Civic Center Victory Garden

Claiming civic space for food production

On July 1, 2008 volunteer urban gardeners, led by Rebar, began removing 10,000 square feet of turf from San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. Over the course of the following two weeks, teams of volunteers transformed the site into a temporary food-producing garden. On July 12, over 250 volunteers transplanted thousands of seedlings into donated soil.
Wedged between San Francisco’s Civic Center, an area that contains many of the city’s largest government and cultural institutions, and the Tenderloin, a neighborhood shackled with significant poverty, homelessness, and crime, the garden stood as a true social and political experiment. Within weeks, this new ‘Garden of Communities’ was producing approximately 100 lbs of fresh organic produce a week, all of which was donated to the San Francisco Food Bank, and subsequently distributed to meals programs throughout the City.
Originally slated to be removed on September 21, Mayor Gavin Newsom requested that the Garden stay in place through Thanksgiving 2008. The Garden was part of a broader effort to reconsider the way we think about urban open space, transforming ornamental landscapes into productive landscapes.
The project was a great success, but a temporary garden is not sufficient to achieve the fundamental change in the food system we seek. If the Civic Center Victory Garden truly succeeds, it will become a powerful symbolic gesture of both the political will in City Hall to support urban agriculture in San Francisco, and of the collective surge of interest in fixing our country’s broken food system.
Numerous groups are at work in San Francisco and across the nation responding to rising fuel prices and food costs by getting their hands dirty and rebuilding the practice of local food production, building bridges between urban communities and the peri-urban and rural farm families that support them, and teaching young and old how to garden again.
The Civic Center Victory Garden was built in collaboration with SF Victory Gardens, Slow Food Nation, City Slicker Farms, CMG landscape Architecture, and hundreds of community volunteers.
Date: Summer, 2008
Location: Civic Center, San Francisco, CA

http://rebargroup.org/victory-garden/

Panhandle Bandshell

A performance stage built entirely with repurposed, recycled materials

The Panhandle Bandshell is a full-scale performance stage constructed almost entirely out of reclaimed and repurposed materials, including 65 automobile hoods, hundreds of computer circuit boards, 3,000 plastic water bottles, French doors, reclaimed wood, and recycled structural steel. As a fully modular structure, it can easily be dismantled, moved and re-assembled anywhere.
From June 23 to September 3, 2007, it was installed in San Francisco’s Panhandle Park, where it was open for both impomptu and scheduled performances. The bandshell was dismantled on September 14th, 2007 and moved to Treasure Island for winter storage. In the summer of 2009, it started a new life at a second location at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, where it played host to countless performances and gatherings over the course of the next year and a half. It is currently in storage again–awaiting installation at its final home. For inquiries about permanent siting of the Bandshell, contact holler [at] rebargroup.org.
Date: Summer, 2007; Summer, 2009 – Spring, 2010.
Location: Panhandle Park and Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA

http://rebargroup.org/panhandle-bandshell/

Nomadic Grove

A meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city

Commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Nomadic Grove is a meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city. To sit, relaxed, looking up at a tree framing the sky is a simple and profound human experience, but one in surprisingly short supply in modern cities. Perhaps it is because trees resist the city’s constant motion, the city’s ruthlessness–they are specific in a world of impatient cosmopolitanism.
Nomadic Grove is an experimental landscape that straddles the poles of stability and movement. The Grove consists of an archipelago of gem-like islands suspended low on wheels, floating just above the surface of Jessie Square as if it were the plane of a calm lake. Fragments of this floating terrain are solidly but temporarily anchored in one of several compositions that change from week to week. In the abstracted islands, large specimen trees are rooted, defining the center of a small world. The trees–oak and olive–are adapted to the climates of both Israel and the Bay Area, representing the Mediterranean biome that is shared between the two regions.
The gem islands, singly and in relationship with one another, provide a means for visitors to inhabit a familiar urban space in novel ways, creating amphitheaters, seating, lounging decks, informal classrooms, or social spaces, depending on the day and the configuration.
Playing on themes of migration, rootedness, local adaptation, and miniature landscape, Nomadic Grove is an inhabitable sketch of the ever-evolving relationship between human and non-human nature.
Date: 2012
Location: Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA

http://rebargroup.org/nomadic-grove/

Zephyros

A wind-powered object of reflection.

Zephyros is a wind-activated sculpture in the form of a helix composed of reflective panels braided around tall masts. Three unique, tapered spirals–clustered in the landscape at the Palega Recreation Center in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood–will gently spin at varying speeds, revealing wind patterns that may be unnoticed at ground level. The reflective stainless steel panels will capture light and mirror the activity in the park and in the surrounding neighborhood.
Zephyros is both an environmental art piece that captures and reveals wind patterns, and a social sculpture that literally reflects the park and the neighborhood. Looking at the piece from below, the visitor sees her own reflection, but also the neighborhood and sky in an ascending collage high above. The movement in the sky will be made visible on the ground as the sun casts dynamic, undulating shadows across the landscape.
Zephyros is a permanent public artwork commissioned for the park by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2011 and is currently in design and fabrication.
Date: To be installed 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA

http://rebargroup.org/zephyros/

Portal of Awareness by Rojkind Arquitectos

Rojkind Arquitectos have designed the “Portal of Awareness” installation in Mexico City. The designers were commissioned by the coffee brand Nescafé to use 1,500 coffee mugs to create the public installation.

http://www.contemporist.com/2012/11/02/portal-of-awareness-by-rojkind-arquitectos/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+contemporist+%28CONTEMPORIST%29