Cleveland's King of Speed Bike Race + King Of The Court Bike Polo

What: Cleveland's King of Speed Bike Race + King Of The Court Bike Polo
When: Friday, July 18th 5:00PM
Where: Starts @ Cyrus Waterfront Lounge & Patio
Cost $$: Its Free!!!
For More Info Email: dizi4444@yahoo.com

Pedal Republik of Cleveland hosts Bike Polo every Sunday, behind the West Side Market @ 11am/Noonish til whenever everyone is tired. Beginners Welcome! Its just about the most fun one can have re-appropriating space in Cleveland! Even if you don't play, come by and watch, its quite the spectacle to see!

ganked completely from Rockitecture who should tell me this stuff so it shows up on the Calendar

What's in a name?

I ride my bike past this development once in a while during my commute. I watched these townhouses go up and while I was happy that they don't have the typical Cleveland Townshack base geometry and crummy materials (well, at least they aren't already falling apart). I wonder how many were to be built to give the complex a completed face as well as tie it into the mainstreet (this area doesn't have much of a neighborhood feel due to train tracks and some warehouses delineating the east and north side).

I think they are called Chicle because that was the name of the adjacent large building that has been turned into lofts (as from what I can tell is a pretty decent retrofit). Regardless the point of this rant is how confused I am by the term "post industrial resort". I believe since the site was cleaned a more accurate term would be a "post post industrial resort" or, if one were to assume that the manufacturing prowress of the nation were to grow "post post pre industrail resort", which I actually can find some enjoyment in.

Regardless, I am much happier to see this sort of reclamation project taking place instead of the usual "Deer Field" (or whatever displaced flora/fauna) greenfield development and am mildly content to see people taking the risk to bring in "non typical" (for Cleveland's standards) albeit tentative designs.

LAUNCH Movie Night - Idiocracy

Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Bela Dubby, Lakewood, Oh
7.30pm until it is over

Have you tried the cake? You should try the cake. The cake is AMAZING!

Help Restore the Historic Coast Guard Station

I have mentioned the old Lifeboat Station #239 before. If you were at all intrigued you may like to know that the Wendy Park Foundation are holding a Painting and Cleaning Day for the Station.

Here is the notice!

The Wendy Park Foundation and U.S. Coast Guard Station Need Your Help!!!

Help Restore the Historic

Coast Guard Station!!!

Save the Date!!!

On Sunday, July 20, 2008 from 9:00 a.m. to Finish

Wendy Park will Sponsor a Painting and Cleaning Day for the Historic U.S. Coast Guard Station.

We Need YOU to Help Give a Face-Lift

To One of Cleveland’s Most Intriguing Pieces of Architecture!

Don’t Let this Historic Landmark Continue to Waste Away!!!

All Supplies Will Be Provided on Site.

Any Carpentry Skills Would Be Greatly Appreciated, But Not Necessary to Help.

Please Meet At Whiskey Island’s Sunset Grille Pavillion at 9:00 a.m. or join in later at the Coast Guard Station located at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.

Any Volunteers who would like to participate or further information please e-mail Director of Park Operations, Katie Winings at kwinings@wendyparkfoundation.org or call @ (216) 410-0101

Wendy Park is located at:

2800 Whiskey Island
Cleveland, OH 44102-2251

Off of the Edgewater Exit on Route 2.

Please visit www.wendyparkfoundation.org for further directions.

LAUNCH Social Tonight

LAUNCHies, plan for another evening of fun!

Old Angle Tavern
1848 W. 25th St. Cleveland, Ohio 44113
Meet around 6ish

A group of Cleveland based designers (mostly architecture types) who realize they don't live in a city with a very strong design culture and want to change that instead of just moving away. People can sit around and complain about it or get off their butts and change it.

We are taking the first steps towards getting off our butts. It is a difficult and tedious process, to shake loose the shackles of complacency that we all wear so comfortably.

Besides, there is beer and food. Yay!

Tremont Art Hop

Tremont Art Hop
Tremont Art Walk
Friday, July 11th, 2008
Tremont neighborhood, Cleveland, Ohio
6pm - 10ish pm for most galleries.

Another fine excuse to wander around Tremont looking at things and finding places to eat and drink.

Yay!

Burning River Garden discovered - urban gardening right on the river

While wandering around downtown Cleveland on the 4th I stumbled across the Burning River Garden, a little urban pocket garden where the Veteran's Memorial Bridge meets W. 10th on the East Side of the Cuyahoga River.

The corner is a rather nice spot that gets some good afternoon sun and marks the East entry of the Veteran's Memorial Bridge Tour. According to the BRG website the plots were designed with future expansion of more gardens and perhaps a community park in mind. While the community garden offers a great opportunity for the inhabitants of the nearby apartment/condo buildings to get their fingers and toes in the dirt, it also creates a fine respite spot for workers of nearby buildings and in creating the garden, marked a space that offers rather nice vistas of the Cuyahoga (our most valuable yet ignored resource).

Built in partnership with the Summer Sprout Program these folks have created a series of hubs for community place building and interaction and in doing so have made the city that much more livable. If you would like help the summer sprout program call Connie Booth for details (513) 221-0981.

Special thanks to Beth from BRG for taking some time from digging and weeding to explain the garden to me.

resources:
Burning River Garden made a music video of setting up the garden.

Hisaka's CSU Student Center Photo Update

I have been meaning to get out to the Cleveland State University campus and watch the painful demolition of Don Hisaka's 1974 student center. I was never one who was sold that the student center was a weak demarcation of the entrance to the campus, mostly because as a commuter school a proper entrance seemed unrealistic to expect. Now that CSU is moving to create more on site residence halls I can see the argument for necessitating a "proper entrance" however I fail to see why the student center needs to mark that entry or why, with such a strong entry face, it didn't mark it enough.

I also have to wonder why a school with a seemingly decent engineering division didn't retrofit the existing structure or choose a designer who dealt with structures that expressed engineering intellect. Granted some may not enjoy the Hisaka building and even call it brutalist due to the raw concrete and expressed structure and materiality but I would think that very foundation could create a proving ground for one of Cleveland State's hallmark divisions to undertake and exploit. These are the sort of lost opportunities that sadden me. These are the chances that institutions have to set themselves apart.

Regardless of the semantics of what new urbanism is required to "front the campus upon Euclid" or "organize a proper main street" the tentative kid gloved nature that has resulted in this demolition work, and the proposed befuddlement of style could be construed as misguided at best and insulting at worst. If Euclid is to be the new Cleveland "main street", then the front door of our institutions should do their best to intrigue as well as welcome. Otherwise, who is going to come knocking?

more resources:
Action shots by Improvising Schema
Puff pieces do nothing to increase the quality of work expected
Ramsey Architectural Group

Drinking beer in a Cleveland Park on a Friday evening was once legal?

It was a perfect dreary morning for starting to begin reading through the ridiculously large pile of books that has accumulated near the living room chair (Not to be confused with the gigantic pile of unread books in the office. These take precedent, they are from the library). I thought I would start out with the smallest of the bunch, a softcover book published by the American Planning Association and written by Project for Public Spaces entitled Managing Downtown Public Spaces.

More of a manual to running various urban planning exercises then a book on urban theory there were still plenty of case studies and interesting stories (and images) supplied including references to one of the few movies I remembered sitting through in college called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces which, regardless of the quality of video and era in which it was shot, is still a surprisingly relevant and humanistic approach to looking at shared public/private space.

I am not posting to bemoan Managing Downtown Public Spaces, I'm not, it was a quick read and actually gave me something to ponder, I am posting because Cleveland (I can only assume Ohio) was used as a case study of successful urban spaces multiple times, most noticeably referring a regularly planned public event that actually made more money then it cost to put on. Yup, an actual income generating event that the city had hosted to bring people downtown.

I haven't been able to find any information online in regards to this event. Supposedly it was hosted by the Greater Cleveland Growth Association (who has recently merged with the Greater Cleveland Partnership and took place every Friday during the summer between the hours of 5pm and 8pm, each time in a different section of town, with the idea to keep people downtown after work and expose them to businesses or parts of the city they "normally wouldn't see".

It was called "Party in the Park" and was started in 1969 (or so I can surmise). It was self supporting and in 1979 grossed a profit of $6000 according to PPS which was distributed to the non-profit organizations that volunteered services.

I just was wondering what had happened to it. I almost remember hearing about the event and am sort of sad that it either a) went away or b) doesn't advertise enough for me to know about it.

Design Council - Finding and working with a designer, a step-by-step guide

Step -by-step guide

There are many reasons to hire a professional designer or design consultant to facilitate a project however there may be some difficulty in quantifying the value of hiring a person who has specifically been trained in the art of design. This is where the Design Council wants to helps out. This specific guide contains chapters on;
- how to find a designer
- how to choose a designer
- how to agree on budgets and costs
- writing a brief and getting the project started
- working with your designer
- completing the design project

The Design Council is an online resource for designers and how-to guides for those wondering if they should hire a designer or design consultant. The Design Council also has added resources for designers including podcasts, design related stories and issues and opportunities and is a fantastic resource whether one is in the United Kingdom or not.

1/3 Movie Night - Wet Hot American Summer

1/3 Movie Night
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Bela Dubby
13321 Madison Ave. Lakewood, OH 44107
7.30pm to 10pm

Free and open to the public.

brought to you by LAUNCH cleveland

Summer of Food

One of the things I enjoy most about the summer time (besides the "surprise" rainstorms, the longer sunny days and the prevalence of cooking out) is that so many local communities are now having "farmer's markets" which as far as I can determine are just wonderful excuses for wandering around a parking lot on a sunny day and buying delicious veggies and fruits, possibly locally or organically grown, meeting your neighbors and enjoying the fact that you have a very legitimate reason for being outside.

With that in mind I thought I would share some of the photos I took of the Grand Opening of the Kamm's Corners Farmers Market which runs every Sunday until October from 10am to 2pm.

There were a wide selection of options, from dairy to veggies and fruits, oils, fresh flowers, breads and sausage sandwiches to quiet the grumbling bellies. You can check what is in season on the Kamm's Corners website as well as recipes that were demonstrated at the market.

Sportables (quickfire) Competition

The Challenge: Create highly transportable and deployable play spaces that are sustainable infrastructure nodes
Location: Capao Redondo, Sao Paolo, Brazil
Submission Period: June 15 to June 30, 2008
Sponsored by: Google SketchUp
Award: $1000+

Open Architecture Network


Let’s create Sportables.

Where resources are scarce, we can create

Community access points to deliver vital services.

Let's create highly transportable and deployable play spaces that are sustainable infrastructure nodes.

| Designing Sportables: Mobile Demountable Sport Product Library & Play Facility |

Need: Nothing connects kids like the power of play. In areas of great need are opportunities to use sports as a catalyst for social change. Where resources are scarce, products can be distributed to deliver vital services. In many parts of the world sporting activities, especially local and traditional sports, are being incorporated into a variety of programs geared toward helping youth address a broad range of issues affecting their lives.
By emphasizing a "team" approach, these programs help impart the skills needed by the next generation to overcome the many challenges faced by their countries, from poverty to HIV/AIDS, malnutrition to low educational access. The Sportables play area and product library aims to provide the youth in communities with limited resources the opportunity to play sports safely, securely, and frequently.


| Challenge |

Transport yourself to Capao Redondo, a densely packed, but colorful, friendly and energetic settlement on the outskirts of Sao Paolo, Brazil. Here the youth run through the narrow alleys and small spaces mimicking the moves of football heroes like Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, but in bare feet. Open space is a premium, and not always available (i.e. market spaces)
Your challenge is to design a solution to create a highly demountable, portable sports product library, product development studio, and futsal (soccer) play area. This “pop-up” facility will be deployed to provide much needed (and desired) jerseys, shoes, and balls to communities that would welcome and use them to inspire change for youth of both genders. The design should comprise of a structure and construction mechanism that can unfurl to provide a space to rent sports gear as well as a safe space for youth to play, but must be re-packaged securely to protect the goods and equipment when the play area is not used or space is not available, or when it moves from one location to another.

Resources:
design brief. pdf
competition page

Music Saves - 4th Birthday (part-A) Bash

What more can I say?
Saturday, June 28th
Beachland Tavern
9pm
$2

Right?

right.

thanks, Music Saves!