PHILLY WORKS

A wonderful day spent with Joel and Kate of EKE and HumanKind discussing all things great. A short preview of their part in a documentarty we are working on. The good life is very possible in Philadelphia. 

Perched behind and on top of a mid-19th century solid construction that had been the storefront and shop of a silversmith for its most recent life, Joel and Kate have built and adapted the living quarters above, and the spacious 3 story shop/studio/ warehouse behind, into a powerful example of a place to conduct work and life that blends, overlaps, and compliments. They have plans for the street-facing storefront too. As well as the adjoining lot that expands into am amazing hidden green space off of Germantown Ave. The first, a showroom/collaborative design space that can showcase work to Germantown Ave. The second, a semi-public, and collaboratively produced sculpture garden. They have plans for everything.  

And this is the very feeling you get when eating an amazing multi-course brunch with the them that they cobbled together from the local Weavers Way co-op. They have plans on how to directly make their life their own, and it is something to see. 

Every part of their home and workshop/ studio has the feeling of having been deliberated over and acted upon. The parts that are in process or that are left in states of disarray, have the feeling of inevitability applied to them via their surrounding and wonderfully thought out spaces. It isn't a place for anyone that does not want to live and work in a space in process though. It looks as if it will always have parts in motion. 

We filmed Joel and Kate for most of the day and managed to make it through our interview questions despite the many enjoyable diversions.. The questions were largely talked through prematurely due to our already established conversation. Some of the more critical points that continued to come up were in relation to their rather hard to define practice, and related to a statement from Joel that seemed to deal with such complexity- "There are always two truths to any one question." This is paraphrased, and to be fair, Joel said this was specifically the way that he and Kate approached things. I'm not sure if he is concerned about the scientific validity of the statement.. Only its relevance to the life they are living. 

They come from different backgrounds. Joel, studied cultural anthropology outside of the States which later helped format his specific approach to design and fabrication. Kate received her MFA here in Philadelphia at UPenn. The two convergent directions has produced and interesting alchemy of sorts. Something along the lines of what you see when looking around their multi-use space. They work as both fabricators, producing products and work based on their expertise in concrete, metal, wood, and polymers. They also are established artists, having completed many public art works over the last 5 years since meeting, that both compliment and contrast their work. One of these public art works can be seen at the Temple University School of Medicine here in Philadelphia. It is a compilation of 55 suspended examples of the wonderful microscopic world that might inspire the medical students that walk underneath them in the large volume of the main public hall. The overall exhibit is 120' x 30' x 30'.

But I would have to say that there home is their greatest accomplishment to date. It seems to represent much of their collected thinking about their belief in the way one should pilot ones life. If it were a ship, it would be a very well designed one. A very sea worthy vessel. But not a new one. One that was assmebled from various, curious, well wrought components. They have cut into the roof of the shop/ studio portion of their world to provide a more inspiring work space based on their direct observations of other historic creative spaces they have visited and worked in.  By creating a large (approximately 12' x 24') skylight, they have allowed natural lighting to reach through both floors, saturating the entire space in wonderful reflected light. It makes one question why we ever went in the direction of closed artificially lit workspaces during the day.. On top of this space is something even more surprising. Reached through an unpredictable door in the back of the master bathroom (a story in itself), is the rooftop that is the home of a luscious green roof and a very content beehive. 

I want to say more about Joel and Kate, and their space..  but will leave it to them when they talk about there practice and intentions in the documentary we are assembling, bit by bit, with these wonderfully productive folk that make Philadelphia such an incredible place. 

Sometimes, Philly will surprise you with its humility. Take, for example, Peg & Awl, who make objects for the home from reclaimed material. Margaux and Walter Kent are nationally among the most successful Etsy stores offering handmade goods. Yet, their home-shop is easily mistaken as another peg in Fishtown’s aging stock: modest white front, cement stoop, screen door.

Untill you get inside. On a recent Philly Works trip, Will, Katie, Adam and I visited the couple and their two young sons, to see the workspace and learn a little more about the family business.  Their home is an expression of straightforward, noiseless living from another age with broad, white, stucco walls between wooden frames accented with old-growth wood, precious strips of aged leather and turn-of the-century style portraits. In their spacious backyard, a thick, winding oak tree with an old-fashioned rope-tie swing and a raised garden plot with bushels of kale ready for harvest. As one child naps several feet from a corner workspace where his mother presses leather and solders P&A's signature mini-journal necklaces, another child wanders curiously on the floor grabbing at Wills’s camera, a new object in a home full of tools.  

“It’s a constant education,” Walter points out. The sons, who are four and one years old, help their mother use a letter stamp, pick-up sandpaper, wooden blocks, or sketch with pencil and paper while sitting on the floor.  Here, family, lifestyle and work are nearly indistinguishable. “The way our company works, we find something we need or something happens to come up as we’re living,” Walter Kent explains, citing the P&A tool caddie as an example. “There’s a void somewhere and we think ‘hey this would be awesome.’”

Margaux, who is a photographer, metal smith and leather worker, met Walter, a woodworke, painter and carpenters son, when Walter was still in military duty. They couple, who are both from suburban Philly, have been living, working and collaborating together ever since. Their success is a blend of unique personal chemistry—Margaux's ambitious dreaming bounded by her husband’s logical nature.  Walter once did all his work in the basement and credits his wife's gumption for their outdoor woodshop, a space that made the P&A business official. On the day we met them, Margaux talked excitedly about a next stage workspace/storefront outfitted with solar panels and P&A's plans to collaborate with Philly Food Forrest on an edible backyard business. Walter quietly showed us the woodshop he built.

Their complementary talents and traits applied to a collection of rare, historic materials make P&A’s signature fabrications: Personal journals bound in saddle leather; totes made from waxed canvas from WWII gun slings; a kitchen table made from reclaimed oak from a demoed hardware store, surfaced in milk paint and coated in tung oil. As P&A grows they continue building relationships with other makers including seamstresses, textile workers, sculptures, artists, and even urban farmers. “The potential is endless,” Margaux says of Philly’s collaborative making power.  “So where to start with endlessness? There are so many people here making things. It’s kinda weird, in the world of internet and things being so expansive, I feel  like people are trying to get back to being close to other people who make things and actually be in a community where what you do and how you live works better as a result of actually being in the presence of other humans.”  

Please join the Philadelphia Art Alliance on Thursday, March 22, for a presentation by members of the design collaborative PhillyWorks, who will be staging an invitational exhibition entitled "Philadelphia Qualities of Life" in the PAA galleries in the Fall of 2012.The speakers in each of their lectures throughout the year will be addressing the theme "Qualities of Life" in Philadelphia. This month's speakers will be Yael Lehmann from The Food Trust, Matt Honea from Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) and Tiffany Ledesma Groll from the Philadelphia Water Department to talk about the Philadelphia Green City, Clean Waters Plan.The program begins at 7:00 PM with an approximate run time of 1 hour, and is FREE and open to the public. Register HERE!

This weekend I found some wonderful old tools at the West Philly Tool Exchange. I paid a small amount of money and spent a little bit of time with my son on Saturday cleaning up and talking about the value of the tools. We discussed how good tools will last a very long time and can be used for an amazingly diverse set of purposes if one is clever and cares for them. The most important thing I emphasized to my son is understanding your tools and their value. Once you have this knowledge, you add their value to your own, making much more possible.

This is largely how I view what we are doing with Philly Works. We are finding value and doing our best to give these values new possibility. For several years we put a show together during Design Philadelphia of fantastic things designed and made in Philadelphia. The aim of the exhibits were to celebrate the makers, their processes, the tools, their spaces, etc. We also began the task of putting an online tool together that could better communicate these values to the Philadelphia Community. We have a long way to go with this, but are excited by the potential it will offer. We have been promoting the idea of easier collaboration, creating the argument that Philadelphia is, in a very real sense, a large and thriving workspace with abundant tools and affordances embedded in the everyday around us. 

With the Qualities of Life Exhibit our aim is both to create discussion and attempts at collaboration among the same people we have been working with over the past few years- specific to topics that are critical to the “why” of our daily activity and efforts in Philadelphia.  In turn, the Qualities of Life Exhibit will hopefully give us an opportunity to better articulate what we want Philadelphia to be and what our place is in it. Through the various ways we will be documenting the processes involved, and through activities dedicated to reflecting on and synthesizing the feedback of those participating and accomplishing work, we hope to create a better understanding of what values Philly Works can offer as we move forward. 

How can we connect and leverage the light social network of creative talent with the more tangible, old-school networks of physical space, tools, and projects? How can we do this and create new opportunity along the way for what these combined talents could offer the larger questions and problems our communities are challenged with? We want others to recognize that we are at a special moment and place that gives us an enormous contextual basis for carrying a conversation forward- about what it means to create, make, and produce as a culture; to participate directly in the real world that surrounds us. It was, and is, tied to our identity as a city. 

These are the desires and questions we are engaging with. The question of “What is Philly Works?” will have to wait a bit longer to be fully flushed out.  It is the wonderful part about all of this, the not knowing. It means we are exploring new territory, and that is pretty exciting. 

Yesterday a meeting on "Safe Streets for Healthy Neighborhoods" took place at the Center for Architecture, conducted by the Bicycle Coaltion, Brown & Keener Urban Design, RBA Group, LRSLA and the Community Design Collaborative. The group, for the past 6 months or so, has been working on a proposal for safer, more bike-friendly streets in Philadelphia. The plan focuses mainly on 15th Street and 13th Streets, which are heavily frequented by bikers avoiding Broad Street. Unfortunately, drivers use these roads heavily as well, avoiding intersections with poorly timed traffic lights.

After numerous workshops with community members, avid bike riders, Street Department representatives, and even those opposed of such bicycle accommodations, the group has come up with a very reasonable, viable and innovative plan for the City of Philadelphia's tiny streets. With parking on both sides of these "grid" streets, there's really no room to add any sort of bike lane, so it immediately became apparent that there needed to be a way for bicyclists to safely travel in the middle of the street. Solutions considered included bicycle sharrows (share the road symbols), occasional speed "humps", and other subtle methods of traffic calming (without actually changing the speed limit).

The result is a very interesting and invoking plan, that most of us (although there were lots of other designers and bicycle advocates in the room) felt pretty strongly would succeed, pending they tread lightly but also create a sense of pride and ownership, involving commuities in the process.
So what's next? The team hopes to work closely with the Water Department, to essentially kill to birds with one stone. The Water Department aims to put more green infrastructure in our city streets, such as bumpouts and bioswales to collect rain water and sewage overflow during heavy rainstorms. The "Safe Streets" team sees an opportunity in this, since creating bumpouts at intersections was one of their most feasible solutions.

Speed humps in conjunction with these bumpouts at intersections would also be a cost efficient solution for traffic calming. Each intersection with curb ramps, built with PENDOT Standards costs $8,000. That's $64,000 per intersection! If the speed bump is raised 3" above street level, the sidewalk ramp only has to be raised another 3" above that, to reach sidewalk height.
Cool Stuff! If you are interested in joining in on their next meeting, it will be on Tuesday, March 20th.