Project TItle: Artful Restoration: A Safe Haven for Baltimore’s Youth

Student Project Team: Danielle Eads and Evan Burch

Instructors: Lucia Phinney and Schaeffer Somers

After mapping vacancy, transportation and social cohesion across the seam of Eutaw Place, a project for a youth art center emerged. The high rate of single parents and the low rate of affordable, available childcare inspired a safe and accessible center for youth. This, in conjunction with the presence of high and low art across the seam, was the catalyst for a program predicated on art and education. The site is located on the western side of the seam, at an abandoned block edge, with art paths stemming from the central hub to gallery outposts, creating a stitched seam condition and strengthening the social cohesion of the neighborhoods. The inclusion of safe transportation was also a vital element in the success of the program. In phase one, children would be transported to the art center after school, on the weekends or during the summer, until the neighborhood began to rehabilitate itself, at which point the revitalized art paths would provide safe routes for the young children to travel on from school to the safe haven. The art center includes related non-profits, live-in artists, studio space for the children and community space. Galleries along the art paths include galleries on the ground level and MICA student housing on the upper floor. The students have a partnership with the art center, and curate the galleries during exhibits.

About the studio:  Boundary Formations & Intensive Seams

A  collaboration of two instructors, Schaeffer Somers and Lucia Phinney, in the Spring of 2012 at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The studio explored Baltimore through extensive research, analysis, and synthetic experimentation as the basis for imagining a transformative intervention in what is referred to as a “down-cycling” city. Survey methods included GIS-based mapping of population demographics, urban health indicators, and geographic data including landforms, soils, and hydrology. High contrast seams in population age, income, education, housing vacancy, neighborhood amenities, and open/green space were framed as “ecotones”, an ecological concept for the overlap of two biomes, where two communities meet and integrate. The urban ecotones identified and mapped by the students became the fertile ground for group projects focused on an intensive site for architecture and landscape as part of an extensive network that fosters and intensifies biological and human flows, resource exchange, equity, reciprocity, and accessibility.