Kickstarter

The Institute of Placemaking is a collaborative project initiated by Pieterjan Grandry, Jia Gu and Valentina Karga with our friends Silvia Font, Chris Lewis and Rosario Talevi. 

Who? 

We are three young designers currently working at the intersection of art and architecture. Our work is straightfoward: we believe simple design is good design.  We are tinkering with new methods of engagement, not only with people but with objects and spaces between. We are improvising and improving; we are not political, but social. We are trying to understand people, society, its values, and we are trying to create new knowledge and new encounters. 

We recently founded the Institute of Placemaking in answer to an Open Call for Projects for the Eme3 Festival of Architecture. Two months later we discovered we were one of three projects to be selected for realization! 

What is Eme3 Festival of Architecture?

Eme3 brings together new creators of emergent architectures in a space of experimentation, exposition and debate. The topic of this year's festival is 'Bottom Up" and they were looking for a project that offered new uses to the neglected or degraded sites of District of Ciutat Vella in Barcelona. 

What is the Institute of Placemaking? 

The Institute of Placemaking is about creating new places from abandoned spaces through knowledge exchange and collective actions in the city. For Eme3 we proposed to re-think the city as a resource, whose products, people and places are all part of a larger cycle of production. 

We begin with a simple, transformable architecture constructed from recovered materials (doors, windows, cabinets etc) that can be taken apart to make workshops with. An office-cabin and a table are the simple spatial elements around which workshops, dinners, film screenings, exhibitions and collective gatherings happen. 

What will you be doing there?

We will build the Institute with local architecture students and volunteers. We'll be taking materials from recycling centers and junkyards and constructing a temporary, transformable architecture. From there, we will activate the space through a series of public workshops (like Fruit Jammin' with Grandma!). 

How can I help? 

Help us make it happen! 

We have a small budget but we will need to double that in order to realize the project in the best possible way! Not only do we have to send ourselves there, we also need help bringing our dear friend Samuel Carvalho, expert designer and builder, to help us assemble the office-cabin and work station; we need additional funds for renting power drills, nail guns, hand saws and a variety of building materials; we need to cover printing costs for our exhibition and we need lots and lots of help reaching out to the public! 

We will be there from June 20 - July 1 to build the Institute, set up our exhibition, conduct workshops, investigate the city and its people and temporarily activate the urban space of Jardin di Torres y Clave. If you're in Barcelona, Spain, you should come visit!