Side
Street Projects & MIT Visual Arts Program presents... Alternate
Routes: The Armadillo
Alternate
Routes: The Armadillo | US Tour - Summer 2009 — Boston,
D.C., New Orleans, Houston, Pasadena
MIT
turned a FEMA Trailer into a garden.
Side Street Projects is gonna go get it.
On
June 12th, Side Street Projects is embarking on an exciting 6,500
mile cross-country road trip from Pasadena, to Boston, and back to
retrieve The
Armadillo — an
actual FEMA trailer deployed after Hurricane Katrina that MIT students
and faculty transformed into a vertical (and mobile) community garden.
MIT awarded The
Armadillo to
Side Street Projects after a nation-wide search. A companion for our
renowned Woodworking
Buses, The Armadillo is the newest addition to our fleet
of mobile art education classrooms for kids in LA County.
Founded in 1992,
Side
Street Projects is
a completely-mobile, artist-run nonprofit organization based in Pasadena,
CA. We teach artists of all ages how to roll up their sleeves and do
things themselves with education programs that encourage self-reliance
and creative problem solving. We are the only sustainable, mobile
community art center in the US.
Learn
More
Media+Sponsorship
Deck
Travel
Itinerary (updated
6/2/09 - all dates
& times subject to change)
RETURN TO PASADENA Welcome Home party @ Hamburger Mary's
West Hollywood, CA
Side
Street Projects would like to thank the MIT FEMA Trailer
Project Team
for their talent, generosity, hard work, and
vision.
The
Armadillo is a modified "green" FEMA
Trailer that was originally one of the thousands of surplus
travel trailers deployed in the Gulf Coast as temporary
housing in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The
Armadillo is the result of the year-long collaborative
art project—the
MIT FEMA Trailer Project—in which faculty and students
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visual
Arts Program transformed a surplus FEMA trailer into
a "green" mobile composting center with vertical
gardens, rainwater catchment system, permaculture library,
and indoor multipurpose space. The trailer was dubbed The
Armadillo for its ribbed
retractable shell.
"The
Armadillo is both a practical tool and a metaphor
for how disaster can be transformed into a tool
for environmental and community change."
— Jae Rhim Lee, Visiting Lecturer,
MIT Visual Arts Program & Director of the MIT
FEMA Trailer Project.
MIT
students studied these issues and researched the environmental,
political, and social history of the trailers under the
direction of Jae Rhim Lee, an artist, permaculture designer
and former consultant to the City of New Orleans Mayor's
Office of Recovery and Development. Students were then
challenged to apply permaculture (a whole systems sustainable
design approach) and environmental justice principles to
the redesign and transformation of a single FEMA trailer
into a model of urban sustainability and community change.
>
Project Directors
Jae Rhim Lee Visiting Lecturer, MIT Visual Arts Program
Dept of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning
Sally Susnowitz Assistant Dean, Student Life
Director, MIT Public Service Center
>
Project Advisors
Ute
Meta Bauer Assoc. Professor and Director
MIT Visual Arts Program, Dept of Architecture
School of Architecture and Planning
Lars
Hasselblad Torres MIT IDEAS Competition
MIT Public Service Center
>
Team
Members
Gina Badger
Colin Kerr
Samuel Kronick
Lisa Schlect
Alyssa Wright
Mike Shafran
Christopher Taylor
Kari Williams
Lucille Ynosencio
Caitlin Berrigan Teaching Assistant
Gena Peditto Project Manager
Tarick T. Walton UROP, Project Coordinator
>
Alumni
Allison Dee UROP Management Sciences
Maryann
Chu UROP Civil Engineering
Jason Rockwood Graduate Student, Comparative
Media Studies
Priyanka Shah Teaching Assistant, DUSP/Architecture
Jegan Vincent De Paul Teaching
Assistant, Visual Arts Program
Side
Street Projects' Alternate Routes program has been made
possible by the generous support of The Leonard I. Green Foundation,
The Pasadena Arts League, The Ahmanson Foundation, The Pasadena
Community Foundation, The City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs
Department, The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The City of
West Hollywood Arts & Cultural
Affairs Commission, The Tournament of Roses Foundation, and by
the support of individuals like you.
Special thanks to Jae Rhim Lee, Ari Klezky, Flip Video, Roland
& Mary Lapointe, Jody & Louise Hopkins, Towsen University,
Noelle Zeltzman, Ray Gauthier, Dave Garrett, Tucker Marlof, Jarrod
Fowler, Ashley Gibbons, and Lesley Byrne.
Side Street Projects is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
All donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
Federal Tax ID# 95-4395168.
