Red Swing Under the L - Bit of Venice Biennale to come to Chicago: March 6th deadline to submit for Spontaneous Interventions

 At last year's edition of the Venice Biennale, the theme of the U.S. pavilion was SpontaneousInterventions: Design Actions for the Common Good.  It showcased 124 projects of ‘interventionist urbanism . . . lighter, quicker, cheaper . . . as alternative recession-era approaches to urban revitalization.’

These includes the Red Swing Project that you see at the top of this post, “. . . started by a group of architecture students in Austin.  The original red swing was made for $2 with a single piece of wood and retired rock climbing rope.  Since, nearly 200 red swings have appeared around the globe, from Haiti to Poland, India, Brazil . . . ”

Another project, Yarnbombing, has set knitting groups across the globe to creating such unique urban cosies as the one you see here, with Artuto Di Modica's iconic Charging Bull on Wall Street waking up one day to what is usually a nightmare confined to housepets:  “Look, I've made you a sweater!”

You can check out the entire gallery of some really cool concepts here. The Venice Biennale exhibition is scheduled to come to Chicago in May, at a still undisclosed location, and the curators - including Cathy Lang Ho, David van der Lear, and Ned Cramer - are looking for

. . . new projects—urban interventions realized in U.S. cities in the past two years—with an emphasis on Chicago and Midwest projects. The exhibition will be on view through Summer 2013.

Architects, designers, planners, artists and citizens who have realized an intervention in a U.S. city—and in particular, in Chicago and the Midwest—in the past 2 years (2011 or 2012) are encouraged to submit PDFs of their projects by midnight (EST) Wednesday, March 6 to be considered for inclusion in the Chicago exhibition.

So block out your weekend,  stock up the fridge with Red Bull, and check out the full project criteria and submission requirements here.

Harvest Dome, by SLO Architecture, made of storm-snapped umbrellas.

Heading to Venice in August, Mobile Food Collective stops in Logan Square Sunday

At end of August, it'll be part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion of this years Venice Biennale, but throughout the day tomorrow, Sunday, July 18th, the Mobile Food Collective will be bringing its Moveable Feast to three different locations in Logan Square.  A realization of a student work project at Archeworks, it's described as being about:

. . .  addressing the social and environmental impact of food, and working to find an innovative way to bring people together around food, through a variety of avenues.  The Archeworks Team has designed a fleet of mobile structures intended to act as both connector and instigator within local food cultures, to encourage a return to heritage, ownership, exchange, and connection—to make food personal again.
The MFC (Mobile Food Collective)  is many things: an education/exchange platform for planting, growing and cooking; demonstrations and distribution of seeds, soil, compost, and produce; a space activator within a community event; or the centerpiece of a harvest dinner.

Physically, the MFC is conceived as a fleet of mobile structures. The larger mobile unit houses a harvest table and flexible storage cabinets that double as seats. At a smaller scale, there are bikes and trailers, equipped to carry the modular storage cabinets. The mobility of the project allows this dialogue to be constant and moveable—we can go where we are needed, bringing different things to different audiences, connecting different groups across a city, or around the world.

So stop by Sunday at one of the locations listed in the image you see above.  The project is still raising funds towards "completing the final steelwork details, fabricating the skin material, and building out our fleet of bikes and trailers."   You can find more information, and make a donation, here.