Bazaar Bizarre- Pop Up City

Bazaar Bizarre
December 1st, 2007
East 4th
noon - 9pm

An alternative holiday craft fair that will populate vacant store front on the corner of East 4th and Prospect. Handmade items including jewelry, toys, clothing and art will be for sale as well as some local performers.


The first of the Pop Up City series of temporary events scheduled to activate vacant urban space.

Bazaar Bizarre web site

Light Up Lakewood

Light Up Lakewood
Friday, November 30th
6pm to 8pm

Downtown Lakewood, an area surprisingly easy location to recognize without some sort of banner/basket network or monumental arch to announce the location, will be hosting the 2007 Light Up Lakewood festival. Light Up Lakewood is a holiday event that focuses on the community centric lifestyle of a walkable town. For me the most exciting occurrence is the Lakewood Shops Main Street(.pdf) which celebrates the window shopping experience of old downtown Cleveland (like in the movies!) by offering a map of local businesses that you can visit to check off said map locations and enter the completed flier in a drawing for local business gift certificates.

Yes, Rozis's has offered $50 gift certificate as part of the grand prize!

The Lakewood Shops Main Street event starts on November 30th and shops will stop marking the maps by December 2nd. If you ever needed an excuse to check out a local business but didn't want to use the awkward "No thanks, just looking." phrase, now is a perfect excuse. The Map covers businesses on Detroit Avenue from Robinwood Avenue to the Library at Arthur Avenue. Not really too far a walk and really a great excuse to get out on the street and see how your city is changing.

I picked up the flier today when I stopped at Dave's Cosmic Subs for dinner. I really wanted to go to the Souper Market but the MarJ was hankering a garden burger. I will admit though that I have had some lascivious dreams lately about the Souper Market's lobster bisque (which I recently had for the first time ever) and am extremely excited about using some of their vegetable stock (they sell organic stocks) to make my own vegetarian french onion which is mostly just onion/butter/veggiestock soup with a lot of Swiss and some delicious fresh breadsmith french bread.

I also just really wanted to plug the Souper Market to guarantee that they will be there every time I am hankering some good soup and salad. You should make sure to stop in and try some of the food. Take a date and pretend you know everyone there. It will impress, I swear.

Check the Fence, or yo-self, foo! (Example of irony part II - same guilty party)

This picture was forwarded to me by a concerned citizen who had noticed that the fliers posted on the construction barrier around the Ameritrust Tower on East 9th, South of Euclid has suffered from what could possibly be described as "adhesive surrender". The glue used to mount the fliers to the barrier has/is failing and the fliers are falling to the ground, and possibly, their doom. This is an example of irony for the following reason...

a) The fliers are promoting what Cuyahoga County is doing to promote, endorse or create sustainable initiatives. Their example is now littering the ground. Littering is not sustainable.

b) The fliers appear to be vinyl based, much like a picnic table cloth. Vinyl is by no means an acceptable sustainable material. Asbestos is probably safer for you. I have no factual material to back that up but I doubt anyone comes here for straight facts. That is what the BBC is for.

I will however offer the option that this is part of the County's plan to save money by utilizing an adhesive which fails exactly when the new fliers are to be posted (the next one goes up in December!) saving the energy and cost of labor needed to remove and dispose of the fliers. That seems somewhat sort of logical.

I for one, am ATWITTER at the possible December designs. If anyone knows what they are I would prefer for them to not spoil the surprise. I am sure it will be endlessly glorious.

Greening the Modern Preservation - Green building and modernism; are they antithetical? - reminder

Just a reminder that the last of the Greening the Modern Preservation Movement: Bauhaus at the Brink will be tomorrow, Wednesday, November 28th at 6pm (at Judson Manor).

Green building and modernism; are they antithetical?
Guest lecturer, Carl Stein, FAIA, Principal of elemental architecture, llc, of New York City and his late father, Richard Stein, FAIA, have completed numerous historic rehabilitation projects based on their innovative and pioneering research in the analysis of energy use and conservation in buildings and design. Stein served his architectural internship with Marcel Breuer from 1968-1971.

preview interview via GCBL

Hope to see you there.

Euclid Corridor, day one

It was cold, rainy and dark so I thought it the perfect weather to go for a photo jaunt with Bradley of the Design Rag to document the first day of operation for the Euclid Corridor Project. I was watching traffic attempt the new patterns from a comfortable office vantage and wanted to see how the thing operated from the street.

First off, I would like to congratulate the city on the sneaky way they are hindering the use of automobiles on Euclid. Seriously. With two main urban corridors (Chester and Carnegie) a block North and South I can understand why the city would want to make Euclid as pedestrian friendly as possible and they did everything short of making it pedestrian only to achieve this. By giving automobiles only one lane in each direction the street seems smaller and more manageable to forge.

Secondly, I would like to huzzah the center bus island stations. Again they work wonderfully as a traffic calming device, they make the street much more pedestrian friendly and they offer amazing vantages of the city while you wait for your bus. I cannot wait for the BTR to be up and running. I am actually excited about public transportation right now.

Thirdly, I didn't see the bike lanes. I hope that they are not shared with the parallel parking lane only because that has proven inherently dangerous for the cyclists. Maybe they just don't reach all the way to CSU.

Lastly, this area of Cleveland looks, well, like a real city. Mix in a good amount of people, toss in some more shops and restaurants and I think we could be on to something here. The street looks so much better than it did a couple of years ago (prior to this project starting), it feels friendly, cleaner and much more organized.

Yay.

resources:
Web Albums of various photos from today

Architecture for Humanity AMD Competition Resources

I would like to tip the hat to the Open Architecture Network(OAN) for attempting to prove out that designers care quite a bit about designing with a purpose as opposed to hi-jacking altruistic trends for personal gain. Spend some time at OAN site and check out the hundreds of project submissions and proposals that are being shared. There is something comforting about the knowledge that people are willing to take their own time and resources to create solutions for the sort of problems that most think too large or ingrained to resolve.

I would also like to point out the current competition; Open Architecture Challenge which I have no doubt hyped here and other places - thanks greensource magazine!) before which allows designers to put their minds towards solving real world problems.

The interesting thing about these competitions and the Open Architecture Network is the teams willingness to share information with other teams as each group works towards the same end goal with perhaps different perspectives. Usually this results in groups working inadvertently against each other to solve a common goal and competing for resources, however the structure of the OAN allows for camaraderie to supersede the search for pure authorship. Whether this is a result of the information age or perhaps more people are searching for purely altruistic goals (and willing to share credit) is beyond me and actually, to me, unimportant.

On a closing note I would like to pass along a blog that was sent to me a while back (took me forever to find again) that documents the Washington University's multidisciplinary student team working on the Kallari portion of the Open Architecture Challenge.

Kallari Chocolate Factory Project - Washington University

Sorry it took me so long to put up Mason, keep up the good work. Thanks for sharing.