Go go grocery!!

We're on the internet!!!So we painted and cleansed the co-op grocery building by the 13th Street garden all last week, leading up to the CSA pick-up on Thursday. Documented here by Sean Thomas of the Old North Restoration Group. Woop woop. It was very satisfying to just go in there, get some clutter out, and paint it fun fun fun colors. I hope this leads to more usage of the building. Right now, it is used as the drop-off point for the CSA and some of the vendors for the North City Farmers' Market (which you should go to every Saturday 9-12, they take debit and credit cards as well as EBT cards and vouchers hooray!). It is still a total monster, but it's becoming lovable for strangers, too.
(Isn't it funny that the garden has started and is rocking a booth at the farmers' market while all we've given the building is some paint and reused wood? Either way, the building is on its way!)
many many hugs
Hitomi

Reconsidering Saint Louis

The Hug Life crew loves loves Andrew Faulkner. He loves the city and he loves his bike. (maybe a little bit too much, but it's a nice bike.) He invites "all community activists, developers, politicians, design professionals, artists, concerned citizens, and anyone with a love for Saint Louis" to Reconsidering Saint Louis: Forming a New Future.
The exhibition and dialogue is the graduate architectural thesis projects from this year and focuses on "adaptive reuse of existing structures and new visions for development within Saint Louis city and the broader metropolitan region."
It is going to be at:
1400 North Market St. (corner of N. Market and N.14th Street) in Old North St. Louis
Thursday May 14, 2009
6-9p.m.
See you there!

So Groc

We've mentioned in prior posts that we're working on designing a co op grocery store/kitchen incubator/artist's studio in Old North St. Louis. Our project is moving along slowly, with many fits and stops. But ultimately, it is moving forward. We're taking this existing building on 13th st and St. Louis ave. It sits on a large lot and has a small community garden funded by a grant from Missouri Foundation for Health. Our main goals with this project are to 1) provide a venue for healthy, good food in the Old North area, 2) create habitable, pleasant space, 3) reuse this old building in an interesting way.
Here are some images from the work we've completed so far.
That's an elevation DJ drew of the north side of the building. The grey part is the artist's studio. The boxes on the roof are greenhouses and the red part is the actual grocery store. The original building was built in the early 1900s. There was an addition made (the artist studio) in the 70s. At this point, much of the building was clad in ugly brick. Since the artists studios are distinctly different from the original building (where the grocery and incubator will be housed), we didn't feel right keeping the ugly brick veneer. Instead, we're proposing taking the brick off and exposing the concrete masonry unit construction.
This is a drawing Hitomi made of the same elevation that takes DJ's ideas further. Here, the blank, windowless walls are cut into to 1) allow light into the space, 2) help with ventilation, and 3) break up the facade, giving it a more human, less monolithic scale. Hitomi proposed the idea of cutting these notches into the wall (the lower half of the drawing) to do just that. We're thinking of covering the walls between these notches with advertisements for the grocery or simply, pictures of veggies and maybe installing benches along these spaces, as well.
This is a drawing I made that we all helped photoshop. It's of the loading dock/east/west facades. Here, we're exploring rooftop access and how that could work. We're proposing having a staircase that leads to the roof but begins inside the building. We're proposing this for safety reasons (Roofs are dangerous, you cant just have random people climbing up there willy nilly) and because it's kinda cool.

We made a rough Sketch Up model. It has helped us quite a bit with figuring out some of the spaces, but we're still far from done. The following screenshot looks down into the building. Please not the elevated deck/covered eating area on the right (south) side of the image. This deck will help to soften the transition from the inside of the building to the garden on the opposite side of the lot, as well as help enclose and define a playground we're proposing for this part of the site.


Here's a plan. Again, it's rough. The bottom rectangle house the grocery (far left), incubator (square-ish thing near the center), bathrooms and an office/storage space (far right). The rectangle above all that stuff is where the artist studios will be (note hitomi's notches along the uppermost/northern wall). The deck is the angled form at the very bottom.

I know these were all pretty superficial analyses of the building; we're still trying to work out all the kinks. So, please, forgive the roughness. But we'd love some feedback!

Hug Life,

Antonio Pacheco

Structure

how do we let this happen? why?

These pictures come from a building we found in Old North a few weeks ago. We saw it quickly go from being somewhat standing to... well, a pile of broken bricks and gnarled wood. It really struck me as something terribly profound and saddening, that a building could so quickly go from space to object, building to rubble. And it made me sad for St. Louis because I know this situation is far too common in this city and cities like it. I wonder how this happened and why we let it happen, still. Because we do still let it happen and it does, every day, every week; all of the time.

It made me wonder what we cherish as a people in terms of our history and legacy. Do we cling to simple-minded notions of a more chaste and simpler past or do we seek to preserve the physical remnants of those prior times by continually and creatively adapting and reusing them
But we don't, we havent. Throughout our recent history, we have allowed people and jobs and life to migrate from historical places to new ones, often at the expense of those left behind and at the expense of the natural environment. Through our laws and opinions, we reshape the landscape each and every day, little by little, rarely looking back or thinking about how today's actions impact our children or our grandparents. We have chosen to live our lives in the absolute present, searching for meaning and happiness in the sprawl and highways. And this old house, and every brick pile like it in St. Louis, is a direct result of that narrowly-defined way of life.

Will we ever change?

Well, yes. That's the whole point of what we're trying to do, I think; Change. I believe that it is our job to change the way our culture views the cradles of this contemporary society. That is, it's our job to convince people of the life thats left in those cities and educate them as to how they can contribute to and enrich that life and vitality. We can do this through not only examining what's there today, but envisoning what might be there tomorrow. This building represents a missed opportunity in such an endeavor. And yet, it can still serve as a tool for education because it is a casualty and just as we venerate and learn from both the castualties and survivors of war, we can learn from and through the buildings we have denied a future.

Hugz,

Antonio Pacheco

Building Profile: Grocery Co Op

The following pictures are from the building we're looking at in Old North. We've been asked to help design a grocery store/ Co-Op for this building. It seems like a really interesting project and I'm excited to take part in it. Right now, theres a bicycle building workshop being run out of the building in conjunction with the Old North Farmer's Market grant. It'll be interesting to see how we incorporate the past and current uses for the building in our attempt at rehabilitation.

The building itself used to be the distribution center for this horseradish company (!!), but that was a few years ago. It's been vacant til the bicycle shop moved there. It's a really big building that has lots and lots of space, but it's kinda dark. There's a cool refrigerator thing inside that really rocks. Ideally, there will be enough room (and there is) for the grocery/co-op and the bicycle shop and perhaps even some other sort of artsy space. There are nice concrete floors throughout the building.

It's maybe not as flashy or outwardly beautiful as some of the other buildings in this hood, but that's part of its appeal for me. It's like taking in that scruffy-looking, not-so-cute dog that follows you home. You know? Except we followed it home. and it's not really scruffy, just... bricky. But you get the pictures.

Hopefully, we can make something useful and awesome.

Hug it out,

Antonio Pacheco

A Sense of Plaza

These pictures are from a plaza we found in Old North in front of a church on 11th and Carr. It's a pretty sweet plaza. We really like plazas. And what's not to like? They're nice spaces designed to facilitate interaction between people. This one, however was empty til we got there. Then, it was really fun for a while.
According to DJ, this is probably the sweetest spot in St. Louis to skate at, as evidenced by this handrail. I think our love of plazas started wayway back when we watched this movie:

North City Farmers Market

This weekend, we took a trip to the Old North Farmers Market to have a chat with Julia, the coordinator for the market. It struck me how excited people were about the farmers market. There were people of all sorts there who seemed really happy that there was fresh produce in their neighborhood. And that, I think is a really special thing. We all deserve to have fresh food available to us, no matter where we live or who we are but somehow, St. Louis thinks it's okay for a large swath of the city to get by on fast food. Even though this famers market is tiny when compared to Soulard's or Maplewood's farmers markets, it seems to me to be the most genuine and effective. Not only is the food grower-produced (meaning that the person selling you that food has a meaningful relationship with what they're selling you), but it provides food to a part of the city that is drastically underserved by the major grocery stores and food providers.

Living in a city requires a certain level of interdependence that is vital for the functioning of the city's fabric as a whole. It seems that this city is very much intent on effecitively cutting out one segment of the population in terms of the reciprocation they need in order to be healthy enough to contribute to the city's wellbeing. But the North City Farmers Market represents a very important challenge to that thinking. It is helping to literally sow the seeds of tomorrow in the fallow earth of today.

For that reason, I appreciate this market a lot. It's a no brainer and it's about time.

Hugz,

Antonio

Crown Candy

Last night, the Dependent Study kids took a trip up to Old North St. Louis to have a conversation with Claire Wolff of the Urban Studio and Mikey Naucus of... lots of stuff. A synopsis/video of that inspiring conversation will be posted within the next few days as we figure out Final Cut Pro and get some intracurricular work finished up.

For now, I'll leave you with some pictures from our trip to Crown Candy immediately following the meeting with Claire and Mikey. We were trying to kill some time waiting for the bus, so we got a malt. I was SO down to try the 5 Malts in Half an Hour Crown Candy Challenge, but I was dissuaded by my colleagues. Regardless of that fact, Crown Candy was a great and yummy experience! It had been my first time both to Old North St. Louis and Crown Candy, but boy was it enjoyable. I felt there was a sense of progress there I have only dreamt of in other parts of St. Louis. There seems to be a sense of community there, a community that cares about not only where it's been, but where it might be headed. I think that sort of concern is what makes it a special place. And its people like Claire and Mikey and Phil Valko who are going to help take Old North St. Louis into an interesting direction.

Here are some silly pictures we took at Crown Candy. Until I can figure out my camera, we'll have to live with blurry pictures. I think DJ was in the bathroom or something when we took these pictures?
Hugz,

Antonio