john locke http://gracefulspoon.com/blog adventures in architecture Fri, 29 Oct 2021 19:51:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.5 Pandemic Printing http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2021/10/29/pandemic-printing/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2021/10/29/pandemic-printing/#respond Fri, 29 Oct 2021 19:51:14 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4342

 

When New York shut down in March 2020, and I started baking bread and drinking too much, I wanted to build a piece of furniture while isolated within the apartment. I needed something that could be created without any tools and wouldn’t be overly taxing mentally. I originally wanted to put together something like the college-dorm-grade, cinder block and pine plank shelves, only with found objects bought via ebay in lieu of concrete blocks. Ultimately, browsing ebay was getting in the way of doomscrolling, so I shifted over to 3d printing it myself. Continuing my fascination with replicating objects of perceived historical value that themselves have already been copied many times over by Roman sculptors working from lost Greek originals, and which have also most likely then been looted by Western museums, I downloaded a bunch of 3d models of scanned heads from antiquity via the British Museum on Sketchfab. As an added bonus, each head took about approximately three days to print, so I realized my ambition of keeping myself occupied for the maximum time with the minimal amount of effort. Factoring in all of the print errors and extrusion jams, this took about a total of seven weeks to realize. The brass shelves were spec’ed and ordered from onlinemetals.com.

 
 


The British Museum’s publicly available scan of the strong Greek Orator (and weak military fighter) Demosthenes with his somewhat pensive, pursed lip demeanor. Note that like many other sculptures from antiquity, the British Museum’s version is a Roman copy of a lost Greek original. https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/a-bust-of-demosthenes-67fb4ea5c8f149c88658bd4a67f0008d

 


Each print was approx. 75-95 hours. I had nothing but time.

 


“Had you for Greece been strong, as wise you were, the Macedonian would not have conquered her.”

 

 
 
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The Last Normal Day http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2020/11/03/the-last-normal-day/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2020/11/03/the-last-normal-day/#respond Tue, 03 Nov 2020 19:33:26 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4312
My last in-person design presentation to a room of medical professionals and staff for a health care facility in Sierra Leone, February 2020.

 
 
 
 

With the weather in New York lurching towards a quarantined pandemic winter and the election about to bring forth…something, it feels like the endless year of 2020 is about to enter some heretofore new phase. To prevent/distract me from constantly clicking refresh on every poll tracking site, I’ve instead been thinking back to the last normal day. It’s always difficult to reconstruct in hindsight, because you obviously didn’t know at the time that you were in fact living your last normal day. For most people it’s probably sometime in March when you were hanging out with friends at a bar, going to a movie, eating out at a restaurant or any of the other countless quotidian social interactions that we took for granted. For me, the gap between normal life and pandemic life is filled by the bright, vivid memories of my three weeks in Sierra Leone at the end of February doing architecture – presenting design ideas, sketching charettes, visiting the project site, finding new material suppliers and sustainable supply chains, understanding construction possibilities and finding equitable labor approaches – basically finding solutions to all of these challenges are what I really enjoy about my job. And I was with some amazing people.

 

The maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone is the worst in the world. A mother is almost one hundred times more likely to die during childbirth than in the United States. There is no single issue or failure that you can point to as the cause of such an offensive statistic. This is a systemic issue, in part caused by deep political issues brought about by a history of colonialism with its attendant official extractive policies, endemic corruption, a civil war, the ebola outbreak, well meaning but failed NGOs, and a whole host of other issues that would require me as an American to understand much more deeply. However, there is no singular heroic act to solve this, no superhero to punch out maternal mortality, and building one hospital can’t singlehandedly correct for decades of neglect and the lack of an infrastructural support system required to both educate a new generation of doctors and pave the roads to get them to the hospital and a power grid that keeps the equipment running. Yet in the face of all these obstacles there are people devoting their lives to caring for each other and making things a little better for those that have been neglected and poor. It is a movement of people working together, fighting for other people just as you would do for yourself. A new hospital building can significantly aid in that work, but it is simply a part of a vast network of care and another step forward to justice and progress for those that are driving that change day in and day out.

 

Amongst the daily intensive collaborative design work and nightly dinner discussions, the steady background din of news from home got louder. First the cases in the Pacific Northwest, then evidence of person-to-person transmission in California, some false optimism thrown in for good measure: “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” then finally the first verified cases in New York state. While it was still over a month before Sierra Leone confirmed its first Covid case, ebola was a recent memory for people there, and hand sanitizing and temperature checks became a standard routine before entering any building, and while meeting at the Health Ministry, no-contact greetings were standard (though I appreciate protocol was broken for a trip highlight bear hug from the Health Minister). Maybe this wasn’t the last time that was necessarily “normal”, and the setting was most definitely different that what I was used to, but it was the last time I felt wholeheartedly positive about the future. I suppose all architecture proposals are inherently utopian in that way. Designing is an optimistic act. When you’re designing something you’re part of a team envisioning and sharing this idea for a project that when built will be a manifestation of that mission to create a better world. The work continues.

 

 

The project site (above).


There are a huge number of mining concerns throughout Sierra Leone, including both one of the world’s largest – Koidu Holdings – as well as well as smaller, more independent operations. However, regardless of the corporate structure, this natural resource belonging to the country has historically been extracted to create enormous wealth for the South African mining conglomerates, Lebanese diamond brokers and high-end Belgian auction houses who control the supply and reap the profits before the stones end up in some engagement ring. There is little to no benefit for the poor, surrounding areas and it just becomes a reason to die working in an open pit or a resource to kill for control over. Through a fluke of geological forces – one of the globes richest kimberlite pipes spiked outwards from the earth’s core out to this small county – and an overly permissive central government, the country is pockmarked with these open pits where 500m3 of earth is removed and discarded for every carat of diamond dug out of the ground.

 


Sustainable forestry initiatives have started to take hold in West Africa, and ideally this project could act as a lighthouse for potential future adoption of timber in the built environment. We visited a timber company producing FSC-certified fast growth, short rotation species of Acacia (shown) and Eucalyptus trees for construction material. These nascent industries promote social and economic development programs within their community, while also providing a more sustainable building material for a fast growing construction market.

 

The Freetown beaches are some of the most beautiful and active beaches I’ve ever been to. So many people laughing, walking, and playing together as the sun sets.

 
 
 
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Cloud Box Performance Space – 2018 Class Work http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2019/01/28/cloud-box-performance-space-2018-class-work/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2019/01/28/cloud-box-performance-space-2018-class-work/#respond Mon, 28 Jan 2019 16:46:30 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4285

An amazing and talented group of students made something worthwhile and in a manner that I think is unique to GSAPP. Below are images from the final intervention – a mobile sound and light performance space. As a quick overview, we spent the first session reading, drawing, and talking to community groups about who gets to build things in the city and why. What systemic issues result in this urban area being neglected? The second session we worked hands-on and in close collaboration with a number of organizers and community artists including the Uni-Project, Uptown Grand Central, as well as Harlem’s young musician Carlito Ratti. I thought it was very worthwhile for the students to not only work collaboratively amongst themselves, but also to fabricate something meaningful and interesting for actual people to use and experience.

 

An abbreviated syllabus below, full syllabus here: https://medium.com/@john.h.locke/hacking-the-urban-experience-2018-18f267862c10:

 

Session A Overview
“Attack current conditions in a manner that will change them.”
– Siegfried Kracauer

 

“It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new — pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creating, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it…”
-Ursula K. Le Guinn, Deep in Admiration (2017)

 

This semester we will collaborate with the UNI Project (www.theuniproject.org) — a non-profit that creates learning environments in public spaces across New York City — to design, build, deploy, test and defend a 1:1 scale prototype intervention intended to facilitate interactive participation in public life.

 

How we build, how things are made and for whom, reflects the social, economic, and political values of a community. We have the opportunity to help shape those values in our own neighborhoods. Here, on the street, New York’s key urban questions can be explored and tested. This is where in the words of Michael Sorkin, cities are “distribution engines”, separating bodies and power in to distinct tranches, which require a constant vigilance to break down these spatial inequalities in an endless struggle to maintain free, open space that is accessible to all. We’re now living through the broken failures of neoliberal urban planning, where public benefit has been surrendered in deference to a developer’s personal gain. However, with tactical precision, we will apply ourselves to subverting the systemic decisions that have led us to this point, in an attempt to provide an alternate path forward. We can prove that things, ideas, installations can exist in public space only for delight, outside of market forces.

 

We will begin with Henri Lefebvre’s assertion for a shared “right to the city”, an essential reading of the urban experience against the privileged inertia of entrenched power, in which a pluralistic collection of citizens must collectively create their city. The temporary activations and assemblages that we develop can lead the way toward an urban environment that provides for the many. In this way, our work should by its own definition be critical, it should merge the social, physical, and experiential, and acknowledge the political ramifications behind architecture and planning in 2018’s America.

 

This course seeks to assert the relevance of the design and fabrication skills at our disposal as potentialities for increased relevance. Through the re-appropriation and re-imagining of existing urban conditions, the student will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to design and fabricate a working prototype that embraces the messy reality of New York. The student will begin by identifying a quality of the urban condition that includes the latent capability for engagement and work toward fabricating an adaptive, responsive and environmentally viable solution. Specific emphasis will be placed on testing and exploring through hands on research the possibilities of detailing and fabricating using unorthodox materials. Formulating a strong guiding thesis idea will be essential to the project’s success, but the core challenge for the student will be converting a strong idea into physical reality, something to be observed, tested and documented.

 

Session A Goals
By attempting to capture a broader audience for architectural interventions, a number of questions present themselves and the student will be challenged to anticipate possible eventualities — how will it be used? How can we quickly imbue meaning in our work? How do we engage with different communities? How do we collaborate with outside groups? Fabrication will be considered less from a formal quality, and more from a use, durability, improvisation and public participation viewpoint.

 

Ultimately the student will come out of the course with a healthy respect for two core concepts: Firstly, an increased skill in the use and applicability of the fabrication skills we have at our disposal for solving design issues using unorthodox materials in unconventional settings; and two, that there is an opportunity for architects to regain lost relevance by inserting themselves through unsolicited proposals into the public consciousness as stewards of urban well-being.

 

Session B Overview
What can architecture accomplish? Is it merely the competent combination of a client’s given program, site, and budget? Are we merely the credentialed executors of assignments? Or worse yet, is society at a point in which it no longer expects anything from us? Do we now have the courage to leave the safety of the assignment and transform ourselves into entrepreneurs and producers? Our goal will be to reclaim the mantle of empowerment. We will form new alliances with groups outside of the architectural aficionado, and imbue our work with dignity and worth to appeal to the non-architect, the average citizen, the neighbor.

 

Building off the skills and experience gained in the first half of the class, this second session will look deeper into the possibilities of public fabrications to functionally alter everyday urban encounters. What do common materials mean to people? What impact can form have on the reading of a project?

 

The goal will be to create a proposal for a mobile installation that can accommodate future progress and participation — a malleable first draft that allows a feedback loop with the neighborhood to give back and evolve together. We will push the notion that learning occurs through making, doing, and interactivity; while giving primary focus to the designing of experiences in lieu of objects. How can you engage with a pluralistic public to have them become a partner in your work? How does that experience become fun, easy, and understandable?

 

Session B Goals
The temporary final intervention should give you an opportunity to upend the distinctions between public and private. You can temporarily disregard social hierarchies, and choreograph a temporary experience that provides for alternative social encounters and shared urban encounters. New York is a palimpsest of change on top of change, but your temporary work should guide the permanent into more democratic, open, and acerbic directions.

 

You will learn to collaborate with outside groups, in a project for real people, re-defining notions of authorship in architectural work. You will explore new models of practice, and leave the course with an understanding of how your own form, program, and material assemblages can change urban experiences.

 

Many thanks to Sam and Leslie Davol at the Uni-Project for all their help and advice, as well as Carey King with Uptown Grand Central for the amazing support.

 

Many thanks to Sam and Leslie Davol for the project photography!

 
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X GWB X http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2019/01/02/x-gwb-x/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2019/01/02/x-gwb-x/#respond Wed, 02 Jan 2019 21:05:47 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4247 The George Washington Bridge is a pretty omnipresent structure both in the neighborhood and from our window. I’ve spent the past year grabbing for the camera whenever the mood struck, which when collected here seems to typically be those times that the distinct cross bracing of the towers GWB are occluded by environmental conditions or when fog, rain, snow or Sunday sunsets make being in the living room feel warm like home.

 

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APHRODITE IN MARBLE http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2018/06/02/aphrodite-in-marble/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2018/06/02/aphrodite-in-marble/#respond Sat, 02 Jun 2018 16:05:30 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4233 Saturday morning, creating a digital copy of the Aphrodite in Marble from the Met. A form that has perpetually adapted – originally cast in bronze 2000 years ago, later destroyed, reproduced (two times, different artists) in marble, limbs were lost, limbs were added, parts recreated, etc.

 

 
 
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Hacking the Urban Experience – LINK NYC http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2017/11/04/hacking-the-urban-experience-link-nyc/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2017/11/04/hacking-the-urban-experience-link-nyc/#comments Sat, 04 Nov 2017 20:30:51 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4199 A story in four parts:

 


What It Means for Consumers and Brands That New York Is Becoming a ‘Smart City’


Free Wi-Fi Kiosks Were to Aid New Yorkers. An Unsavory Side Has Spurred a Retreat.


LinkNYC kiosks not a hit with everyone


NYC nixes kiosk browsers after homeless commandeer their use

 
 

With little fanfare or prior warning, they began bolting the LinkNYC kiosks to the sidewalks in early 2016. Greeted with little more than a New York shrug, these were blatant pedestrian-scale digital billboards. An upgrade from the static posters on bus stops and phone booths. The trade-off for tolerating these new advertising intrusions was the promise of new “world-class” free wifi (of which an email address was initially required) and an internet-enabled, built-in tablet. Instantly, certainly apocryphal stories of rampant homeless porn-watching quickly spread, though a quick look through the offending media images showed that the concern seemed more to do with less desirable folks congregating and watching youtube videos or making voip calls instead of “moving along”. It should also be noted that these kiosks are not evenly distributed throughout the city, but rather more heavily located uptown – either through the result of human decision-making or a black box ROI algorithm is unclear. Seven months after the initial roll-out, access to internet for all passersby was either completely shut off or severely curtailed, though the digital signs remained.

 

Our course at Columbia, Hacking the Urban Experience, is invested in architectural street interventions at a neighborhood scale. As it appears that the design and implementation of these is driven by public-private advertising concerns (LinkNYC’s parent company is Alphabet’s Google), rather than architects or city planners, the first assignment of the course looked at ways to both acknowledge that these things now exist on NYC streets and to non-invasively study ways that they can be adapted. In the same manner that steetlight poles can act as support posts for help wanted or missing person signs, how can the Link NYC kiosks adapt and provide actual value to the street?

 

Below are samples of prototypes that were constructed in one week, with the expressed goal of adapting and testing how simple acts and gestures can impact our relation to these structures and public space around us. These kiosks inadvertently provide a number of opportunities – the bright screen can illuminate objects, the usb ports are charged and can power a desk fan, and the invisible wifi signals can define an actual physical space. These interventions became the foundation of a framework to discuss who is public space for, and who can stop and enjoy listening to a song by Slipknot on the sidewalk without a resulting pearl-clutching article by the Times.

 
 









 
 
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Central Park with Satellite http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2017/10/19/central-park-with-satellite/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2017/10/19/central-park-with-satellite/#respond Thu, 19 Oct 2017 23:45:29 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4193

 
 
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Hacking the Urban Experience – Student Work http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2017/03/14/hacking-the-urban-experience-student-work/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2017/03/14/hacking-the-urban-experience-student-work/#comments Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:27:23 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4175 wind01

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Final work from the class last year, the product of a collaboration between the Parks Department, The Columbus Amsterdam BID, and Lincoln Square. These modular, mobile, interactive wind harps were installed across the street from Lincoln Center and later during the 106th Street Family Days. The colorful wind harps were made from off-the-shelf roofing material and each produced a distinct tone when ambient wind from the street funneled down the Broadway/Amsterdam Junction passed through the apertures and reverberated through the hollow column, plucking the various string widths and producing sound of various, distinct pitch. The concept was adapted from the design of Aeolian Harps – passive wind instrument which many people “find alludes to higher realms”. These also worked as improvisational instruments, that could be played on the street by passersby. The bright colors created a welcoming sight which invited participation and the strings made the foreign-seeming objects instantly recognizable as a harp/guitar like stringed instrument.

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Jamaica Flux Inflato http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2016/06/02/jamaica-flux-inflato/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2016/06/02/jamaica-flux-inflato/#respond Thu, 02 Jun 2016 16:38:04 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4145 INFLATO-DUMPSTER-JCAL-01

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INFLATO-DUMPSTER-JCAL-03

INFLATO-DUMPSTER-JCAL-04

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web-inflato-02

web-inflato

 
 

Images from the three-day event in Queens, sponsored by the great team at the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning and with Joaquin Reyes.

 

The Inflato Dumpster is a radical new conception of what constitutes public space in New York City. This site-specific work creates an open, engaging street-level structure that acts as a mobile learning laboratory through creative programming events that reflects the diversity of its location. The project takes advantage of digital design and new lightweight fabrication techniques to create a framework for small group discussion and engagement.

 

The project includes 165 square feet of enclosed space with maximum dimensions at 17’ height by 12’-6” wide and 24’ long. The main element is an inflatable membrane containing 2000 cubic feet of volume, weighing less than 20 lbs. Made from a combination of lightweight inflatable materials and a modular city dumpster, the Inflato presents a subdued silver, semi-reflective surface from the outside, while the interior creates a gold, brightly gilded interior.

 
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Jamaica Flux 2016 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2016/05/03/jamaica-flux-2016/ http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2016/05/03/jamaica-flux-2016/#respond Tue, 03 May 2016 19:15:59 +0000 http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/?p=4138 inflato-jcal-01

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A few quick shots of the Inflato Dumpster project installed in the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning gallery in Queens as part of the 2016 Jamaica Flux show.

 

The Flux 2016 exhibition invited 19 artists to study the effects of art in public spaces and provokes conversations regarding art’s role in community, participation, commerce, and urban renewal.

 

This was a preview exhibition of the Inflato project before its full activation (complete with pre-fab metal base) on the 165th Street Pedestrian Mall.

 
 
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