Walking out of our office on Howard Street in South of Market, it sometimes feels like America couldn’t be more diverse (and divided).  Turning left and walking down to the end of our block on 5th Street, you may have a chance to see President Obama – who resides in the Intercontinental Hotel a couple of times a year when visiting SF,  while heading to the opposite side of the block, the corner of 6th Street, you will find yourself in the middle of America’s lost souls, forgotten citizens, with poverty and drug addiction unplugged.

Wikipedia refers to the SOMA neighborhood  as a vast and diverse stretch of warehouses, auto repair shops, nightclubs, residential hotels, art spaces, loft apartments, furniture showrooms, condominiums, and technology companies.

Within this mix, only a five minute walk from our office lies a beautiful ( and surprisingly) little known oasis-  The Howard Langton Community Garden – where 17 years ago people came together to create a beautiful mixture of plants, vegetables, birds and bees.  In the 80s the site used to be a playground, which over time degraded into what was referred to as the ‘ Needle Park’ and used for drug use/exchange as well as  sleeping ground for the homeless of the nearby Tenderloin.

With the help of SLUG (SF League of Urban Farmers) SOMA residents worked together with the city and over years of bureaucratic hurdles turned the plot into a community garden and opened about 17 years ago with the help of city funds and many volunteer hours.

The garden is part of about 35+ community gardens overseen by the City’s Recreation and Park Department. Membership is open to anyone interested in community/ gardening for a $35 annual membership fee and  a set number of work hours a year.  Since the neighborhood is still considered ‘ transitional ‘ the gate is locked but access is available through the membership– and anyone with an interest in the garden is welcomed.

While space for growing is limited, there are ample other options to enjoy the garden.  Whether one is just looking for a quiet space to relax,  enjoys the flowers or likes to watch the bees, chickens or fishes in the pond there is also an opportunity to connect with other people of all walks of life,  to share the joy of gardening and be part of the ever-growing ‘ urban farming’ movement.

If you are in the neighborhood – stop by and enjoy, but…

For a link to Howard Langton Community Garden click here.

See also “Cracks in the Asphalt:  Community Gardens of San Francisco” by Alex Hatch

Photos by David Hunter

If you’re out in the Sunset this Saturday evening you might want to drop by Problem Library at 1288 15th Avenue where two O+A artists, Olivia Ward and Jasper Sanidad, will be unveiling new work.  Olivia’s sculpture and shadowboxes (above) and Jasper’s videos provide a whole new angle on “crazy interiors.”  Also participating are Geoffrey Colburn, Rich Kenciano and Shane York.  The weirdness begins at 8:00 p.m.

To see a preview click here.

Primo will be in New York this Thursday to speak about versatility in workplace design at the sold-out Worktech 13 conference at the Time and Life Building in Rockefeller Center.  That’s versatility in the broadest sense of giving companies highly adaptable and creative work environments tailored to a workforce that is always in motion.

Worktech is an annual series of business conferences that brings together forward-looking leaders to envision how the modern workplace is changing.  This year there are conferences in New York, Singapore and London.

Joining Primo at the New York event will be Harald Becker, Senior Design Strategist for Microsoft’s Office Envisioning unit; Greg Lindsay, author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next; Julie Seitz, Director of Workplace 2020 at Coca-Cola Company–and many other designers, writers and business futurists.

For more information about Worktech 13 click here.

Above:  Versatile workplace at Tagged, San Francisco

Photo by Jasper Sanidad

Earlier this year I volunteered myself and Primo to construct the stage sets for our son’s elementary school’s 4^th grade play. I had high hopes of proposing something creative and out of the box like one of my favorite set designs for the 1923 play  Death of Tarelkin by Constructivist Varvara Stepanova.

ttp://www.radford.edu/rbarris/art428/constructivist%20theater.html

But then I found out the play would be Annie  with six different scenes, including a mansion scene,  a President’s office, and a New York City street scene.  The mansion scene needed to look like a mansion and New York needed to look like New York, and with only ourselves as design and fabrication crew,  I resigned myself  to making the best representations I could out of cardboard.

Though architects have often dabbled in set design,  Jacques Herzog, doesn’t think highly of most of their designs: “The stage sets created by architects or even by artists are perfectly dreadful – The pitfalls of simply transferring one’s own style, one’s typical trademarks from construction site to proscenium stage seem almost inescapable.”

I think the success of a set design by a non-set designer like an artist or an architect  is linked to an integrated collaborative process with crew and cast.  For example artist William Kentridge’s The Nose; he directed and did sets for a stagework that was very much an extension of his artwork.

The New York City Ballet in a grand collaboration had Santiago Calatrava create several structures, and called their entire season The Architecture of Dance.  Much of the choreography was influenced by the sculptural set objects created by Calatrava.

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/new_york_city_ballet/pas_de_deux.asp 

And Jaques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron did the sets of Verdi’s Attila for the Metropolitan Opera, while Muiccia Prada did the costumes.

http://www.interiordesign.net/article/532250-From_Skyscrapers_to_Stage_Sets.php

Interestingly, I most enjoyed making architecture (a scaled down Chrysler Building) for the New York scene of Annie.  The play is at the end of this month, and I can’t wait to see how everything works out. I look forward to my next opportunity to try my hand at stage design. Berkeley Rep maybe?

And just today as we are about to post my blog entry about theater set design I get this interesting show announcement from Southern Exposure that takes collaboration to a whole new level. An initial group of 3 artists building a set, 3 artists respond to the set by creating objects to fill the set, and then a final group of artists will write a piece based on their response to what has been created before them (set and props.)  I will be checking it out!

For details click here.

Have you ever noticed the four-story glass mosaic in the lobby of San Francisco’s Masonic Memorial temple in Nob Hill?

Many people have seen it, but few know anything about its artist. Completed in 1958, the piece which depicts the California masons’ heritage, is the work of Emile Norman who developed his ‘endomosaic’ technique to create the huge panels. The process used everyday materials such as tiny pieces of metal, parchment, felt, linen, silk, natural foliage, thinly sliced vegetation, shells and soils (from every California county)—which was then ground up and mixed with stained glass colors and epoxy resins. Even though the window is over 50 years old, it still reminds us to always look beyond the tried and true ideas for design inspiration and that very ordinary materials can be repurposed in a beautiful way.

Go check it out!

Flckr photos by BrianinLR and AcroYogi

In the land of interior design, spaces are consciously designed to ignite certain feelings, transform daily actions and inspire creative, collaborative thought. But stepping outside the door confronts us with unpredictability and often disorder. The clash of the controlled environment with the chaos of the corner proves enriching. O+A’s Howard Street home off South of Market’s 6^th Street corridor provides the urban backdrop that reminds us it’s often the outside space that shapes our day.

Photographs by Holly Hursley

Back when I was a student at SJSU, during my free time (when I wasn’t trying to meet assignment deadlines, tutoring at the student center, internshipping in the city, or front desking at my part time at the salon) my passion was street dance/b-girling and performing. It was a way to blow off steam and get away from the day to day grind – not to mention a great excuse to hang out with my girlfriends. Although I don’t perform anymore, the dance scene is still very much a passion to me. It is a creative outlet that doesn’t involve drawing at a desk, but in turn helps inspire ideas for some of the projects I’m working on.


One of my favorite choreographers is Bryan Tanaka, look him up for his extensive resume of amazing projects he’s worked on, as well as the list of superstar talents he’s worked with. Here’s a video that discusses his creative process. What inspires you?

written by: Renee Laput-Mendoza

Quite a flurry of attention from Japan lately– reporters from two Tokyo-based magazines, Wired Japan and Axis stopped by the office not long ago and the results are now hitting newstands on the Ginza.

Regrettably we have no one on staff who reads Japanese so we can’t vouch for the text here, but we can say that Wired had a good long talk with Denise and spent a fair chunk of one afternoon photographing her and touring the office.  And Axis spoke to Verda and Primo a few months ago.  Japan’s long tradition of collaborative work environments makes it a natural for our aesthetic.  We think that’s what they’re saying here…

Photo by Zen Sekizawa

“I was given geodes as a child, and I always thought of them as these magical things. Living in Southern California, my family would take road trips in the summer and we’d drive through this area outside of Death Valley called Red Rock. There were these amazing desert formations. I would sit in the backseat and dream. I knew there had to be geodes out there, and I’d fantasize about finding one and being able to crack it open, a treasure that no one’s ever seen before. That really excited me — the idea that there could be something that had been there for thousands or millions of years, and that you’d be the first person to see it.”







See more of her work here: Elyse Graham

This week, Santa Clara broke some new ground by blanketing its entire city with free public WiFi. The public WiFi network spans across 19 square miles, covering the 118,000 residents that live in the city. The free public WiFi network is part of an electric meter upgrade program provided by the city’s utility provider, Silicon Valley Power. The new “smart” meters allow the company to wirelessly retrieve electricity and water usage data from homes, while also allowing its employees to connect while they’re out on the field.

read more here: Article