Many sites are off to a phenomenally early start. Beautiful ideas are blossoming and people are coming together. This beginning stage of pure potential its quite possibly my favorite. I get to tell people to throw their doubts and concerns out the window and, for a moment, give their wildest dreams a voice. These nuggets of splendor and hope, no matter how far off they may seem to be at the moment, will be like polar stars in the night sky, reminding us where we’re going even if we’re not sure how to get there.
In the last two days I’ve met with two schools. Gladstone Highschool down in Gladstone, OR and Trillium Charter School up in the NE.
Gladstone has a class of students working on various sustainable living projects all focusing on the space of an undeveloped outdoor space in the center of their school building. My understanding is that the whole school has been recently renovated (rather immaculately) to lead certification. For some reason though, this space was overlooked and remains barren and rather disheveled. Perfect for placemaking!!! Its rather exciting, because now there’s so much more freedom for creative development. So far there are groups working towards a plaster mosaic, a vertical garden, a water catchment system, a mural, and a cob bench (I think that’s all of them). On Monday, Internato Erik and I went down to meet with the cob bench group.
We had met them two weeks earlier when local natural builder Jeremie Krehbiel taught us how to make cob. This time we sat down with a mound of potters clay and explored possibilities for bench designs. These were some of their ideas
Rather impressive if you ask me. It was oodles of fun!
Today I met with parents, teachers, and staff of the Trillium Charter School and talked about the transformation of their used-to-be parking lot into a vibrant educational social space. We brought the T-Horse there in October when they had a large community event. A lot of great ideas and concepts were produced and a dedicated placemaking class has been working on furthering ideas and surveying the community. With schools, long term, holistic design comes into play much more than in public community spaces and neighborhoods, so a big focus was on creating a master plan within which all the amazing ideas could be fit. Its going to be a challenging process, but everyone I’ve met there has so much talent and beautiful commitment to the schools community that Im more than confident we’ll be seeing some amazing places being made next summer.
That’s all for now. In December, I’ll be caroling (for the first time) with the community of Yamhill and 44th, we’ll see if I live to tell the story!
