building blocks

As a kid, my brother and I played with Legos obsessively. He more than I, but still, I've never forgiven myself for not taking the time to check out Legoland while living in San Diego. (yeah, that's a lego San Francisco alright...)

All the more exciting, then, to have two occasions to celebrate the joy of the building block this week. First, I saw a talk by James Rojas, an architect, planner and artist who uses found objects (Legos, yes, but buttons, blocks, sticks, shapes of all other kinds) to run community workshops on city design.

From what I gathered, he asks participants to build their utopian city with the objects at hand, which they then have to describe and explain to the group. Although it wasn't clear if he then works directly with redevelopment agencies or designers to implement these visions, but the exercise struck me as a useful step in simply starting to understand neighborhood, community and the built environment. I thought of the housing community where I taught DJing and music, Town and Country located in Southeast San Diego. It's isolated in a corner of San Diego that's carved through with freeways and impassable thoroughfares, dotted with an impersonal shopping center or two, and largely cut off (spatially and culturally) from the kinds of things people normally associate with that city - beaches, Sea World, surfing. It's also in one of the more violent, gang-ridden areas of the city, and these factors all combine to produce a fragmented and limited sense of city life.

I'd love to see what the kids i worked with would create when asked to visualize their community and reshape their neighborhood into a more appealing design. Instead of dreaming of "getting out" or trying to expose them to other parts of the city, how might we work with them to actually reinterpret and begin to re-use where they are actually at?

As for the second Lego-rrific moment? Christopher Niemann's tribute to New York, of course!