Living in a Box

Welcome to the Welcome House (or: How Design Philadelphia will reinvent the city).

by Nathaniel Popkin

"I remember writing in my journal that I loved the idea of 'a city dialoguing with itself,'" says photographer Marianne Bernstein, who this year curates one of Design Philadelphia's seminal events, the Welcome House in Love Park. There, for each of 10 days (Oct. 4-13), a different artist will perform a daylong interactive piece inside a 10-foot glass cube.

"All of [the performances] will be interactive," explains Bernstein. "Anyone who stops by will become part of the art." Then, at night, a video of the previous day's performance will be projected on the cube. "I see the Welcome House as a catalyst for change, a portal for creativity," she says.

Bernstein has a history of orchestrating projects that engage people with each other and with the city. "The entire process becomes art," she says. "Many documentary filmmakers and theater directors also work this way. They have an idea, they work with others, and everything unfolds organically."

Collaboration, indeed, has made the Welcome House possible. Bernstein teamed up with Eugenie Perret, co-owner of Old City furniture gallery Minima and co-curator of last year's "A Clean Break," an exhibit of "smart" houses on Broad Street. Perret, who Bernstein calls Philadelphia's "doyenne of style," will turn the park into Design Philadelphia's public lounge (she'll also perform in the Welcome House on Oct. 7, knitting herself into a cocoon). Daryn Edwards of Interface Studio Architects transformed Bernstein's concept of a shelter for artists into the glass cube; Kurt Schlenbaker and Will Stanforth are heading up the build and installation; Ricardo Rivera of Klip Collective is producing the video. The project, presented by First Person Arts and InLiquid *^{(this line has been modified from its original published version)}, will culminate in November, when the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art will produce a multimedia exhibit of the artists' Welcome House experiences.

Collaboration is intrinsic to Design Philadelphia, now in its fifth year the nation's largest and most ambitious celebration of design's potential to remake the world. Day to day, it's what fuels so many of the city's most inventive artists, designers and software developers.

Mark Stehle Welcome Party: Jason Riley, Nicky Santore and Shawn Riley (L-R) at work on the Welcome House.

"What I see happening so often," says architect and industrial designer Beth Van Why, the event's project manager, "is people coming together over a shared idea. At Design Philadelphia, we see people interested in topics, not products, that lead to them collaborating throughout the year."

Neil Kleinman is the former dean of University of the Arts' College of Media and Communication and a senior fellow and faculty member at the university's still-nascent Corzo Center for the Creative Economy. He's an adviser to Design Philadelphia and a catalyst within the city's various overlapping communities of designers, artists and technology entrepreneurs. "These young entrepreneurs are remarkably bright, well-educated, generous, engaged, curious. They are willing to share." The result, he notes, is that the sum, in terms of the viability of ideas, is greater than the parts. "No," Kleinman corrects himself, "more than that: These conversations create a new sum and new parts."

Integral to all this is the impact on the city. "My role is to help to create the city I want to live in," says Kleinman. "Without my ego, my agenda," he adds with practiced calibration, "getting in the way."

Longtime design advocate Hilary Jay co-founded Design Philadelphia in 2005 with former UArts faculty member Jamer Hunt. Jay, who has been a jewelry designer and the Inquirer magazine's design columnist, is the executive director of the Design Center at Philadelphia University, which administers Design Philadelphia. (Full disclosure: From 2007 to 2009 I have been Philadelphia University's writer-in-residence and an adjunct professor in the School of Liberal Arts.) Jay is quietly intense and reflective about the role of design in imagining the city.

"Design is a thread that runs through everything," she says. "I've selected to imagine that through the design disciplines we can run threads through the bigger issues of sustainability, economic justice, ecology, because design has a unique ability to be an agent for change. If we can build a better mousetrap, we can build a better city."

"The bottom line for Design Philadelphia, she says, "is imagining Philadelphia. It's all about what we can be." She is, indeed, a careful urban observer. "We are shifting," she notes, referring to the city's ongoing economic recalibration. The impressive growth in Design Philadelphia — from 55 events in its first year to more than 125 this year — and the event's emergent impact on the citywide conversation reflects and reinforces the shift.

When I ask her how, in a city of countless design mistakes and seemingly endless missed opportunities, the event can ultimately have deeper impact on policy, she notes the role of young people. "I see it as beyond a festival at this point. It's really more visual and vocal advocating. Students end up staying. The energy is everything. I put my faith in the little guys." When I press still, she is matter-of-fact. "I have to look at the Piazza. This is a guy [developer Bart Blatstein] who is a strip-mall king. So I hope for every misstep, there's a real step."

It's good, if limited, evidence. The Piazza at Schmidts, the work of architects Scott Erdy and Dave McHenry, is extraordinarily well designed; moreover, its presence — who it attracts and how it reinforces the urban fabric — amplifies the very energy of which Jay, a longtime Philadelphian, is so justifiably proud. The Piazza asks us to pay attention, to notice, to imagine. Doing so, we might realize we can design things better and that, indeed, new sums and new parts — new urban forms — are possible. What might Philadelphia therefore become?

Jay Corless, who has spent the last two months traveling among 35 American cities in search of best practices and innovation in design and the creative economy, found in Philadelphia a city well-immersed in transformation. Corless and his partner, Sali Sasaki, are former United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) consultants who worked on the International Creative Cities Network. Corless has worked on the business plan for the London Design Festival and helped prepare London's 2012 Olympic bid. He worked on last year's Design Miami. This summer, in search of the American creative economy (beyond New York and Los Angeles), and emboldened by dreams of Steinbeck and de Tocqueville (Corless is American; Sasaki, born in Japan, was raised in France), they invented a project called Cities X Design.

"In the American context, Philadelphia is unique," Corless says. Among the most advanced 10 to 15 cities, with a well-established design and arts community, strong institutions and a major annual event, in UNESCO-speak the city also has a high cultural heritage index. That means its history of innovation and production is alive in the minds of creative people, today (a nice example is the Design Center at Philadelphia University's just-opened exhibit "Lace in Translation," a ravishing conversation between contemporary artists and the lace patterns of the 19th-century Quaker Lace Co.). Critically, he notes, "Design Philadelphia and the London Design Festival are the only two in the world that employ the city as an open-source platform for ideas."

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We might therefore think of early October as a time to experiment. One of Jay's aforementioned little guys, Andrew Dahlgren, the industrial designer who last year founded the Web site Made in Philly (madein-philly.com), has taken the cue. At Design Philadelphia, Dahlgren will curate "Philly Works," a survey of objects designed and made in the city, with a particular emphasis in the former "workshop of the world" on documenting production.

Dahlgren, who came to Philadelphia to study industrial design at UArts, was impressed immediately by the sense of collaboration and openness. As Van Why observes, "As soon as you're open to changing the city, the city is open to you."

"Philadelphia," says Dahlgren, "is sort of this really awesome scale: big enough that there's a lot going on, small enough you can call up anyone. Everybody is willing to talk to you."

Both Dahlgren and Van Why participate in Green Village Philadelphia, a design collaborative inventing "restorative urban design." Dahlgren is program director of the group's Urban Studio. Their goal, long in discussion, is to create a new kind of neighborhood where food production and wellness are accounted for in design. At Design Philadelphia, Dahlgren will present one aspect of their work, a rainwater collection system for the Philadelphia rowhouse (there is nothing commercially available that's appropriate for Philadelphia). It's a project of Green Village, the Water Department and New Kensington Community Development Corp.; the exhibit, Dahlgren hopes, will attract new ideas and partners.

Strikingly, so much of the recombinant, expansive energy that surrounds Design Philadelphia has emerged during a recession that's hit design firms particularly. Moreover, the event itself is in flux. Jay's contract with Philadelphia University, the administrator of the event since its inception, is up. University President Stephen Spinelli Jr. says he isn't sure about the relationship. It appears to be a matter of raising enough overhead. "I believe a concerted effort by interested parties might pull it off. Maybe the effort is ongoing and we shall see," he told me in an e-mail. Jay, for her part, says, "Design Philadelphia has to move forward because it's so integral to Philadelphia's reputation."

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But the recession, which deferred ambitious plans on the part of some participants, has opened up other opportunities. "There's something good about a good crisis," says Kleinman, echoing President Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Kleinman has taken the opportunity to nudge together Innovation Philadelphia's Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit, a big-picture event taking place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center Oct. 5 and 6, and Design Philadelphia. Now, the two events are presented jointly under a shared October calendar called Next Up Philly. Critically, says Innovation Philadelphia President and CEO Kelly Lee, it's an open calendar. Anyone can add an event. The point, she says, is "to promote a broader celebration of innovation."

Not everyone has supported the move. Some, in the city's "grassroots" entrepreneurial communities, decry Innovation Philadelphia, a nonprofit economic development agency, as cumbersome and ineffective. To them, moreover, it feels inauthentic. They see little direct benefit from the Summit. Sensing this, Kleinman, who sits on the group's advisory board, has set out to make it more "porous" to the grassroots. Lee agrees. Aligning the event with Design Philadelphia and others, like Ignite Philly and Fashion Week, she hopes, will incite "a lot of cross-pollination."

But Lee, a native Philadelphian, has already given the city something of value — the first economic assessment of the creative economy, a study called "Creative Footprint." The 2008 report says it's an industry worth $60 billion to the region; it employs 766,000 in relatively high-paying, knowledge-intensive work (a follow-up will gauge the impact of the recession on employment). By qualifying an industry sector still only vaguely understood, the numbers help make a political case. They also form a label: Philadelphia as a strong and variegated hub of designers, software developers and artists.

That may already be widely understood. This June, in partnership with building products distributor C.H. Briggs, DuPont opened a Philadelphia design center for the synthetic material Corian. (It is worth noting an economic shift: The Corian studio opened just as plans were finalized to close the DuPont Marshall Laboratory in Grays Ferry, where auto paint was developed and tested since 1917.)

The contemporary space in the Marketplace Design Center is meant to showcase Corian's flexibility as a building product much beyond the kitchen counter. "There is nothing the material won't allow us to do," notes Luis Arias, C.H. Briggs chief marketing officer (indeed, last year the Seekoo Hotel in Bordeaux, France, opened, clad entirely in "Glacier White" Corian). As Arias explains, the economic downturn presented an opportunity to tap a strong design market. After New York and Milan, the Philadelphia Corian design center is the company's third. "In times like this," explains Arias, "it's even more important to invest in and drive strategy. It is not the time to hold the cards close."

And so "with stars aligned," Arias of C.H. Briggs and North American commercial marketing manager for DuPont Surfaces Elizabeth Lawson agreed to help sponsor Design Philadelphia. This kind of corporate support, says Jay, "reinforces the message that design ... is vital to the economic health of the city."

Lawson, for her part, says she was "blown away" by Design Philadelphia. The company agreed to sponsor the event's Dialogues on Design series and forged a partnership with the industrial design program at Philadelphia University, where the product will be employed in studio this fall.

Lawson also imagined having designers turn the material into public benches. Some 40 designers accepted the invitation to design a Corian bench (in Glacier White) and a dozen were chosen to be installed near Café Cret on the Parkway; in the small enclosed park at 17th and Chestnut; and along the Schuylkill Banks. There, you'll find two of the most interesting benches, Francis Cauffman's spiraling, natural-form "Twist" and Josh Owen's "Philadelphia Stoop," a sharp pair-down and reimagining of the stoop's potential for socializing. Owen, a Philadelphia University professor of industrial design, says the project is "precisely the kind of activity that can enhance a deeper civic understanding of design's transformative power on the urban scale. It's also a way to remind us that we are all stakeholders in this conversation."

Artists and designers, says Chris Garvin, who has replaced Kleinman as interim dean of UArts' College of Media and Communication, sometimes forget they are part of the conversation. "Artists are not outsiders in society," he says. "They are insiders, integral. Artists and designers make the world around us," he argues. "Why give up that power?"

Garvin, who trained as a painter at Ohio State, is a grassroots entrepreneur — his projection technology firm Educated Guesswork partners with institutions around the city. He is warm, affable, optimistic and also sharply analytic. The current energy of the grassroots, he argues, isn't near enough.

"We're working way under capacity for the amount of talent in the city," he says. The solution, he thinks, is to transform design education. "Design education is the heart of UArts," but he wonders, "how does it work in this city, how does it make this city thrive?" It's a question he and others are examining publicly during Design Philadelphia. There, on the school's vacant Broad Street lot, he'll present the panel series Studio Next, an early exploration of what's possible when multidisciplinary teams of designers are immersed in their community.

Marianne Bernstein, the Welcome House curator, is confident that she already knows. "Love Park," she reminds us, "has been neglected and needs our care. Time to put the paddles on — a little electro-shock therapy. We're planning on power-washing it a week before, planting and Eugenie has orchestrated Gandia to provide the park with gorgeous Spanish furniture (for everyone to sit on!). The Design Philadelphia opening night party will have a DJ, alcohol and I will be the first out to get everyone dancing if I have to. And you know what? It's not costing the city one penny. Everyone is working for free. This is what artists do: They give; they take risks; they invent. And if that's not love, I don't know what is."

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Design Philadelphia runs from Wed., Oct. 7, through Tue., Oct. 13. For more information and a full schedule, visit Design Philadelphia.org or see the complete guide to Next Up Philly on p. 29. Nathaniel Popkin is the author of two books about Philadelphia and writes about the city at nathanielpopkin.net.