Urban Design: A Textile Collection
Urban– Design: A textile collection
Awarded the ICFF Editors Award for Materials and Textiles 2021
When I lived in Chicago years ago, I distinctly remember people saying that everyone in Chicago has an architectural vocabulary, even the cab drivers can tell you about Louis Sullivan and this city that was planned by Daniel Burnham. The idea that a city can be designed for people, all people, to live in and flourish. Fast forward to the 20-teens, a time and place where small towns are booming, and as they grow the city planning has changed. In this new city the spaces that, in Burnham’s plan, are public, equitably distributed and cared for by the city, are now falling under private stewardship allowing these half public half private spaces to limit its use to those who are allowed. The place where I live, Austin, Texas is one of these cities.
As I collected inspiration for the Urban– Design collection that I launched at ICFF in November, I dug deeply into the archive of conversations I have had with neighbors and things that are causing people to talk. I am in a city that is transforming before my eyes, with old and new ideas colliding, creating a conversation among even the most average person that turns toward words like gentrification, land codes, urban trails and a new transit system in a place defined by roads and highways. All of this change is leading to high housing prices, and mass waves of newcomers from big cities looking for a slower life. This rapid urbanization affects everyone who is here, as regular citizens are constantly asked to come together in the form of neighborhood associations, normally in place to make decisions about lawn care and where a new stop sign needs to be, are invited to decide if a developer who has dollar signs in his eyes should be granted a “variance” to build a thirteen story building right next to a single story ranch house. Everyone is invited, and everyone is affected by the outcome.
I set out on this mission of design, as an observer of our culture, the subject that surfaced, urbanization. The history of this movement dates back to the destruction of our first city, NYC by Levittown and the first interstate highway designed to cut through the ghettoized city designed to get people of one race out of it as quickly as possible. The cities and how they evolve are the philosophy books of our time. The things that shaped our cities of the past are that of a social order, our cities are the places where people are, and where we will continue to be as cities everywhere are growing by leaps and bounds, constantly creating a conversation and patchwork of ideas about how these places will evolve and what is the correct way to do it.
As a designer, I find myself constantly making artifacts that are visual diaries and evidence of these places. Using screen printing and fabric as my medium, in the most appropriate form to express my subject, referencing that of street artists and pop artists, getting the work out as quickly as possible, applying in unassuming ways to surfaces and objects that no one would imagine could hold hidden messages of a new movement: the revitalization of the city.
The Urban– Design collection is that of a walk down the street, illustrated moments, like the overgrown foliage that no one maintains, creating a wall only in the summer months where it previously was not. The collection is based on the ideals and implementation of urban design that has aged, changed, been redeveloped and will become something that ultimately the people own through living in a place in time.
This collection was previously un-named, but has now taken the form of the following prints:
Break the Grid, Patina, Community Greens, Public Spaces, Tributary, Encounter, Wander.