Fallow City Project

For the past two weeks, I've been working with a group of art and architecture students and a visiting artist on a project called Fallow City. We are creating imaginative proposals for the "fallow period" when a city (like Detroit) is in decline, marked by abandoned lots, houses, and retreating infrastructure. Our ideas are not so much about solving the problems of abandonment, crime, etc, but about re-imagining in an inventive, playful, and open-ended way the use of these spaces and about how people live in suburbia.

My projects are looking at re-using house structure as gardens and "roof landscapes." Crystal is making a modular elevated walkway, and Berenika is making a thicket-like structure with solar cells.

Flower Dinner Party

Before Serena left town, we had people over for dinner during the snowstorm. We had some paper flowers lying around, and decided to put them in our hair, and then to make one for every woman at the party. Somehow each flower fit the wearer's personality, and made us feel extra festive-- like having a bit of the tropics in the cold Virginia winter.