Let it Grow is a platform that facilitates entrepreneurs, urban idealists, and artists in bringing their green innovations to life, with a specific focus on plant and seed-based projects. We were honored to be featured in their latest interview series, where we discuss our process, the limits of tactical urbanism, and our current work in India.
Later this year, Daniel and Kim will head to San Francisco to immerse ourselves in a month of residency at Headlands Center for the Arts.
Cities have always been subject to the forces of ruination. Buildings, monuments, and infrastructures built with the pretense of permanence, inevitably succumb to the shifting fates of disinvestment, abandonment and transition. How should we look at these spaces as citizens, as designers, planners, and ecologists? What’s going on within them and why does it matter?
A group exhibition that explores how art and design can stimulate public awareness of urgent ecological issues through soil regeneration, re-conceptualizing land use, and activating under-utilized green spaces in Los Angeles.
Commonstudio is Bangalore bound! Well, almost. Fuelled by a 2016/17 Fulbright-Nehru research grant from the United States-India Education Fund (USIEF), we're thrilled to have the opportunity to put down some temporary roots in India, beginning in October of 2016.
Twice a year in Budapest, the streets explode into a curious and colorful profusion of unwanted stuff. What follows is a brief photo essay exploring the "Lomtalanítás" as it occurred in the 8th district from March 6-11, 2016.
Last week marked our first visit to the Metropoliz Future Forest site since our assisted migration efforts in the fall of 2015. We were honored to co-lead a group of visiting scholars, artists, and designers from the American Academy in Rome for a “Walk & Talk” which focused on the many signs of life and friction that exist in the contemporary fringes of the “eternal city.”
(Los Angeles, CA) — On March 24, A+D Architecture and Design Museum>LosAngeles will present Come In! DTLA, an exhibition that celebrates the Museum’s new neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles and the designers who find inspiration there!
The latest installment of the Museum's Come In series presents what is on the minds and in the studios of the cutting edge, innovative designers of Los Angeles. Featured work pushes the boundaries of traditional forms of architecture and design and extends to graphics, digital media, landscape, fashion, furniture, installation, photography, sculpture and more.
Come In! DTLA is organized by A+D Architecture and Design Museum>Los Angeles and curated by Danielle Rago. Exhibition design by Tyler McMartin.
Commonstudio co-founders Kim and Daniel will participate in a conversational excursion to the post-industrial periphery of Rome on the morning of March 24th, 2016. Building on valuable historical perspectives from Lindsay Harris (current Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome), we will use the districts of Prenestino and Centocelle as a fitting lens to discuss issues of historical and contemporary migration and settlement within Rome from both a social and botanical perspective. We will also visit and discuss our recent collaborative landscape intervention at the Museum of The Other And The Elsewhere (MAAM) as a case study examining how marginalized people, plants, and places find ways to survive, thrive, and build resilience against all odds.
To celebrate the dawn of a new year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on a past project that is near to our hearts.
“Abject Object”, which began in 2009, was an early attempt to develop series of products and workshops that were focused on creating pathways to skills, income, and a creative outlet for homeless women in the notorious Skid Row district of Los Angeles. It was co-developed in partnership with the amazing folks of the Downtown Women’s Center, and an equally amazing, diverse and ever-evolving roster of design volunteers. We met every Sunday for five years, volunteering our time from the craft rooms or windowless basements of the DWC’s old building on Los Angeles street.
It wasn’t always easy, glamorous or even fun, but it provided a crash course in the often messy intricacies of working directly with community stakeholders, and attempting to bring a sustaining social enterprise to life. In 2009, Project H volunteer Jenny Liang helped produce a brief video that shows a glimpse into the process.
Perhaps the most powerful and enduring aspect of these efforts were not the individual projects and products as we originally assumed, but the workshop and engagement model that continues in some form to this day. Five years after we began the initiative, the DWC is celebrating the success of Made—a brick-and-mortar social enterprise located at its new building on San Pedro street in Downtown.
Made provides a public face to the organization and an opportunity to broadcast it's mission of hope and resilience. It’s a place to stop in for a coffee and check out a range of handmade goods, some of which are still produced in on-site workshops with the women of the DWC.
We are excited to share some field notes from initial stages of a collaborative tactical landscape intervention we are calling The Metropoliz Future Forest, developed in an ongoing creative partnership between Commonstudio (Kim Karlsrud and Daniel Phillips) and Flash Atoye (Firat Erdim and Olivia Valentine), with support from the American Academy in Rome.
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