Pop-Up RVA: Get your Space for the Race!

Pop-up RVA launches in September 2015 in anticipation of the 450,000 spectators during the nine-day UCI Road World Championships. These pop-ups will reactivate 5,000 square feet of vacant retail along the 100 and 200 blocks of East Broad Street throughout the month of September. Community partners include Storefront for Community Design, Downtown Neighborhood Association, Douglas Development Corporation, and the City of Richmond. Improvement efforts are sponsored by HandsOn Greater Richmond and Monument Construction.

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Since the opening of Storefront's East Broad Street location in 2012, thousands of square feet of commercial space have remained empty — some of them as long as 20 years. In 2011, Storefront's Program Director Tyler King documented the history of some of the buildings included in the scope of Pop-up RVA, and around 40 others. He created a catalog of these buildings called NTHNG MSSNG, describing their current condition and former uses. 

Check out a preview of the book below.

NTHNG MSSNG by R. Tyler King | Make Your Own Book

Design a Processing Kitchen for Community Garden

Storefront's volunteer landscape architects are working with VSU's Harding Street Community Garden initiative to create a variety of garden types along a corridor of vacant lots. Anchoring the block is a community center, which will be used as an educational space and processing kitchen for produce grown along Harding Street. The head of the program Duron Chavis is seeking assistance from an interior designer or architect to make the kitchen more efficient for processing vegetables.

Fall 2015 mOb Projects

NOTE: The deadline to become a mentor has passed. Contact Storefront if you're interested in mentoring in the future.

Under the guidance of a professional mentor, VCUarts faculty, and Storefront staff, mOb will be taking on 15 community projects in student groups of 2-4. mOb mentors spend between 5-10 hours over the course of the semester providing feedback and guidance to the student team as they develop their deliverables. If you're interested in any of the projects below, use the form below to sign up as a mentor. The mOb session begins on Tuesday, August 18th. After projects are assigned to students, a project lead will contact you.

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Institute for Contemporary Art
Designing a series of actions to create a presence for the ICA while the building is under construction.

Lillie Estes Mayoral Campaign
Designing an identity for community organizer Lillie Estes, who seeks the office of Mayor.

Recovery by Design
Developing a workshop for Storefront’s NEA-funded Recovery by Design series, and working with Richmond Behavioral Health Authority clients to curate an exhibit of outcomes from summer workshops.

VCU Office of Sustainability
Continuing to refine the design of a community garden on VCU’s campus.

Byrd Theater
Prototyping a uniform for staff based on film history, to enhance the Byrd experience.

Crystalis Institute
Transforming a basement with white cinderblock walls into a sacred space for nonprofit that promotes spirituality without organized religion.

Epiphany Preschool
Designing a variety of playhouses for 1-4 year olds, inexpensive and modern.

Friends of Riverview Park
Identifying community events that would be desirable to residents and creating a conceptual design for a skatepark, community garden, and playground.

Grace Inside
Working with a state prison chaplain to redesign an office.

Maymont Civic League
Helping to cultivate neighborhood pride through a flag, beautification projects, and developing programs to help residents with minor repairs and improvements of homes and properties, blighted/abandoned properties.

Richmond Anti-Violence Project
Create an identity for the VAVP, which works to address and prevent sexual and intimate partner violence within, and hate/bias motivated violence against, the LGBTQ community.

Saving Our Youth
Design a yearbook for this youth safety community organization.

Richmond City Health District
Creating architectural designs that could help customers make the "healthy choice the easy choice" and also experience the environment of the store as healthy and safety.

Valentine
Design an exhibit that explores — from Robert E. Lee to Arthur Ashe — what is a southern man?

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mOb is a  partnership of three design departments of VCUarts, Graphic Design, Fashion Design and Interior Design and one department of the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Urban and Regional Planning. These departments operate an design lab that realizes the potential of design to shape the City of Richmond.

mOb + Storefront is a collaboration of mOb and Storefront for Community Design that combines the energy, enthusiasm and expertise of VCU students and faculty with Storefront’s community involvement. mOb + Storefront operates on the principle that good design makes a healthier city where citizens participate more fully in their environment, their government and their culture.

How small structures fill big gaps in food access

Storefront volunteer consultant and former mOb student Colleen Brennan discusses the relationship between craft and food access. A furniture builder by trade, she has worked on two projects about food access at mOb + Storefront — through Shalom Farms and Tricycle Gardens. 

As most of us know, there are big gaps in the locations of grocery store chains that leave many without adequate supply of food. Having a background in craft, I’ve thought a lot about how removed we are from the production of the basic things we need every day, that being food and the infrastructure & tools necessary to prepare it. While the craft movement was originally founded to revive the dignity of labor and combat the dehumanizing effects of factory work, the movement has been revived with concerns that are more focused around sustainability — both environmental and economic. Now, the focus is more about locally sourced materials and makers as a form of ethical consumerism. These are largely the concerns of the "slow food/farm to table" movement as well.  The philosophies of these two movements have such similar sentiments, and in addition to the similarities in scale there is immense potential for them to intersect and expand access to good food on the local level.

Bacon's Rebellion. Map showing Richmond's urban food deserts by census tract (2012).

There are two ways that food can actually meet food desert: physically providing access and education. Accessibility to food will always require infrastructure on some level, and small grocery markets operate on a scale that lends itself well to craft. Tricycle Gardens is a nonprofit community garden that runs a program called Corner Farm, which carves out spaces in the corner stores of Richmond’s urban food deserts to offer locally grown produce. They have 11-15 participating stores thoughotut the city.  Tricycle Gardens reached out to Storefront to get help designing shelves for shelf stable produce.

Through Storefront's Design Session, Brennan devised a scheme to create shelves around the coolers provided through the Corner Farm program.

Another nonprofit I worked with during mOb, Shalom Farms, literally drives to neighborhoods without grocery stores. This past spring, we designed a system that will allow them to easily load their van and convert the van into a pop-up market for sales. They're working on implementing this now. Their focus on education provides access by way of knowledge sharing. Part of Shalom Farms’ program is teaching volunteer labor about farming techniques and the science behind it.  They provide access through education and therefore, personal agency. This is early DIY movement stuff — So punk!

Brennan managed a team of students through mOb studio to design a system that converts a 16 passenger van into a farm stand.

mOb + Storefront will continue to work on issues around food access during this Fall's session of mOb. Even without building structures, healthier options can be more readily available. The Richmond City Health District will serve as a client of mOb, and students will apply the principles of choice architecture (focusing on arrangement that prioritize healthy options) to a corner store in the Highland Park neighborhood.

Check out more of Colleen's work here!

Storing Bikes for Story Rides

Catherine Illian, owner of Richmond Rides applied to work with Storefront to develop a storage solution for Richmond Rides, a new bicycle tour company that shares a small space with Cyclus bike shop at 2225 East Clay Street. Volunteer Evan MacKenzie developed three concepts to store 16 bikes and helmets. Each concept provides racks that can accommodate 14 bikes, while leaving room for 2 extra bikes in the space.

When not in storage, these bikes wheel around Church Hill on tours like this:

Our this tour of historic Church Hill, you will learn about the neighborhood where Richmond was founded through the lives of its most memorable residents. As you ride, you will also experience some of Richmond’s delicious eats and amazing views in this beautiful and historic city. Some of the characters you discover along the way include its celebrated and sometimes overlooked heroes.

Sugar Show

The remaining concrete slab of the Domino Sugar factory at 3101 Wharf Street has served as a user-defined public space for Richmonders to fish, stargaze, and picnic.

 

Meanwhile, the completion of the Capital Trail abutting this lo-fi riverfront plaza and the adjacent development of Stone Brewery prompts some users to consider the Sugar Pad's relationship to its surroundings. This Friday, Storefront will feature work by designers Adele Ball and Ben Evyan inspired by their romance with the Sugar Pad.

Ben Evyan

Byrd Park Community Engagement

The Friends of William Byrd Park and Storefront for Community Design would like to use your feedback to help prioritize park improvements and to learn what park users enjoy. When referring to Byrd Park we mean the whole park including: Dogwood Dell, the Carillon, the trails behind the Carillon down to Pump House Drive, the three lakes (Fountain/Boat, Swan, and Shields), the VITA course, the tennis courts, the baseball and softball fields, Barker Field, the Roundhouse, the Landing, the Shields Lake shelter and picnic area, and all of the open green space in between.

Three public meetings are scheduled:
9/3/15 from 7pm-9pm at the Roundhouse in Byrd Park: Following the regular meeting of the Friends of William Byrd Park, survey results will be shared and prioritization will begin.

9/10/15 & 9/16/15 from 4pm-9pm at the Virginia Home, 1101 Hampton Street: Open prioritization voting will take place.  Stop by for 20 minutes anytime during the open hours to vote on your top priorities for the park.

The following 30 questions should take you about 10 minutes to complete.  This survey will be open from June 22, 2015 - September 1, 2015 at 5pm EST.  All users of the park, regardless of geographic location, are invited and encouraged to fill out this survey and share it with their friends. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please contact Ryan Rinn (ryan@storefrontrichmond.org).

Image (banner): Dementi Studios: Swimming at Shield’s Lake shields shield bathing suit suits water park summer sun bathing bikini diving board.

Beautify Bellevue Group Seeks Support to Restore Treewells

Storefront volunteer consultant Scott Wiley provided a planting schedule for a swath of sidewalk in the Bellevue neighborhood.

On behalf of Beautify Bellevue, Linda Decker applied to work with Storefront to develop concepts for streetscape improvements along Lamont Street in the Bellevue community. For this anomalous strip of asphalt, Linda requested assistance in plant placement and permitting. Landscape Architect and Bellevue resident Scott Wiley provided a plan that recycles portions of the asphalt for the abutting on-street parking, with smaller plantings and additional tree wells in- between. With the exception of some aspects of asphalt removal (it is actually soft), most of this work can be implemented by volunteers. Scott communicated with Arborist Luke McCall and Right of Way Engineer Doug Mawby from the City of Richmond’s Department of Public Works. They advised the group to apply for a Work in Streets Permit and Street Tree Planting Application. If necessary, Storefront staff can help Beautify Bellevue navigate these processes. 

Imagine a Bridge...

Throughout the month of June, Storefront invited Bridge Park to share its vision of a park that spans the James River — dramatically increasing river access while addressing some of our downtown’s most challenging gaps in connectivity between city and river levels. Style Weekly's architecture critic Ed Slipek stopped by Storefront to check out BridgePark during its residency throughout the month of June.

Read more.

Find Design Here

Without the hundreds of hours donated by Storefront's, our programs would not be possible. Through Storefront's Design Session program, over 120 professional volunteers assist applicants with the first 10 percent design processes. For the other 90 percent of the process, the Directory for Design Community aims to provide a resource for aspects of design projects that go beyond the scope of Storefront's programs. Use the directory when:
 

• Storefront staff determines that your design needs should be initiated by a private practice.
• You would like to maintain a dialogue with Storefront, but can afford to hire a professional designer to initiate your project.
• When projects need a push beyond conceptual and technical assistance provided through Storefront's Design Session program.