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South Burlingame Message Board

10/1/2015

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From Concept to Creation: A Community Message Board
By Tammy Straw-Dunn

Initiated by a small group of neighbors, this community message board was brought to fruition through donations & volunteered time, collaborating with The City Repair Project & the Portland Bureau of Transportation. The design, includes exciting features like living roof, re-purposed hardware, and artistic mosaic work at the foundations, created by neighbors of all ages.
 
The South Burlingame neighborhood is a mix of residents who have lived here since they grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s, including active senior walkers & gardeners, empty nesters, renting students, and many young, new families. The residents are excited to meet and participate in activities with their neighbors and were looking for better ways to share their interests and hear about planned activities than word-of-mouth or scattered email list serves. 
 
The planning, construction, and continued use of this message board all represent a wonderful and engaging way to foster community… that is easy for any neighborhood to replicate!
 
Here is a fun, pictoral How-To of our process!
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​Concrete Foundations
Build form work & structure; pour concrete; remove forms once set.
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Mosaic Artwork
Collect, break, & sort tile pieces; mortar design to backer board; mortar designed panels to pair of concrete foundations; grout & sponge-rinse completed tile work.
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Living Roof & Sign Board
Mill salvaged wood to build sign board; stain wood surfaces; build roof with waterproof membrane, root barrier, flashing, & drainage openings at lower fascia; line roof bed with moisture blanket & filter fabric;  spread river rocks at lower edge for drainage & roll filter fabric beneath to hold in place; fill roof box with soil mixture; plant with sedum in autumn.  
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Lessons from Wright & Taliesin West

1/20/2015

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Text and pictures by Mark Lakeman, January 2015
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I have just returned from a journey to Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. The trip was extremely successful, and also deeply inspiring. 

As many of our friends know, communitecture does a tremendous amount of outreach as part of our goal to inspire and activate people everywhere. We travel all over North America, to as many as four cities per month to share stories of how we have been able to achieve great things by working together with people to design and create sustainable and beautiful environments where communities may thrive together. These stories are always told as being in the context of Portland, Oregon where the larger culture is steadily evolving and becoming more sustainable as a whole. Our hope is that we motivate people to act where they live, to get off the couch and work to transform the spaces where they live into vital, beautiful, and sustainable places. 

This recent journey took me to Frank Lloyd Wright's home in the desert, the legendary nexus of visionary design known as Taliesin West. There is so much to say about the place, and of the experience of being there, and can share a little of it now. Foremost that it is a shockingly beautiful place that embodies and expresses all that Wright espoused during his long and brilliant life. The people who remain there are a thriving community, working well to understand and further develop Wright's ideas so that they are broadly owned, diverse, applicable to contemporary culture, and timely in their ecological relevance. 
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Any visitor to Taliesin – and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture that still thrives there – will be blown away by the sheer power of its architectural reality and the living legacy of the culture and school that carries on more than 56 years after Wright's death. They have gone through a series of inevitable growing pains over those years, and have come through the other side still standing strong. The architecture school has an excellent, highly qualified faculty who bring a broad set of backgrounds and experiences to the design studio. They are doing an outstanding job of preparing their students for a very high rate of graduation and placement in the field, more than 90% in both categories.

The professors are doing well at interpreting an extremely strong design tradition that is the most creative of all schools in the USA, while at the same time instilling new ideas that appear to push the boundaries of what even Wright understood in his time. Urban issues, sustainability, and ephemeral projects all sparkle on the design boards of the studio, where an endless stream of brilliant ideas have been hatched before, for nearly a century.


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Talk about an inspiring atmosphere: inside the design studio of Frank Lloyd Wright & now the students at Taliesin West.
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It's all smiles & thought-provoking conversation with faculty Michael DesBarres (left), student Daniel Chapman (right) and me, Mark Lakeman (middle)
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A peek inside the theatre where I presented on January 15th. 
The Frank Lloyd Wright School has an accredited master's degree program, and the student body is as diverse and inspired as any. The students are energized, respectful, and immensely helpful to all who pass through their home. Out in the desert beyond the amazing campus that seems to rise out of the landscape and gleam, the students have built generations of amazing experimental housing projects. Some nestle into the landscape quietly, while other designs declare themselves in the sun and harshness of the relentless heat and climate of Arizona. 
Here are just a few examples of the creative, student-built structures in the Taliesin landscape; this aspect of the architectural curriculum truly embodies the “learning by doing” educational approach advocated by Frank Lloyd Wright. 
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The whole experience was viscerally transformative and it is difficult many days later not to continue feeling absolutely motivated. Wright proved that design could transform the world, to help people come closer to nature, to reflect the best of their character, to express solutions to vexing problems into the built world. Though he is no longer living, his ideas live on and are becoming stronger, not weaker, through designers like us who live on to carry forth the work of designing a better world.
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This is how Frank Lloyd Wright deals with a decorative vase that's too big for the window shelf: cut a hole in the glass! 
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Every one of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings includes his red "signature" tile; I found it at Taliesin!
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Even his building's doors are no simple design, but an elegant and expressive craft.
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Even the giant LEGO model of Taliesin is on display here!
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Little Libraries Built By Teens

7/29/2014

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For the second summer in a row, communitecture is working with Tivnu: Building Justice to construct small-scale installations for communities across Portland, Oregon. Tivnu is a Hebrew word that connotes right-action of a constructive kind, and this organization works to involve and activate teens from across the country by bringing them to Portland each summer to engage in a wide spectrum of service-learning projects.
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This year, in early July, we built three little libraries. First we bring the community hosts together with the teen-participants to discuss design ideas, issues of materials and scale, site locations and other considerations. Next, the participants draw up designs and present them to the hosts. Then we are ready to build!

With a small mountain of recycled wooden materials from the ReBuilding Center, we built three little library projects in a single day. Each library was built by a team of 3 to 4 participants who learned how to hold and use construction tools over the course of the day. One library turned out to be a miniature stage for puppet-scale displays, another was tall and vertical for large children’s books, and the third was quite huge and designed for a full-spectrum of shared items, including books.
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The following day, the teens took each library to its final community destination. One was in NE at a tea house, another in SE in a suburb, and the third was in the inner SE Brooklyn Neighborhood. These participants had never dug such deep and exact holes before, especially in the hard dry earth of summer, so they shared the task and quickly installed each project in a safe, stable, and permanent fashion.

These are small but extremely powerful projects. What this diverse group of teens built is a fantastic genesis each library’s story, facilitating teamwork and learning through service and partipation. And then the hosts of each little library will embellish and fill them until they are quite unique and appropriate for their community.

At this time last year (summer 2013), there were just over 9,000 little libraries that had been installed and registered in the world. Now there are more than 15,000! This is a quiet, constructive, doable movement to change the world through direct and creative community building. Free Little Libraries seem to be spreading with no signs of stopping!
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