Asbury Manor Community Meeting

On March 4th, a community meeting was held at the Wadsworth Avenue Evangelical Church. Art-En 301 students shared a presentation, which is being transformed into a Kickstarter campaign. A lively community discussion followed the presentation and many good ideas were gathered. Here is a link to the powerpoint.

Ashley Porter, owner of Porter Consulting Engineers, met with us on March 6th and reviewed design proposals. He shared an official map that extended our understanding of the site, which sits not just in the floodplain, but is actually in the floodway. This was surprising news as our research showed only that Asbury Manor is in the floodplain. This new information requires some reconsideration of the site and our plans for the shelter. As a result of this news, we will have to prepare a topo survey and secure special permits that we had been told previously would not be needed.

Mr. Porter reviewed student concept designs and provided excellent structural recommendations, which we are working with. We will meet with Mr. Porter again on Monday March 25th to review designs and set our project budget, as well as a date for doing the required topographical survey. Once final designs have been determined, Porter Consulting Engineers will prepare the required engineering certifications for the project.

Betsy Damon and the Keepers of the Water: serendipity at its best!

On February 27th, Betsy Damon presented a lecture (Water Rules: Life) and shared information about her international work via Keepers of the Water, an international effort to work with communities worldwide to use community-based art strategies to spearhead local efforts to restore landscapes, communities and water.

Amelie Xie's post on Betsy's visit sums up what I love most about collaboration and that is serendipity and coincidence! You can visit Amelie's post by clicking on her blog link (see menu on right of screen re: students)

In my wildest dreams I never would have anticipated that one of my students would have known of Besty's project in Chengdu, but low and behold, Amelie grew up in China and is familiar with the project! Here is a link to Besty's Keepers of the Waters project (or google Keepers of the Water). Click here is a link to an article in YES magazine on Betsy's work in China.

From Bus Shelters to Stormwater Innovations to Building Commons and Community Capacity

Our thinking has been expanded by Bill Stricktland's visit last week. Bill is the founder and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA. These two programs -- Manchester Craftsman Guild and Bidwell Training Center -- offer free training and enrichment programs to those with greatest need. Manchester offers after school art classes, while Bidwell Training Center focuses on workforce development and job training.

Students working at Manchester Craftsman Guild from 

Bidwell Training Center (link to image)

Mr. Stricktland is a visionary who believes that beautiful environments bring out the best in us and inspire excellence. Likewise, he believes that when we surround ourselves with beauty and operate from a deep sense of respect for others, our spirits are elevated and we are able to achieve great things.

This is a vision I can buy into.

Bill's visit helped me see that there might be a larger purpose behind the Asbury Manor bus shelter project. This site has such great potential for transformation. I see opportunities for an extreme makeover, grounded in sustainable and resilient design; one that models adaptive reuse and celebrates creativity. What a cool, one-of-a-kind site it could be. I can imagine stumbling on it as I stumbled on Piccasiette in France back in 1985.

Piccasiette

or Grandma Prisbey's Bottle Village

Grandma Prisby's Village

or something as unusual as the Watts Towers in LA....

Watts Towers....

Or Project Row House for the Third Ward in Houston, Texas?

Project Row House from ...

Project Row House from

How might these sorts of projects -- and many other cool and unusual projects -- influence our work at Asbury Manor? 

What about looking at the intersections of the natural and built environments, two distinct 'ecosystems' in which our lives unfold? Can the built environments that we create become more resilient in the face of changing natural systems?

Bill's visit has made me wonder if the bus shelter we have been imagining, envisioning and planning for could lead to something greater at Asbury Manor; something more than our initial goal of providing refuge from the weather while waiting for the CATA bus?

Would the residents want this? Would they be willing to work to help make it happen?

Bus Shelters

The bulk of our work this semester will involve development of a project begun last summer through a faculty-student collaborative research project Emma Cook's (AC alum '12). Emma did preliminary

research and planning for a bus stop at Asbury Manor 

in Meadville's 5th Ward. Art-En 301 will research a range of

options with a goal towards creating a kickstarter campaign 

to raise funds for the project. We will be exploring options for adaptive

reuse and/or repurposing materials; but more, we will be exploring how public/community-based/environmental art can develop social capital and lead to enhanced visioning for community design and transformation. Below are a few bus 

shelters to inspire our thinking.

Sculptor Christopher Fennell created the shelter in 2007 out of three retired school buses dating from 1962, ’72 and ’77. The shelter is located in Athens, Ga. See link for details. 

See link for details and discussion and more examples of this sort

This bronze sculpture is a bus station shelter made to look like a table - it was made by David Cerny [wiki] of the Czech Republic.