and Laura whose schedules unfortunately hadn’t been able to align with BCL’s Office Hours in the last couple of weeks. I asked about their progress with their yarn bombs, which have been installed in numerous locations in downtown Windsor, and are gradually covering the entirety of the bike racks outside of Phog.
I wondered about the potential of adding text to the tags, which could lead to a really large intervention / eventual collection of handmade scarves.
This could be an amazing project! Sam already posted her efforts from last night on her blog, and the results are really encouraging!!! I think this could be one of our next summer projects.
The new model for our Magnetic Planters—basically just using a paper mache technique. Darren figured this one out, and after some testing, it looks like this is the strongest and easiest planter we can make! We did more research last Friday to get to this point, but we’re happy to have come up with a really workable solution.
Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, May 22, at 2:30pm in LeBel, room 125. We’ll be finishing up the planters and planning for our downtown space in June.
See you there!
GOOD recently had a Livable Streets competition where they invited readers to do some rendering and Photoshopping of holistic redesigns. The winner, Steve Price, reimagined Portsmouth, Virginia with infill development, light rail, and dedicated bike paths.
We need to do this for Windsor. Anyone up for putting their skills to use? Maybe Scaledown should try to push something like this forward.
Public Sculpture Tackle rethinks interaction with public sculpture. Performed by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the work is pretty much what it sounds like; artists in the BHQF wear makeshift-athletic gear and attempt to tackle public sculptures in Manhattan, which is, by nature, “on the defense.”
I keep thinking about what public sculpture looks like in Windsor and wondering about what it means to have a sculpture ghetto garden. Public sculpture should be integrated into the streets.
