Green Building Deconstruction Workshop With The Transformazium @ The Queens Museum

Oh the irony, I booked my trip back from NYC to see the Hold Steady play a benefit at The Braddock Library, only to find that the folks from North Braddock's Transformazium, Caledonia Curry,(AKA, Swoon) Leslie Stem, Dana Bishop Root, Ruthie Stringer will be talking at the Queens Museum the same day.

"Initially attracted to North Braddock because of the radically different set of resources it offered (in the form of abundant space and cheap real estate as well as a moody landscape of aesthetic decay), Transformazium rapidly realized a need to pause and examine the realities of their post-industrial neighborhood and build relationships with their new neighbors.

After doing a personalized tour of Detroit Disassembled, Transformazium will bring their experience living and working in a neighborhood that in many ways parallels neighborhoods in Detroit to QMA’s Detroit Project Room, and will use their Deconstruction activity book as a framework for generating questions, discussion, and reflection on the appeal of the post-industrial landscape, the challenges of relocation, the potential social and economic impact of Deconstruction on areas struggling with abandonment, and the possibilities for communication and exchange that can exist in a neighborhood."

Deconstruction: Coloring and Conversation with Transformazium
Saturday, November 12, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm, 2011
The Queens Museum

Transformazium Update In POP City: Braddock Deconstruction Workshops Tomorrow and Friday

Pop City has a long piece about progress on The Transformazium in North Braddock. I'm sure lots of us want them to just get it over with and get an exiting new art and community center up and running.

But these folks are not just talking the talk about sustainable reuse, they are using the building as a lab project and lesson in building deconstruction. The goal is to save as much of the building as possible and adapt it to reuse through as few steps as they can. If you've been to Construction Junction you know what that's about and also have a clue as to the precious quality unique material and craft went into buildings here.

"All reuse is a form of recycling, but not all recycling is reuse," says Brian Swearingen, the head of Construction Junction's deconstruction crew. "In deconstruction and reuse, we're taking that same material, but using it for the same purpose, or slightly altering it for another purpose. When you do that, you're saving energy, because you have less transportation costs, less energy costs, and no remanufacturing costs, which are high. A good example is a metal table. If you recycle that at a landfill, you have to put it on a truck, probably put it on a train, possibly put it on a ship, and send it maybe halfway around the world to make what is oftentimes a similar product."

Construction Junction was set up eight years ago by the Pennsylvania Resources Council to spearhead a movement in Pittsburgh away from disposing waste in landfills without exploring its other purposes. They operate a store, which accepts donations of reusable materials from individuals and businesses renovating or demolishing buildings, and sells those materials at a low cost so they can be repurposed.

Want to learn about this process, and the emerging industry developing around it? There's are workshops tomorrow and Friday.

Update--Crap, the link on POP City didn't work and I can't seem to easily find the details. One has to realise just how broke and pressured many of the organizations and people involved are.

Perhaps you can hunt this info out?

Braddock Redux

Transformazium

Construction Junction

Reuse Consulting

Famous Part Time Braddock Resident, Swoon On Art News Cover

One of the young faces at the recent Braddock Elks Lodge Chile Cookoff belonged to the Street Artist, Swoon who I think will be around putting effort into the Transformazium project in North Braddock. She is the subject of the current Art News cover story.

Transformazium Music Video from Joshua Tonies on Vimeo.

Video by Josh Tonies

"For the time being, Swoon's ambitions are now firmly landlocked. In late January, the artist headed off to the mountains of Virginia with her boyfriend, the artist Ben Wolf, who collaborates with her on some projects. She spent several weeks there making drawings and studying the architecture for an arts center she’s helping to build in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, in a community where jobs are scarce and the recession is deeply felt, as in much of small-town America. The centerpiece of the project is an abandoned church. "We're going to do some experiments to make the building more sustainable," she says, like constructing an energy-generating playground that will "make the little buggers work," she adds with a giggle. To raise money for this and other projects, Swoon sells editions of her work through several galleries, including Deitch Projects, New Image Art in Los Angeles, and Black Rat Projects in London, with prints and drawings priced from a rock-bottom $100 up to $30,000.

In her free time, Swoon loves to surf, though she confesses she's "terrible at it." She's also an avid traveler; last year she took a motorcycle trip across India. When she's in a strange city, she likes to ride her bike and explore abandoned structures and tunnels. In the studio, she listens to low-key music, like that of Philip Glass and Tom Waits, but once outside, she goes for New Orleans "bounce," as well as bands and musicians like Dirty Fingers, Girl Talk, and Mos Def—"basically music to dance to," she says.

As with many of her endeavors, the Braddock center, called Transformazium, has a socially ambitious agenda, but the end result is as much esthetic as political. "For me," Swoon says, the work "is about trying to understand the world, to gain a consciousness of what's happening, and then creating work that's a document of that process."

Here are some images that I hope capture the beauty of her Switchback Sea show @ Deitch Projects a few years ago.