Urban Hike and Imprisoned Clouds

This morning we went on an urban hike through the a part of the canal system. We walked for about a 1 ½ to 2 miles through the London Outfall canal, which is close to the neighborhood we’re working in. The 17th Street canal was the big one that flooded during the storm, but the one we walked through definitely had some structural difficulty. You could see where there was new concrete poured and where Rebar was poking through the old areas. Some of the bridges and pipes that run across are pretty cool though, they have a really great honest functionality to them. So did the canal themselves, their purpose is overtly apparent and is the only thing on display. An instructor from Tulane took us on the tour, which is totally illegal but no one patrols the canals. When we got to our starting place a guy who was doing yard work asked us some questions like, “Whatcha y’all doing?” And we just told him that we were picking up garbage. And then another guy along the way looked over the wall and asked us if we were fixing their problems. It was kind of weird that it was so deserted, because it seemed like the perfect place for homeless people to hang out but there was absolutely no one. The little water that was there was gross, but it was really interesting to be inside this industrial infrastructure that makes the city function. Seeing the pumping stations and the drains that if they weren’t there the city would be underwater.

We spent the rest of the day in the studio talking about ideas we’ve been formulating about materials and their formal qualities. Lauren and I have been working on an idea of how to engage a community through materials. One of the ideas I had was how to reuse plastic grocery bags, because they are everywhere here. My first idea was to create Gambians, the chicken wire boxes that are usually filled with rocks that they use to reinforce earth cliffs near roads, but instead of rocks fill them with compressed plastic bags. The translucent quality of them was pretty cool. My idea was that we could tap the community to collect bags and involve them directly in the process. So, the Gambian idea is still on the table but today we presented some different ways of using the bags.

We’re trying an ironing method, because when we iron them they fuse together and create a plane that has some sort of structure, but I’m worried because they still look like grocery bags and I don’t want them to be perceived as trash. We tried folding them accordion style, almost like blinds, with cables running through them. And we tried embossing the plastic over itself to express an image or information. I’m not sure how it would work out in an actual bus stop because I don’t think we could prevent people from messing with it. We’re also developing an idea of how the shelter can be a porch for the community, a gathering place. At the end of the presentations we went around and listed off ideas that we liked in an attempt to pull out the ideas that are the strongest. The idea is to move away from the typical school structure of cultivating your own ideas, but to somehow combine everyone’s ideas into one cohesive idea that will be a shelter rather than 11 different ideas next to each other. The people in the neighborhood seem psyched about what we’re doing and are excited to have it as a beacon to the rest of the city expressing how Hollygrove is still here and has some good things happening.