Painting in Process

jack londinium

fun

Making Space (Dan)

The life and work of the artist is intricately tied to the space in which he or she practices. Understanding the space of the artist at multiple levels of experience is essential to the development of the program and the architecture of this thesis. The studio is a personal and private space, organized and continually reconfigured to suit the individual artist’s needs. Yet while the individual artist has the right and perhaps the duty to express themselves as such, the work of the artist is most meaningful when it is part of the shaping of a collective spirit or vision amongst these diverse individuals. Thus the studio is understood not as a site of isolation but of community. Communities of artists can in turn use their vision to participate in and possibly transform the culture of the city in which they practice. Many artists communities thrive in the Bay Area, but for high school students in urban schools who often feel disenfranchised and voiceless within the confines of classroom and who might have limited opportunities to make art, the provision of a space in which they can be themselves, learning and making in an environment where they feel comfortable, can be life-changing.
My thesis project will define educational, operational and spatial program for a distinctive arts program tentatively called the Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity (BayAFH). Developed in collaboration with an existing program in Boston which began in 1991, it will bring together Bay Area high school students and practicing artists to produce artwork for practice, exhibition and sale. I will propose a visionary design to house BayAFH on a group open lots at 4th and Washington Streets in the Jack London District of Oakland. The design will reflect the philosophy and long-term goals of the program rather than a smaller, more realistic, approach to providing space for BayAFH in the immediate future. It will promote a positive, dynamic relationship between the individual participants, between the working artist and the youthful artist in the process of becoming; between BayAFH artists and the immediate community; and between all of these players and the larger cultural life of the city. My thesis tries to establish a model for a community art center whose programs and physical assets could establish it as a permanent feature of a reviving neighborhood, protecting it from being pushed aside in the gentrification process, and instead embracing and leading the coming change. A new model for community based art education is needed to insure relevance, accessibility and viability. In order to empower Oakland’s youth through art, they must be able to express themselves through both physical artifacts and a social involvement with each other, their mentors, and the community.
This is an architecture at the service of artists, and the design aims to establish a more dynamic and reciprocal relationship between architectural and art practice, education and exhibition. Rather than designing the building as a finished product, it will be a framework that the inhabitants can transform and augment as they see fit. The design process will unfold through the investigation of four principle criteria of flexibility, sustainability, light and fun.

artists in action

imagined spaces...

Panoramania

My lovely site in Oakland, CA...
4th & Washington Streets, Jack London District...

AFH Boston

Designing with Light

Youthful Exuberance

Art for Sale

Break Time

Site Proposal

This thesis proposes a site at the intersection of 4th and Washington St. in Oakland, California for the design a new facility to house the envisioned Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity program. The site is composed of three parcels, currently occupied by a three individual parking lots, two privately and one public. The corner lot, at 409 Washington Street, occupies 7050 square feet and the middle lot, at 518 4th St, occupies 4583 square feet. Both are rectangular sites. The third lot does not have any information readily available about it. It is nearly equal in area, but is roughly triangular in shape, tapering down to just 15 feet wide at the western boundary. All three lots are asphalt paved and surrounded by chain link fence and contain no built structures. In addition, a narrow strip of land tapers off along 4th Street to the east of the second lot, providing a 10 foot buffer between the sidewalk and the BART fence. This parcel would not be built upon but would be included in the landscaping plan.
The site is a residue of open space leftover by the construction of the city’s transportation infrastructure. The tunnel exit/entrance for BART bounds the north side, a deep trench which holds eastbound and westbound subway lines, between concrete retaining walls. One block further north is the merge point for the 880 and 980 freeways. Two blocks south runs the Amtrak and freight rail lines. Beyond that is the Oakland Estuary a shipping channel between Oakland and Alameda that serves the port infrastructure to the west.
Hemmed in by infrastructure, the site sits at a crossroads within Oakland. This neighborhood is well-served by all modes of urban transportation, including bus, subway, train, car and ferry, and yet it is cut off from the center of the city by the linear arrangement of these lines. This condition allowed the conversion of the neighborhood from industrial to commercial and residential to occur, but remains a burden to the area in terms of its physical presence. This industrial/seaport/transportation nexus condition is held in common with many other recently redeveloped areas in the country, such as SOMA in San Francisco, Fort Point in Boston, the Meatpacking District in New York. In all these cases, the confluence of infrastructure facilitated industrial uses, but as this infrastructure was upgraded in the post-war years, the fabric of the neighborhood was torn apart. In these situations, the influx of arts and culture have been a prime means for revitalizing the area. The City of Oakland is cognizant of these factors and has put in much effort to use them to its advantage.
Currently, the area is defined by Jack London Square, a 1970’s mixed-use redevelopment that contains hotels, restaurants, retail and office space. The square was perhaps a good idea in terms of planning but was constructed in an architectural language that is tacky and dated. The square is a prime tourist destination for Oakland but has had much difficulty attracting city residents and has seen many of its retail tenants depart in recent years. The larger area around the square, now called the Jack London District, is a former industrial warehouse zone that now holds a variety of businesses, largely in renovated warehouse spaces. The push for the redevelopment of the area is underway, as outlined in the Oakland Estuary Policy Plan. Many of the typical identifiers of gentrification, such as residential-loft conversions, design firms, and artists studios, can be found here. The plan, however, makes it clear that in this particular portion of the plan arts and cultural uses should be supported.
In the case of the artist spaces, however, there is an interesting trend in the Jack London District that differentiates it from other artist zones, like the one along Telegraph Ave. While the Art Murmur galleries of Telegraph bank on a claim to a geographically defined territory within the city (which brings with it all sorts of ethical questions) the galleries, performance spaces and studios of the Jack London District, take on a more inclusive identity the revolves around outreach to the city as a whole. Pro Arts Gallery is exemplary of this condition, as the program not only operates a gallery in the area, but organizes the East Bay Open Studios and serves a network of hundreds of artists across the whole region. While this approach does not neglect its surroundings, it looks beyond the notion of trying to fix or help a deserving place, towards serving a larger community.
This approach reveals a potential for the neighborhood to become a cultural crossroads for Oakland rather than just an infrastructural one. Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity aims strives to become part of and strengthen this cultural context. The architectural proposal will become a site for a much larger network of youth and mentor artists, members, patrons and visitors who arrive there to learn, create and experience. Rather than seeking a singular context to relate to and trying to adapt to the specificity of a particular neighborhood, the program intends to create a new community whose locality is all of Oakland, in which diverse individuals from all over the city can come together. The program will celebrate and be shaped by the various gravitational forces that affect the area, from Downtown, Chinatown, Uptown, West Oakland, the Port, the Lake, Jingletown, Fruitvale, San Antonio and even Alameda. As a newcomer to Oakland, this situation is ideal for one who cannot claim a specific neighborhood but is more interested in interactions with a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants. The hope is that working alongside the other non-profit arts organizations in the area, such as Pro Arts Gallery, Swarm Studios, Oakland Metro, MOCHA, Oaklandish and the Crucible, the BayAFH can be part of a cultural transformation for this part of the city.
That said the quirky mix of uses in the neighborhood opens up many opportunities for involvement and cooperation for a young arts program. Other non-profits, like Sports for Kids, Pro Arts, and Oakland Metro make their homes here. Tourists who find little of the culture of Oakland contained in the square itself are eager to soak it up in the nearby galleries. Restaurants and bars provide some semblance of a night-life. A loose compound of civic and social services, including the Oakland Police Department, Courthouse, Social Welfare, Probation and directly across the street from the site, the City Coroner’s office. For better or worse, more and more lofts are popping up to the north and west, and with them the inevitable signs of gentrification. Above all this tower the cranes of Oakland’s port, reminding everyone that this remains as a working port zone despite its gradual conversion. This is a context that is transitional, conflicted and hard to pin down. This thesis proposes that BayAFH can be a unifying for the area, using art to simultaneously strengthen the existing community and create a new one.
After a lot of careful consideration I have decided to design on an open site from the ground up. While doing an adaptive reuse project had great appeal, this open site offers more potential, to do an innovative design project and to deal with the realities and limitations of the proposed situation. This thesis will propose a visionary design for the site that considers the ideal situation for the BayAFH program rather than the initial conditions. Programs like the one I have in mind never start big. They work their way up from humble beginnings. The original Artists for Humanity in Boston began when a practicing artist invited a group of six students to come work with her in her tiny studio. They spent two or three years there, learning to paint and completing only a few commissions before they found a suitable space. And when they found that space, it was essentially donated to them because the real estate owner was inspired by their vision. It is my intention to use this project to research spatial, programmatic, educational and economic tactics that support this particular design proposal and can also be carried with me as I attempt to actually impliment this program in the coming years.

The Program: Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity

The goal of this thesis, Making Space for Art in Architecture, is the development of a unique program, which supports a new form of artist community in the city of Oakland, California. This program, tentatively named Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity (BayAFH), is a non-profit arts center which employs Bay Area high school students and practicing artists to produce artwork on commission and for gallery exhibitions. The program is modeled on Artists for Humanity, highly-successful non-profit that began in 1991. The program’s youth artists learn about art by making objects and images that are their own rather than through didactic classroom exercises. The program posits that all its participants are artists, and that the line traditionally drawn between student and teacher will be blurred into a more meaningful relationship between youth artists and mentor artists. The classroom environment will be dissolved into the studio, a flexible workspace that allows artists to express themselves freely. That the studio is the epicenter of learning might seem obvious and be taken for granted by students and professors in a graduate architecture program. However, for high school students who often feel disenfranchised and voiceless within the confines of classroom, the provision of a space in which they can be themselves, learning and making in an environment where they feel comfortable can be life-changing. Understanding the space of the artist at multiple scales of experience is essential to the development of the program and the architecture that which support it.
While the education and empowerment of Oakland’s youth through art-making is the primary goal of this program, this process is impossible without the involvement of dedicated and experienced artists who are willing to share the skills and knowledge with the youth. Mentor artists from diverse fields of practice will be welcomed to the program. The program will provide a personal studio space to each artist in exchange for their service as mentors to the youth studio. Studios will be offered in painting and drawing, photography, sculpture, graphic design, furniture and architecture. Students in all studios will have opportunity to work on both personal projects and group commissioned projects. The mentor’s responsibility is not to tell the youth artist what to make, but to guide them towards the achievement of their vision, providing new methods for making and challenging the youth to constantly expand their abilities and understandings of art. This is a reciprocal relationship. Within this open and egalitarian environment, everyone has something to learn from everyone else around them. There are no tests or exams to determine who is eligible to gain from this program and to evaluate who is better than who. A show of genuine commitment and zeal towards making and learning in this environment is all that is necessary to participate. This program walks the line between art as a medium for social change and art for arts sake. It holds the premise that individual artist has the right and perhaps the duty to express themselves as such, but that the work of the artist is most meaningful when it is part of the shaping of a collective spirit or vision amongst these diverse individuals.
This thesis will propose a design for a permanent home for BayAFH . This will be an epicenter for a larger community that provides physical space for participating artists to come together. This is an architecture at the service of artists, and the design establish a more dynamic and reciprocal relationship between architectural form and arts practice, education and exhibition. In architectural education and practice, program is generally understood as a system of square-footage allotments given over to the particular functions of the building. Formal envelopes are developed into which these functional requirements are slotted in. Given the emphasis on the program and participants, this architectural project will attempt to serve the needs of the participants rather than impose the designer’s conception of what is artistic space. Nevertheless the program suggests a variety of spaces to be composed by the architect, including a large open studio floor, between five and ten individual studios, machine and sculpture workshops, administrative office space, a large gallery that accommodates a variety of art forms and can be used for parties and functions, and a gallery store that provides a direct, commercial outlet for the program’s products.
The open studio floor is the physical and ideological heart of the program. This is where the core relationships between the artists are established. Rather than assigning specific desk spaces to individual students, each youth artist will be provided with a kit of parts to assemble on the open studio floor, allowing them to shape the environment around them and establish amongst themselves the relationships between public and private, individual and collective. This may oftentimes be a contentious process, but learning to work together and share space, material and ideas is a vital part of the artist’s education. For artists involved in the architectural and furniture design studios, projects would often be focused on adding to and improving the building’s spaces and facilities. All of the program’s participants would be included in continual efforts to reconceive the relationship between artists and their space within the framework of the BayAFH facility.
Materials and surfaces will be provided to the program’s youth artists. The styles, subjects, and ideas behind the art will be their own. In return, their work will be exhibited in the gallery space of the arts center and in outside exhibitions arranged by the program. An important part of the learning experience is for these young artists to be involved with the organization, installation and promotion of the gallery exhibitions and openings, so that they engaged not only in the production of art, but also its social and business components. In order to empower Oakland’s youth through art, they must be able to express themselves through both physical artifacts and a social involvement with each other, their mentors, and the community. From personal experience, I can say that what I learned the most from my time at AFH was how to talk to and work with other people that were very different than me. Art is a medium through which people from diverse ages, races, religions, neighborhoods and interests can come together to create, to learn, to teach and to collaborate. Perhaps this vision is naïve and idealistic, given the difficult constraints of our time and place. However, I know from experience that it is possible to achieve, and look forward to both expanding the realm of possibility and finding practical solutions for implementation of the program in the near future.

for

for victoria

for won lee

for robby

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.

before...party...afterwards

.

so...

So after last night, you now all have an idea of the immense amount of conflict that has been going on in my head over this project. I hope if nothing else it makes it clear that just because one brings a firm idea of what the project is or could be to the class, that does not mean that person has it all figured out. On the contrary, these early stages of knowing reveal the enormous complexity and richness that can be found in any project. It is pretty overwhelming at times. But I can only remain in that zone where I think I can do it all for so long. So, allow me to clarify where I am going with this thing.

My thesis is a visionary project. The idea is not to set up the initial conditions, but to imagine what could be. Solving the business and real estate complications of procuring a site is not essential to my thesis idea; they are not part of my domain. Rather, these are issues I would like to learn more about because I anticipate dealing with them in the next phase of the project. However, there are really rich educational, programmatic and spatial parameters to this project which are far more important to me than economic issues which I honestly know very little about. In addition, the money issue that truly interests me here is how to design a program that is economically sustainable rather than how to make profitable real estate venture. The question here is how does the program work, more so than how do I create this program.

I am not interested in being a businessman or real estate developer. These are important forces to understand, for many of our projects, and I intend to research these topics in order to inform this process. This applies especially to the site selection phase that we are all in right now. However, the point of my project is not to make money. I am not an aspiring developer hoping to cash in on the rise of the creative class. Rather I am interested, as an artist, a designer and as a potential mentor, in how local artists can subvert this phenomenon as a means of creating new communities for supporting the arts, as well as strengthening existing communities in the City of Oakland. The program is a non-profit organization, at the service of artists and those who aspire to be artists. It is a space for making, and a space for learning.

My hope is to use my thesis research and design proposal to support and inform a grant application process for the year of 2008. The City of Oakland provides grants for arts and youth programs through groups like the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth and the Oakland Cultural Funding Arts Department. These grants are due in December and January, so I cannot possibly complete them in time or hope to follow through on the proposal before I graduate. By postponing the realization of the project I will allow myself to more fully develop the educational, economic and spatial program before I seek funding and attempt to make this dream a reality. I intend to study these grant applications to get a sense of what is ahead, but the thesis is not a grant application, it is an idea, a vision which will be far more valuable to me and hopefully you, than the messy, bureaucratic, compromised reality of what we all have the rest of our lives to deal with.

I am looking for a site that is feasible, but not stifling. There is no need for me to resign my project to some imaginary poverty just because that will likely be the conditions under which the program will begin. Programs like the one I have in mind never start big. They work their way up from humble beginnings, often starting out in the way Marc is structuring his project. Artists for Humanity began when a practicing artist invited a group of six students to come work with her in her tiny studio. They spent two or three years there, learning to paint and completing only a few commissions before they found a space. And when they found that space, it was essentially donated to them because the real estate owner was inspired by their vision. The object then, is to make a proposal good enough that people are willing to support it, rather than making something simple and easy enough that I can do it myself. Whether the project will be built from the ground up or be a remodel is much less clear. Given that I have not yet set the design parameters, I don’t want to jump the gun on what form this artist space will be. Just know that it is about creating a singular physical space within the center of the city, which is about bringing a diverse group of individuals together, rather than serving any one particular neighborhood.

Post-Industrial-Landscape

collage with pen, maps, tracings, contact sheets, chinese newspaper. june 2006

Dan's Domain: Making Space for Art in Architecture

The life and work of the artist is intricately tied to the spaces in which he or she practices. These spaces define who we are and what we make. They give us room to act, to make, to create a world for ourselves that is free from the constraints of the outside world. In order to feel comfortable, confident and empowered by their work, it is essential that the artist has control over their studio space. The studio is a support structure that allows the artist to create his own work and to connect and learn from others. For many artists, the studio is a personal and private space, organized and reconfigured if not designed in the first place to suit the individual artist’s own needs. However individual artists and their studios tend to aggregate together to in particular buildings and neighborhoods to form collectives that not only share space but also share values, attitudes towards practice, and visions for the future. In turn these collectives allow groups of artists to connect with the city at large, to negotiate and participate in the definition of an urban culture. Thus at a fundamental level this project seeks to better understand the relationship between the artist and the city, and between the individual and the collective. While the primary objective is to provide spaces for making, the project is grounded in the idea that art can go beyond self-expression and serve as a means to empower those who previously did not have a voice.
The spatial, programmatic and material needs of artists will drive the project towards the design of a community arts center. This is a place that will allow a diverse network of artists from all over the city to come together at a centralized place. Its primary aim is to support arts practice and education. However if the program is to be self-sustaining, and truly give artists control over their space, then it must address issues of economics, real-estate and community involvement. The community will be centered on a large, open studio floor that gives the younger, less experienced artists studying there enough space to be comfortable but also puts them in close proximity with their peers, allowing them to establish relationships between themselves and their work, to share and learn from one another. Individual studios will also be provided for the experienced artists that serve as mentors to the young artists. While providing privacy and containment, they will not seek to impose the architect’s will on the artist. Rather they will be designed as flexible frameworks that allow the artist to shape the space according to his or her needs. A machine shop for wood and metal will support a sculpture studio and allow the building’s inhabitants to construct internal architecture, furniture, contraptions and exhibition walls. Rather than designing the building as a finished product, it will be a framework that the artist’s working there can add to as they see fit. A gallery space will give the center’s inhabitants the ability to transfer their work directly from the studio to the marketplace, transferring control of the display and sales of artwork back to the artist. Finally a gallery store will give the center a street level presence that promotes economic sustainability and provides a more direct means for sharing work with the public. The primary objective of this project is to establish a program that goes beyond the allotment of square footages towards a comprehensive strategy for economic, social, political and educational engagement with the surrounding city. Like any good school, this arts center exists to support its students and mentors, and to serve the surrounding community.
The arts have shaped the form and culture of the city throughout the history of civilization. In the past two decades, however, the arts have become one of the most powerful modes of redevelopment in cities across the world. This broad phenomenon includes top-down, institutionalized projects like the Bilbao Guggenheim or the Tate Modern in London. A more interesting phenomenon, however, is the gradual shift of neighborhoods like SOMA in San Francisco, SOHO in New York and Fort Point in Boston from industrial areas, to artist enclaves, to cultural centers for the elite. Thus far, artists have fueled this phenomenon without having any control over it, as they are usually evicted by landlords and developers once they have helped raise property values with their galleries and boutiques. The question remains of how can artists take control of this process of arts-based redevelopment so that they benefit directly from the changes rather than developers and real estate agents. Oakland is a city that is on the verge of this type of transformation. All over the city, in West Oakland, Downtown, Jack London Square and on Telegraph Ave, artist communities, schools and galleries have begun to reclaim abandoned and disused spaces to support new communities and give focus to existing ones. The spaces available to these types of groups are more often than not the remnants of the city’s industrial past. The decaying industrial infrastructure that once served the interests of war and capitalism can be revitalized to create spaces for making the art and the culture of the city.

what is possible, if the space permits...

artists for humanity, boston
union machine works, 534 clay st, oakland

Making Space for Art in Architecture

I don’t believe the architect is an artist. I believe I am an artist and that one day I might like to be an architect. A building can be a work of art in its own right, but we should never strive for this above making a great piece of architecture. Rather than seeking a one to one relationship, these two ways of making can and should have a reciprocal effect on each other. An artwork can affect a space just as a building can shape the space in which we perceive or create an artwork. This reciprocity can also be decisive in the process of the creator. Le Corbusier developed a shared language between his architecture and his paintings that was instrumental in his understanding of form, line, and process. In the abstract paintings of modernist painters like Mondrian, Malevich or Matta, the built environment guided a tectonic approach whose aim was not to simulate or represent, but to achieve similar qualities of rhythm, space, and form. In neither case was this critical link a matter of pulling forms from one world into the next, but rather a deeply felt understanding of how these mediums shape the world around us.
I have two principal creative interests, in my personal and academic life they intertwine. I enjoy painting for its own sake, without any responsibility to the world or to the people around me. But because of this my artwork does not have the power or potential to effect a change at the scale that I aspire to. Architecture can do more. An architecture at the service of art. Not subservient, mind you. Not a functional machine for painting, but rather a space that recognizes the needs of artists and is able to support them, materially, economically, spatially. Above all, an artist needs space. A space to work, a space to learn, a space to call his own and a space to share with the community are all essential for any creative person to be truly engaged in his work. The working environment shapes who we are and what we make as much we, as designers, try to shape the spaces around us. This project will be informed by the practice and process of a painter, but will not attempt to create architecture out of painting or vice versa. Instead it will strive to discover deeper links between the two means of expression, to know their own limitations and to allow them to aid each other without ever letting them interfere. The artist and the art itself are not the subject but the client of this project which aims at creating a better working environment for the creative people of all stripes in the East Bay.

Take Back Wurster

A school exists first and foremost to support its students, not the other way around. This is particularly essential when the place of instruction also serves as the primary workspace. For students of art, architecture and design, the studio becomes a home away from home, if not the primary residence. We may not require all the amenities of a house, but what we do require above any material needs is the freedom to craft our work in our own way, to discuss our work and ideas openly and to learn on our own terms. Currently, however, there is a move within the administration of the CED to take the control of the studio space out of the hands of those who labor there. A system of rules for use of the Wurster facilities has been instituted which not only offends the principles of free speech that once defined Berkeley, but that shows a complete lack of understanding of why and how we inhabit the studio space. Attempts to impose an artificial order on this space will do nothing but stifle the creative energy of the students. Why are they trying to silence us? The voice of the students is what a school of architecture thrives on. Creative people cannot conform to spatial constraints set by bureaucratic policies. They will always subvert the space, in an effort to make it their own, and to take control of the conditions in which they create. We do not work in an office, yet, and we create in order to learn and to experience the joy of making, not to satisfy requirements or to please the higher-ups. The mess, noise, graffiti, music, conversation, sex, drugs, trash, booze and politics that fills our studios are not bad habits or unwanted by-products of our hectic and stressful lifestyles. They are essential companions, without which we wouldn’t be the designers and artists that we are today. Taking these things away from the students, or forcing them outside the studios is a misguided effort to exert control by the administration. It bears disturbing similarities to the current political situation in our country. For years the student body has been placated, largely by the mind-numbing intensity of studio work and by the general sense of well-being that is promoted among the denizens of Wurster. Despite some small disruptions and irregularities, CED students are astonishingly calm, polite, friendly and obedient. However, we will not stand by and watch the values that they believe in and that this school once stood for be trampled upon in the name of a protocol power grab. It is time to Take Back Wurster.