The Gowanus Canal | Courtesy of Team NC State

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn was once a meandering tidal creek whose brackish waters produced oysters so succulent and sizable they were harvested by the Dutch settlers and shipped back to Europe by the barrel-full. With the growth of industry and the concomitant population explosion in Brooklyn in the middle of the 19th century, the old Gowanus Creek was channeled and deepened to create the 1.8 mile-long canal, finished in 1869. By 1906 there were over 85 barge trips per working day and the canal was a “maritime superhighway for barges bearing coal, sand, oil, and brick.”

Barge traffic on the Gowanus Canal in 1940, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library

Today the primary function of the Gowanus Canal is as a collector outlet for 14 of the combined sewer overflow points in Brooklyn. If you are ever by the Canal during the rain, an acrid stink reminiscent of Dante’s fumache lagoni will wash over you thanks to a mix of raw sewage, heavy metals, petrochemicals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the deep sediments and waters of the Canal. The blocks immediately adjacent to the Canal have been left mostly to bus repair shops, industrial scrap yards, concrete plants, the vacant vestiges of past energy industries, and carting companies that lumber through Brooklyn at night.

And yet, the Canal has a certain sublime attraction. The F/G trains and the Gowanus Expressway cross overhead and at night the little lights emanating from the subway cars are beautiful. If you go there on the right night, watch the subway crawl along the tracks, see the distant skyline of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and notice the bats diving for insects against the dark silhouettes of the strange warehouses and factories, you will discover an entirely new side of New York City.

Of course, the Canal was not always seen in this light, and will not always be like this. With the slowing of industrial activity in the 1940′s and the ceasing of regular dredging operations by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1955, the lands and waters were left open for new agents who could find room to operate here, whether they be blue crabs and swallows or artists, the homeless, school teachers with a bivalve interest, or private developers. It is terrain vague, an “abandoned area, obsolete and unproductive… which represents an anonymous reality.” [sic]¹ And this terrain vague permits new uses to arise.  As such it is can operate simultaneously as an open sewer, ecological laboratory, and hipster playpen.

A member of the Canal Nest Colony team installs one of the first birdhouses along the Gowanus Canal

The Colony’s History
In November 2008, Urban Omnibus partnered with Bryan Bell, founder of Design Corps, to hold a design/build event encouraging designers to “make a difference in two days,” an exercise in design activism. Four intrepid designers living in Brooklyn got together and entered the event, deciding to create a small colony of birdhouses for the urban birds living along the canal. They called it the Canal Nest Colony (CNC). Most interesting, they liked what they were doing and decided to keep it going. Throughout the fall of 2008 and the next spring, they kept cutting up and painting pieces of scrap wood and turning them into little yellow birdhouses.

Courtesy of Thomas Ryan

The design of the houses is sophisticated and lovely. Scraps from local cabinet makers are fastened atop an old reject piece of scaffolding, which is then cast in a 5-gallon bucket partially filled with concrete. The cost per birdhouse is a couple of dollars and each house is a mobile unit that can be inserted or relocated into almost any crevice along the Gowanus. The benefit to the community is not limited to the strength of their design. Birds can be an indicator of ecosystem biodiversity and environmental health in urban areas. And people like birds — it is fun to see them hunt and fly and build, they have different colors and behaviors, and many of them migrate, marking the changing of seasons and passage of time.

In 2009, a few folks from the Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC) took notice. The GCC is a community non-profit group that works to address some of the legacy issues of the Gowanus Canal and to encourage community members from local businesses, schools and neighborhood organizations to engage in the clean-up and maintenance of the Canal and its surrounding environment.

The GCC began helping the CNC obtain materials and a workspace. In return, the CNC offered their birdhouse initiative as an organizing mechanism for the community volunteer days. Suddenly, volunteers had a wider variety of activities to engage in — bolting, painting, digging, hammering, and pouring concrete in addition to the weeding and picking up trash that dominated earlier events — and the “clean and green” days ended not only with an cleaned patch of ground along the Canal, but also with the construction of something interesting.

The Colony’s Activity
Over the course of 2009, the CNC’s collaboration with the GCC progressed and 25 new bird and bat houses were designed, built and installed. The delicate yellow boxes were beautiful by the oily blues and rusting browns of the Canal. The bucket-footing allowed for the houses to migrate season to season, slowly finding their way to the micro-habitats along the Canal that best suit different bird species. The CNC team fine-tuned the design and placement of the houses, thanks to suggestions of members from the New York City Audubon Society, and enhanced the habitats with plantings to provide cover and food for the birds and welcoming gardens for the neighbors.

2010 brought efforts to expand the initiative through grant proposals, donations and partnerships. In May, the Department of Sanitation (DOS) granted use of a one-acre lot to the project team, a site situated at a bend in the canal where 2nd Avenue dead-ends, used during the winter for salt and sand storage but vacant throughout the rest of the year. Plant material was donated by Pleasant Run Nursery in New Jersey, mulch was donated by the Department of Parks and Recreation, a shipping container was donated for storage, and a small urban nursery was set up to store and care for the trees and shrubs until they could be installed.

Community volunteers paint and assemble birdhouses at one of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy's community Clean and Green days in 2009

The volunteer community began to grow. An event held at the end of May brought over one hundred people down to the canal to help install a new garden at the end of First Street. But even with the increased community participation, the expansion of both scope and area site coverage meant the participants’ efforts were spread too thin. Mid-season, the team decided to rein in the ambition and focus on site improvements near the Salt Lot. By clustering all of the services and activities in one spot, they created a destination along the canal. The Salt Lot and its sublime surroundings now offer one of the few places to observe and take in the canal and its rhythms.

The Salt Lot at the end of 2nd Avenue in Brooklyn

Work continued through the summer. Many of the plants at First Street died during the hottest days of the summer, and weeds and trash always return. But excitement is building. A large composting operation is getting started, more birdhouses have been installed and plantings have been established along the banks of the canal, which may draw more people and provide habitat and food for birds. The seasonal nursery has proved a great success logistically, piqued neighborhood interest and enabled the ecological initiatives of the CNC project.

The Colony’s Future
The future of the Canal Nest Colony must be seen in the context of the other initiatives birthed along the Gowanus Canal in recent years. In addition to the vestigial industrial uses — scrap yards, bus repair shops, concrete plants, and warehouses — the 00’s saw a wealth of endeavors by idiosyncratic communities emphasizing experimentation and education, labor, and hedonism. In addition to the Canal Nest Colony, the Dredgers, the Oyster Farm, and the Dumpster Pool, the Gowanus was also the site of the Sponge Park Study and the Oyster-Tecture proposal and was made an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site. And the GCC has begun design work for a series of EPA and DEP-funded pilot projects in the vicinity to study strategies for stormwater retention.

Map via thiscityismine.com/gowanus

In its capacity to attract creative/scientific agents the Gowanus Canal is a testament to the enduring ability of post-industrial wastelands to captivate the contemporary urban imagination, at least of those fortunate enough to have a bit of leisure time. And that is a key point; livelihood is now divorced from hard labor, and the result is a massive portion of the population that no longer desires recreation solely in the form of repose and “healthful socializing.” While the consumption of public spaces and experiences — spectacle — is still the dominant mode of recreation, the efforts along the Gowanus Canal offer evidence that there is a desire for other types of recreation, ones that involve work, especially working with your hands.

As for the Canal Nest Colony specifically, this fall the team will be working with MillionTreesNYC to get new trees delivered and cared for until they are installed with volunteer help in October. Next year the composting operation will be fully functional, the seasonal nursery will be back, and new locations for better birdhouses will be scouted. Perhaps a study will be done of the plant communities that have colonized the banks of the Canal and their horticultural and ecological value can be understood and publicized. The energy and support of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy will surely influence the direction, and the GCC will be working on related pilot projects, and new volunteers and teammates will likely contribute new ideas.

The efforts on the Gowanus, nascent though they may be, are evidence of the potential good that can come from communities of different scales and motivations — city government, local organizations, engaged residents — working together, in even the most ghastly of locations, to improve their surroundings and do something fun together.

A vision for one of the new gardens along the Gowanus Canal

For a reminder of the origins of this project, check out the video below that we shot of the team designing and building the birdhouses during the Make a Difference in Two Days event:
[See post to watch Flash video]

¹ “Terrain Vague”, Ignasi Sola Morales, AA.VV. 1996

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The design for this canopy was selected at a Sketch120 charrette hosted by Design in 5, the Architectural League’s group for young architects and designers. Check in with them on Facebook to find out about their other upcoming events.

In all of its various activities, SUPERFRONT aims to subvert the traditional order of operations in architectural practice and discourse. For example, when the time came to open up the backyard as a community resource, Mitch opted not to stage a traditional architectural competition, in which designers work on spec in response to a pre-defined brief. Rather, SUPERFRONT first put out a call to community groups for program ideas that would support their missions, asking how each group might like to use the 1,000 square foot outdoor space for a public activity. Then the gallery partnered with Design in 5, the Architectural League’s group for designers five years or less out of school, to organize a Sketch120 charrette, in which each team of volunteer designers was assigned one of the briefs at random and had two hours to come up with a scheme. The winning design scheme, by a group called KIT, involves an canopy made of hula hoops to house and shade the activities of the New York City Explorers Carnival, a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center. This Saturday from 6 to 9pm, check out the public unveiling of the installation and the simultaneous opening of SUPERFRONT’s latest exhibition: Artists who Play Well with Architects. There will be live music and beverages.

As with all things SUPERFRONT, the installation in the backyard is more than meets the eye. The appropriateness of the design of the canopy to its specific, intended use — to frame a safe, playful and multi-generational event space — is just part of the project’s broader objective: to reimagine the relationship between the architect and the public in the creation of public space, whether temporary, permanent or somewhere in-between. The theme underlying the charrette was “Temporary Publics.” Here’s how SUPERFRONT defines that theme:

Mismanaged crises of the past few years (from the failure of physical infrastructure to the catastrophes of bond markets) have complicated our notion of the architectural relationship between temporality and typology. For example, temporary FEMA trailers in New Orleans remain occupied as primary homes five years later, or luxury projects that became icons before they were even constructed remain stalled as holes in a sidewalk.

Sketch 120: “Sketch Cypher — Temporary Publics” hosted by SUPERFRONT and Design in 5, a group of the Architectural League, invites you to reconsider the possibilities of public architecture in this moment of temporal-typological crisis. What if the industry never returns to normal, if real estate financing never materializes, and all we had to work with, as architects, were our own ideas, a discarded space, and a nebulous public?

What if temporary were forever? The goal is to design a public space with these precepts.

SUPERFRONT itself embodies these precepts. The collaborations, exhibitions and events it organizes plumb the depth and breadth of subject matter that experiments in architecture currently confront. And it situates each of these experiments in the cultural context of the space’s location in Bed-Stuy and in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary practice.

Photo by Dave Rittinger

The jury who selected the winning scheme consisted of DJ /rupture, nArchitects and Slade Architecture. The design team, KIT, is comprised of Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster and Read Langworthy. New York City Explorers (NYCE) is a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center created by Kisha Edwards-Gandsy & Keyanna Murrill that provides classes, camps, childcare, two indoor play spaces, and party planning for families throughout NYC. The NYCE Carnival at SUPERFRONT aims to provide safe, carnival style atmosphere complete with scheduled films, games, contests, healthy food vendor sampling, and creative family programming.

PUBLIC SUMMER at SUPERFRONT Team:
SUPERFRONT Project Team: Nicole McGlinn, Project Manager; Mitch McEwen, Executive Director; Lily Fuks, Project Intern; Melissa Frost, Gallery Intern; Sarah Millsaps, Engineering Consultant;

Designers, KIT:  Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster, Read Langworthy

NY City Explorers: Kisha Edwards-Gandsy And Keyanna Murrill, Co-Owners

Design and Construction Volunteers: Jack Bader, Rodrigo Balarezo, Alex Baumel, Cristina Greavu, Elizabeth MacWillie, Scott Miller, Viren Patel, Shinjinee Pathak, Herbert Ramirez, Rian Rooney, Aviva Rubin, William Serbin, Irmak Turan

Installation photograph by Dave Rittinger. See more of his photos of PUBLIC SUMMER at SUPERFRONT on Flickr.

MITCH MCEWEN is the Director and Founder of Superfront. She is Principal of A. Conglomerate and a recipient of the The New York State Council on the Arts 2010 Independent Projects awards for Architecture, Planning and Design. The Akademie Schloss Solitude has granted her a residency fellowship in architecture for 2012-2013. Her architectural work has been published in Architectural Record and the New York Times, and her writing in African-American studies has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (IRAAS, Columbia University, 2007, 2009). Since founding SUPERFRONT in January 2008, she has curated more than fifteen exhibits and published 4 exhibition catalogues. In 2006, she was invited to join the adjunct faculty of Columbia GSAPP as Adjunct Assistant Professor to create a new cross-disciplinary course for urban planners and urban designers. She holds an M.Arch from Columbia GSAPP and A.B. from Harvard.

Remember how much fun we had when we got together and made a difference in two days? Well, a team of North Carolinians felt like taking matters into their own hands, without warning and without ceremony. Design activist extraordinaire and organizer of our Make a Difference event, Bryan Bell, recently shared with us these photos. He had nothing to do with the objects; neither did the photographer, Rebecca Necessary. They found the designs with a note attached that reads: “Anonymous public gifting by Raleigh designers.”

Be inspired. Click the image above to view a slideshow of the Raleigh designers’ work.

All images by Rebecca Necessary.

Bryan Bell’s approach to expanding design’s role in addressing public needs, highlighted last week on the Omnibus, is a powerful step towards redefining the popular conception of what design can do. He is not alone in this effort, joined by design/build curricula like Auburn University’s Rural Studio or the Yale Building Project (see expanded list below), design activist organizations like Architecture for Humanity or Public Architecture, as well as the growing number of private firms and individual designers who bring their expertise to bear on issues of social concern. But alongside the grand gestures are the small interventions that subtly or overtly improve the experience of urban life in surprising and often playful ways. The Canadian Centre for Architecture has curated some of the most inspiring of these Actions:

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents the exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.

Actions: What You Can Do With the City documents and presents specific projects by a large and diverse group of activists whose personal involvement has triggered radical change in today’s cities. These human motors of change include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees, and many others who answer the question of what can be done to improve the urban experience with surprising and often playful actions.

To extend the sense of transformative possibility beyond the exhibition (and for those of us who can’t make it to Montreal to see the show before it comes down next Monday), there’s a parallel online exhibit. And, General Assembly‘s Take-a-Bag-Leave-a-Bag project, one of the designs that emerged from Urban Omnibus’ Make a Difference in Two Days event, is part of the show. So, it seems that the smallest-scale of designs to improve the public realm can reverberate far beyond our neighborhoods: to inspire our fellow citizens to participate in the constant shaping urban experience, and maybe to enhance the understanding of what design has to offer. Get involved.

A partial list of design/build programs in American architecture schools:

Tulane School of Architecture’s UrbanBuild
A bunch of schools are involved in Tulane’s CityBuild Consortium
UVA’s ecoMOD
UT Austin’s Design Build Texas
Parsons Design Workshop
University of Miami’s Center for Urban and Community Design
Auburn University’s Rural Studio
Yale School of Architecture’s Building Project
Neighborhood Design/Build Studio at the University of Washington
and, of course, NC State

Let us know about your own experiences. And if you’re not in school or about to start, Architecture for Humanity New York has monthly meet ups where projects and volunteer opportunities are discussed.

Just in time for the warm weather, we wanted to share the process with citizen-designers across the city, in the hope of inspiring some small-scale, local interventions in your neck of the woods. If you stumble across, or initiate, a compelling design action in the public interest somewhere in the five boroughs of New York, we want to hear about it.

Below are descriptions of when the seven teams got up to over the weekend. First, check out a video that shows them in action:

Team NC State
Hans Hesselein, David Moses, Andrew Nicolas, Thomas Ryan
Bryan’s popularity as an educator precedes him. An interdisciplinary group of alumni from North Carolina State – two architects, a landscape architect and a graphic designer – some of whom worked with Bryan as undergrads before moving to New York joined in the fun. After raiding a New Jersey nursery for plants, piping and lumber, the team set about the task of creating sensory linkages across the divide of the Gowanus Canal. The eventual solution – a beautiful set of birdhouses – turned the site’s specific ecology into a point of connection rather than separation. And we weren’t the only ones to notice, check out blog coverage here that also got picked up here. [Update Sept. 15, 2010: For a look at the progression of this project from temporary design experiment to community-driven, multi-disciplinary operation, check out our feature Canal Nest Colony.]

Business Casual
Patrick Candella, Scott Corey, Philip Kuehne, Viren Patel, Mary Polites
This group of passionate young designers met while studying at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and most of them live in Jersey City. As such, they brought a fresh perspective to the sometimes parochial language in which New Yorkers articulate design challenges. Their site was a large parking lot that services several big box stores. The lot is ringed with an invisible and unmarked electric fence that, when crossed, renders shopping carts inoperable. The team observed dozens of paralyzed carts discarded around the periphery of the lot and very few deposited at the official corral at the center. If there were a corral before the fence, then maybe the employee whose job it is to return the carts wouldn’t have to manually unlock each cart one by one. If there were unlocked carts at the most popular points of pedestrian entry to the lot – near the path to the adjacent mall or near the light rail stop – customers arriving on foot could pick them up along their way. To address this problem, Business Casual scrounged around the NJIT woodshop for discarded plywood and built two shopping cart corrals that responded to actual observed use patterns. Imagine that.

Due North
Samuel John Reilly, Koren Sin, Stephanie Vito
These three young architecture students are new to New York. As undergraduates in Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning semester in the city program, the team responded to a simple problem they themselves faced as newcomers: directions. But instead of constructing orientation devices as an end in themselves, they assembled large amounts of discarded cardboard near their Flatiron District Cornell outpost into street furniture that points the passerby on her way while providing a resting spot for the road-weary.

Austin+Mergold and Company
Jason Austin, James Bowman, Alex Mergold, Denise Ramzy, and Sally Reynolds
Wayfinding was a recurring challenge that teams sought to address with simple design interventions. Austin+Mergold and Company closely observed tourists exiting the subway unable to locate themselves (see video below). Their solution borrowed less from street furniture and more from weather vanes, encouraging pedestrians to look upwards to find their way. And their careful consideration of New York’s skyline led them to evoke the horizon’s most conspicuous absence and place of remembrance for New Yorkers and out of town visitors alike, the twin towers and Ground Zero.

watch Austin+Mergold and Company’s site analysis video

General Assembly
Jaime Keeler, Josie Lawlor, Sarah Lawlor, Elle Przybyla, Jonathan Zames
This loose collective includes architects, writers and filmmakers whose research process for this exercise brought each of them home to his or her neighborhood only to discover a city-wide design challenge: too many plastic bags yet never one when you need one (to, you know, curb your dog, or cover your bicycle seat in the rain). Inspired by the practice of taking a penny and leaving a penny, General Assembly fashioned a simple series of perforated cylinders that attach to signposts, allowing citizens to put a ubiquitous piece of litter to good use. Check out more of their work here.

Columbia Students
Christina Akiskalou, Daniya Atta, Anastasia Choli, Elia Karachaliou, Pablo Perez Palacios, Eleni Petaloti, Pietro Todeschini
A group of international students in GSAPP’s Advanced Architectural Design professional program took inspiration from the rain on the first day of this two-day adventure. The rain stopped, the air was still warm, but who wants to hang out on a rain-drenched campus bench? So with rolls of altered bubble-wrap and containers made from takeaway soup canisters, a makeshift, reusable ground cloth was born.

Hester Street Collaborative & Leroy Street Studio
Anne Frederick, Morgan Hare, Dylan House, Marc Turkel, Jess Osserman, Shawn Watts
When it comes to making a difference through design, planning and organizing in the public interest, these collectives are professionals. The Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) is a design-build non-profit that works with schools and community groups in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The Collaborative emerged from the architectural practice of Leroy Street Studio, and the two groups took this opportunity to come together and to reconnect with their shared backgrounds in design and construction. One of the Chinatown elementary schools where HSC works lacks the street access to their playground that would make it a genuine public amenity, so the team went about creating a new gate, cutting out the chainlink, and creating a much needed connection point between school and neighborhood.

After 48 hours in the field, the teams reconvened at Cabinet Magazine‘s Gowanus space to share their processes, sites and projects with Bryan and the public. In the presentations, Bryan urged the teams to identify stakeholders affected, issues addressed and materials used. He encouraged all participants to check back on their projects and to continue to observe their sites. Observing real use patterns, talking to people about their needs, working in a community you know well: all these are hallmarks of Bryan’s philosophy of design as activism. The weekend proved that even the smallest-scale interventions can go a long way towards expanding the understanding of what design can do. Now it’s your turn, go out there and make something. The first step, as these designers experienced first-hand, is to watch closely and listen carefully.

As founder of the SEED Network, Bell promotes the idea of community-based design, which he said should be ecologically and culturally sensitive. Like LEED, a U.S. Green Building Council program that stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, SEED will have a scorecard system to measure how a development addresses the social, economic and environmental health issues of a community. (DJC Oregon 3.31.09)

Bryan’s infectious optimism about the potential for conscientious design action in the built environment to address inequalities might be exactly what this economy needs. Designers, small-scale interventions really can make a difference. If you want some real, live, built examples of this, stay tuned. Next week on the Omnibus: Make a Difference in Two Days.