Refreshing Opportunities
by Ted Cheecharoen, Colleen Heine, Ken Holmes, and Yahayra Rosario-Cora
(AKA Team Strippers)
About a month ago, during our conversation with a landscaping professional, she referred to Whitemarsh Plaza as a “lifeless” place; at the beginning of all of this, we would have agreed. On the first visit of the SCAD Sustainable Practices in Design class to [...]
Opening the Door to a Festival of Opportunities
By Scott Boylston
Almost 10 weeks ago, a graduate Sustainable Practices in Design class at SCAD visited a generic strip mall on Whitemarsh Island. We went to visit Wendy Armstrong of Thrive Take Out Cafe to talk about the possibility of creating an outdoor eating area made from building materials reclaimed from Savannah Gardens. You could [...]
Hot Times with the Girl Scouts
By Scott Boylston
We have a whole lot of numbers to share with you about the amount of materials that we helped the Girl Scouts harvest over the weekend from a site otherwise scheduled for the landfill, but we’ll start here:
Day One of the Girl Scouts Volunteer Building Material Harvest:
95º, one short of the record [...]
Been Busy: Initiative 4
By Scott Boylston
Two buildings on the site of Savannah Gardens will give way this weekend to the whim of Girl Scouts. The reclaimed materials will be used for an eco-camp on Rose Dhu Island, a magnificent piece of land surrounded by meandering rivers. The eco-camp is intended to enhance girls’ knowledge of and appreciation for [...]
Been Busy: Initiative 3
By Scott Boylston
INITIATIVE THREE :: Outdoor Eating Area
Wendy Armstrong, owner of Thrive Carry Out Cafe , expressed interest in creating an outdoor eating area for Whitemarsh Plaza, a nondescript commercial mall on one of the islands east of Savannah, and only about 4 miles from Savannah Gardens. Thrive is Savannah’s first Green Certified Restaurant, and [...]
Been Busy: Initiative 2
By Scott Boylston
The first law of thermodynamics is founded on the observation that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed; human energy certainly fits within that framework. So, as the energy dedicated to developing Emergent Structures projects and collaborations increases, the energy dedicated to blog writing (blogergy?) has a tendency [...]
In the Zone
By Scott Boylston
We’re looking forward to our summer.
The old saying goes, you get what you ask for, and yes, we most definitely have. We have complexity, oh yes we do. But along with the complexity—along with this wild collaborative network we’ve nurtured—we have excitement, and meaning, and passionate interest from those throughout the ever-expanding network.
The [...]
The Patience of Good Ideas
By Scott Boylston
Emergent Structure’s second post declared, “…Pastor Johnnie Powers is what the Emergent Structures Project is about.” Discussions on social innovation center around uncorking the tacit knowledge of communities, and tapping into the creative power that exists within the basic building blocks of informal human interaction. Mr. Powers is surely unique, but he is not [...]
Faith Without Works is Dead: Hunting for Solutions
By Summer Constantino
Armed with a growing knowledge of reclaimed materials, and with fierce determination, my partner in a winter quarter Sustainable Practices in Design class at SCAD, Katie Coulburn, and I decided to design a meaningful method of including heartpine from the old buildings at Savannah Gardens into the redevelopment of new homes on the [...]
The Decade of What’s Next
By Kathleen Fritz
This decade has already been memorialized on talk shows and blogs with the populous not knowing what to call it. Some are playing number games like “The Aughts” or “The Y2K’s”, but others are looking into what this first decade of the new millennium actually meant. Some are suggesting the “Post 9/11 Era” [...]