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.

If tomorrow’s next week’s meet-up, tour and potluck picnic along the Grand Concourse whets your appetite for more Bronx explorations, then come back Thursday afternoon to behold an impressive flotilla navigating down the Bronx River. Bronx River Crossing (BRX) is a project of Van Alen Institute New York Prize winners Alexander Levi and Amanda Schachter. They have been working since January 2009 to with over 100 Bronx high school students and their teachers, local community leaders, and architecture students and practitioners in and around New York City to design and build a floating, large-scale model of the Lower Bronx River Watershed. Come to Hunt’s Point Riverside Park for the docking and celebration. Or walk along the banks as participants get their float on. Here’s the Van Alen’s write-up:

Made from recovered materials including 3,000 used MetroCards, 30 broken umbrellas, 2,000 plastic bottles, 300 sycamore burrs, and 50 PVC window frames hauled off a demolition site, the model will be assembled and launched on June 11 from 219th Street into the Bronx River, accompanied by a thirty-canoe-strong flotilla of the BRX participants responsible for its creation. After spending the previous night camping out along the river, the group will guide the giant watershed model downstream and pull ashore at Hunts Point Riverside Park for a public presentation and reception. (Click HERE for a downloadable map of the BRX course).

BRX complements current ongoing efforts for environmental reclamation by local activists and inspires prolonged collaborative design investigation that will strengthen links across neighborhoods, institutions and public space along the river. Summoning a broad-based community and culling material from the city fabric itself, Levi and Schachter physically activate and recast the Lower Bronx River Watershed as the ecological and social spine of the borough. The BRX Watershed model displays both seen and unseen elements of the region-including the historical ecology of the watershed, neighborhoods, buildings, transportation infrastructures, storm water and sewer networks, the Greenway and other open public space, and a range of evidence and concepts gathered from the personal itineraries of BRX participants. Following its launch down the river, the model is planned to tour Bronx schools in Fall 2009.

PUBLIC RECEPTION
Please join Alexander Levi, Amanda Schachter, and the BRX participants for a reception at Hunts Point Riverside Park in the Bronx as they share experiences of their efforts from the initial planning and mapping stages through model-building, flotation, and final launch. Presentations will begin at 3:00pm, and the Bronx Watershed Model will remain on view at the park until 6:00pm. No RSVP necessary.

Directions to Hunts Point Riverside Park: Take the 6 Train to Hunts Point Ave. Transfer to the Bx6 Bus, and get off at the intersection of Spofford Ave and Halleck St. Walk 1 block north on Halleck, and turn right onto Lafayette/Hunts Point Riverside Park. Travel time is approximately 1 hour from Union Square.

RIVER WALK
For anyone interested in viewing the BRX Watershed Model from the riverbanks while it floats downstream, Levi and Schachter have provided a map and timeline with suggested stopping points. To download the map, click HERE. A guided walk may be organized in the coming days; if you would like to participate, please rsvp@vanalen.org and we will notify you of availability.

BRX PARTICIPANTS
Participating schools and institutions include Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, Pablo Neruda Academy for Architecture and World Studies, Urban Workshop, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture, and Fordham University. Additional project support provided by the Bronx River Alliance, New York City Urban Park Rangers, NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority, the Bureau of Topography of the Office of the Bronx Borough President, and the St Joan of Arc Church. Special thanks to all students, collaborators, and team leaders. See below for a complete list: Participating BRX Students Alexander Levi and Amanda Schachter divided the Lower Bronx Watershed into four regions of study – Estuary, Saltmarsh, Upland, and Freshmarsh – and assigned a team of high school and university students to each. The four teams met weekly throughout Spring 2009 to plan and build one section each of the Lower Bronx Watershed model.

Estuary
Led by Colin Cathcart, Aslihan Demirtas, and Joyce Huang

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.