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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.

The Resource Exchange is part of a growing effort in Philly, including Recycled Artists-In-Residency, to divert precious materials from landfills by connecting them to artists and creators. Learn more here. Drop by RE from 10am-6pm on Saturdays or call for an appointment, 267.997.0060.​​ 

The Resource Exchange [RE], a nonprofit salvage house located in Port Richmond, is gearing up to include an open work space as early as April.  By adding a place to sew, build, craft and teach workshops, RE hopes to complete the circle of creative reuse. “We’re looking to build an ongoing relationship with creative businesses in Philadelphia,” Karyn Gerred explains. “Reuse is a co-working relationship, it requires collaborative work.”

With an ever-changing inventory including fabrics, ribbons, beads, wood, architectural salvage, glitter, leather, glass and unusual odds and ends—sold up to 50% retail value—RE is already a haven for anyone with creative flair.  The workspace will further demonstrate the value of materials saved from the landfill.  “[The Resource Exchange] is not just a repository,” Gerred explains. “It’s about trying to demonstrate that found materials have inherint value by incorporating them back into creative projects.”

RE saves materials from theater and film sets, manufacture cut-offs and basement donations. With each visit, I’ve been delighted to find a rare piece—a yard of high-quality silk or burnt out velvet, a cut of woven leather, squares of copper, strips of dense felt, lumber, medical slides, hi-res photography from another land—just waiting for new use. Gerred, a former scenic painter and graduate of UArts, created RE in response to the “tremendous” waste generated from “temporary” creations in film and theatre. Since there is minimal recycling effort within the industry, Gerred, developed a “thrift-store for the arts.” Although there are costs and effort associated with salvage-- coordination, transport, storage, deconstruction, etc--RE aims to make salvaged materials ever more accessible to Philly creatives. Adding shared workspace will help bring the local remake community closer to the supply source and each other.