Those crazy artists are taking over Oakland!
From the Crucible's Annual Fire Arts Festival
Held in a large open parking lot at 7th & Union next to where the BART emerges from the tangle of the 980 freeway. The lot is publicly owned and is used as overflow parking for the West Oakland BART. These swaths of parking that straddle the large pieces of infrastructure are some of the last open building sites in West or Downtown Oakland. Located across the street from the Crucible, another arts center in this area could solidify the transformative value of the arts for this area, which the city has already designated for community oriented development. Rather than compete, the two arts program can compliment eachother, with the Crucible offering industrial arts courses and facilities and the new program focusing on art and architecture. The massive brutal cuts of these freeways once tore this nieghborhood apart, quickly speeding commuters through the area while cutting it off from the heart of the city. This program could not only make the immediate area a more beautiful, dynamic space, but also reconnect it back to the city.
Labels: dbackman
posted by dbackman at 4:02 PM
1 Comments:
I am getting more and more excited about making a new building that brushes up against the tangle of bart and freeways to the south and west of downtown oakland. however, the vastness of this west oakland site is a little much for me. this huge parking lot is too open-ended for my tastes. closer to downtown, jack london and the machine works site that i already scoped out there is a pair of small parking lots that interest me. they sit right at the point where the bart comes out of the ground. a building of two stories or more would give amazing views of both downtown oakland and sf. the neighborhood is a wierd mix of galleries, design firms, light industrial, restaurants and the police, justice and social ser ice headquarters for oakland. this site gives me a little more to react to, and i won't feel like i am intruding on crucibles territory, although jesses interweacing of industrial and fine art sounds pretty exciting.
the two sites imply very different responses to the city. so i just need to figure out where i stand.
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