Interchange as Interstitial

roen hohlfeld

Throughout this project I explore the typology of the urban freeway interchange as an interstitial site; a stage upon which ad-hoc urbanisms unfold. Interstitial spaces lie on the margins, at transitional points that are not clearly legible. As a result, these spaces are often marginalized and undervalued. Under closer scrutiny interstitial spaces are a critical and essential component of our cityscapes. My explorations are an attempt to better understand these sites, the values that they have, and the role they play in the larger urban landscape.

I focus specifically on the site beneath the interchange of Interstate 5 and the West Seattle Bridge. This is a space of the everyday. The landscape of the Interstate serves as a threshold for the humble routine of the daily commute; it is a repetitive and overlooked backdrop for this parody. This space acts as a retreat for urban wildlife and offers marginalized people a place as they attempt to simply live in ad-hoc shelters scattered around the site. The freeway itself, as well as the interstitial space created by the complex interchanges allow for a different experience of the city. This space is a critical and valuable part of our urban fabric.

the stolen shopping cart

by Carlos Camara

The Stolen Shopping Cart

The original intent of shopping carts were to transport a person’s bought goods to their car in the parking lot, juxtaposed to the place of purchase. Recently I have noticed shopping carts outside the property of where they were intended for.

I have noticed that in community neighborhoods of low income families, buildings, and apartment complexes, shopping carts are being used for the quick transportation of goods from the store to the home. For example, the Safeway half a mile from my Nothgate apartment houses two Safeway shopping carts (15-20 years old), stored inside the building on the bottom level. The residents of my complex not only push the cart to and from the Safeway, but also take it in the elevator to their specific floor for unloading. A shopping cart I spotted at an apartment complex next to Northgate Mall, was being used by the grounds maintenance man to transport light bulbs and WD40. This particular cart was from the Toys R Us in the neighborhood. Another more clever use I found, were carts being used as columns for a shelter constructed by the older homeless woman living outside the Blockbuster on Lake City Way.

These uses illustrate the community’s ability to improvise in a place designed without their needs fully being met. Near my apartment, there are many apartment complexes with large families and retired residents. Both groups live here due to financial constraints in an expensive city. Many rely on public transportation instead of owning their own vehicle. When store locations aren’t located close to home, it is difficult to grocery shop and transport goods back without a car. Without a personal vehicle, it’s almost impossible for the elderly to transport their weekly grocery shopping to their home on a bus. The weather of Seattle does not make this process any easier. Thus, the stealing of shopping carts makes perfect sense.

The homeless woman’s use of several carts is multi-purposeful. Not only can she store her belongings and transport them wherever she needs to go, but they also serve as a portable home. Her resourcefulness shows how she has recycled the city’s leftovers to fulfill a lack of homeless shelters in the area.

What is this a reflection of? In Seattle there has been a huge push to make Seattle a more walkable city. But more walkable for whom? Large families and elder families with financial limitations aren’t often found in the heart of downtown. We focus a lot of attention on improving the commute to and within downtown – but there seems to be an oversight when it comes to those living on the outskirts.

University District Farmer's Market

Rachel Miller

In the last decade, the Farmer’s Market has become a welcome and ubiquitous addition to Seattle Neighborhoods. The Neighborhood Farmer’s Market Alliance counts seven markets within Seattle’s boundaries, with demand for additional locations. The University District Farmer’s Market, located in a parking lot on the corner of University Way and NE 50^th St. is one of the oldest of the markets. It was founded in 1993, and has since become an integral part of the University District community. Open on Saturdays, year-round, the U-District Market hosts between 30 and 60 vendors, depending on the season. During the week, when the market is not open, the location is a pay parking lot, serving local businesses and students. On Saturday morning, when school is not in session, the market takes over. This adaptive use of space activates the area throughout the week.

Like many markets, the U-District market begins at 9 am, and closes at 2pm. When I visited the site only a half an hour after it opened, the market was already packed. It was surprisingly foggy and quite cold, around 35 degrees, but those in attendance had bundled up and were shopping with gusto. The U-District market hosts vendors selling a variety of products: soap, wine, prepared foods, meat, flowers, and cheeses, to name a few. All of your food shopping for the week can be purchased in one trip.

The U-District market is located in an area with a strong existing community network. Within a one block radius of the market is the University District branch of the Seattle Public Library, a P-Patch, the University Heights Community Center, stops for popular bus lines, and residences. This connectivity creates a community campus which enables neighbors to interact with one another, learn, and participate in community functions, all actions which help a build strong, healthy, and successful neighborhood.

View University District Farmer's Market in a larger map

Civic Vitality in the Peripheral Spaces of Tacoma’s Theater District

Michael Carey

The Theater District in Tacoma is a dense urban environment that has been praised for its improvisational spaces which are subject to change at the will of the users. Included in the Theater District is several small scale pocket parks along with the larger fireman’s Park; all of which are not heavily frequented. To the contrary, the peripheral “loose spaces” are much livelier with the ripeness of cultural diversity. Because of the high frequency of pedestrian flow, and the desire to participate in personalizing the landscape, these malleable peripheral spaces set the stage for the expression of cultural identity.
Painting a Sense of Place
As the downtown area of Tacoma has been redeveloped overtime, many building facades have become unified with a seemingly monotonous veneer. In order to add variety while still retaining visual cohesion to the building facades, mural art has been accepted as an artful way to give the pedestrians a sense of place in the landscape.
Public Amenity Art
The adaptation of everyday amenities into public art is one of the many ways that the inhabitants of the Theater district can leave their identifying mark on the landscape. Through creating artworks out of public amenities, such as sidewalks, handrails and community message boards, artists are able to change the everyday spaces in the urban environment into places that become attractions in themselves. Creating an awareness of the roles that amenities play in upholding our everyday lives challenges the public to think about how beauty can comingle with functionality.
Amalgamation of Public Space and Private Gain
On the corner of 11th and Broadway is one of the most pedestrian friendly places in the Theater District. At this intersection Broadway has been redirected off of the street grid, and around the sculptural fountain, to give pedestrian traffic the hierarchical right-of-way. Because of the strong aesthetic attractiveness of the fountain, in coordination with the ease of pedestrian access, local businesses have claimed this space to post signs advertising their stores and restaurants. During the work week, when most of the shops are open, this corner becomes so occupied by business advertisement signs that it creates a large pedestrian traffic conflict. If the function of the space was preserved, over the desire of the businesses to solicit patrons, a harmonious amalgamation of private interest in the public space could be achieved.

Aleatory

Talya ten Brink

In Aleatory music an element of the composition is left to chance, such as “unstructured pieces consisting of vague directives, such as “Play for five minutes” or by being “told to arrange the structure of the piece” (Encyclopedia Britannica Online). Street musicians are temporal, ad-hoc elements of a moment in the urban landscape. The street musicians rearrange their stages as they respond to interactions with site users. An Asian man who played the Erhu in Westlake center reappeared at Pike Place market, and on my return to the subway I noticed that a two-man band took his place. Their reliance on human relationships means that they are “elements that set in motion rather artificial ecologies that, in turn, take on a genuine self-organizing life of their own” (Corner, 102). Within this framework, the musicians choose what they are going to play. I discovered that each musician not only had his own style, but his own personality that came through his music. When an artist exposes his art to a person, it is as if he is exposing the product of his soul. My camera captured the personality of the musician instead of the music, but one can get a sense of the type of music from my snapshots of the musicians’ personalities. I took photographs in Pike Place Market and Westlake Center: Pike Place Station, on January 16, 2010 from 1-3 pm. The photograph from UW Bookstore on the Ave was taken at 7 pm, January 16, 2010. Even if the street performers’ audience doesn’t pause to look and listen, their notes imbue the air, and settle into the passers-by, who subconsciously absorb the strange music into their errands and worries and thoughts as they hurry on. Music is essential to life; and in a city, street performers bring that music to the everyman. Street performers animate the urban landscape. They bring an element of chance into daily environment.

View Aleatory in a larger map

Seattle Downtown Street Performers

Fuji Tjiang

Street performers are probably the best example in reclaiming spaces in an urban context. They claim their stages within the fabric and create a kind of conversation in that particular spaces. It is interesting to see what kind of spaces they choose and the reason behind it. Performers choose places within the urban fabric to capture people attention. Most desirable places are those with free access to a variety of public spaces, those with anonymous and diversified public and those with fluidity of meaning.

The sites that I am focusing are Pike Place Market and Westlake. These two spots are probably the most vibrant and busy in Seattle Downtown area. These are where people are rushing and flowing through the city, and they seem to be perfect choice for the performers. Pike Place Market is a desirable site as there is available audience for the performers as this place is always full of visitors, both local and foreign. Westlake is surrounded by shopping malls and stores, which provide a continuous flow of people. This condition is also preferable for the performers as this is where people are concentrated.

View Street Performers in a larger map

Green Lake Dirt Jumps: Urban Surface in Flux

Tera Hatfield

The jumps in Lower Woodland Park rise and bleed back into the earth with no clear edge within the dirt lot—their size and length are amorphous and change at various points of the year, almost like drifting sand dunes. These jumps were built illegally on underutilized park land ten to fifteen years ago and are the result of a minority group’s efforts to create a fluid, informal and adaptive urban space. Despite the city’s efforts to bulldoze the illegal construction, the jumps were rebuilt again and again by tenacious bikers. The city finally condoned the construction, but does not contribute to the funding or upkeep of the area.

Today, the jumps occupy a linear patch of land sandwiched between permanent, and formally programmed turf fields. Heavy winter rain reveals infrastructural artifacts of the urban landscape hidden within the body cavities of the jumps—concrete blockades, traffic cones, railroad ties, boulders and cords of wood. The jumps are a sculpted surface, an informal physical assemblage of the discarded and fragmented urban context. As a process landscape continually in flux, the jumps are always ready for visual and physical reinterpretation. One early morning, I observed young children absorbed in a fantasy that appropriated the fluctuating terrain in their play, possibly scrambling up the backs of dinosaurs and over the splintered hull of an upturned and sinking pirate ship.

The jumps are located west of the turf soccer fields that border Green Lake Way Avenue N. and south of the tennis courts and new skatepark complex.

Unusual Alleyscapes

Delia Lacson

Alleyways are the secret corridors of urban life. Originally designed for utilitarian purposes of access and sanitation, many alley corridors have become underused and neglected spaces. Alleys can provide more than just pedestrian friendly shortcuts and hiding places for garbage and power lines between streetscapes. More recently, the alley has emerged, driven primarily by citizen initiatives and ad hoc community adaptations, as an important element in the neighborhood fabric. Perhaps it is because alleys were intentionally designed as semi-hidden corridors that they have become a safe haven for informal alternative approaches to community open space within the urban fabric. Several cities, including Seattle, are actively repurposing shared alley spaces. The alley corridor can be productive, dynamic and picturesque- reflective of the communities that are redefining them as gathering spaces, gardens and art galleries.

FOULEE MARKET AND DELI

By: Justin Jameson

Foulee market is located at the intersection of Columbian way and Beacon avenue (atop of Beacon hill). According to 2000 Census the surrounding areas demographic was primarily Asian (51%) followed by White (20%), Black (13%), Hispanic/Latino (9%) and others (7%) (Seattle PI) . The structure is somewhat odd, and (although not evident at first) seems to be the original structure of a house which was converted into a market. The assumption is that as business progressed the market had made the choice to expand. It appears that the market has expanded at least two times; the first expansion was seemed to have the intentions of being permanent (tin covered roof and walls). The second expansion was completed using metal poles and tarps; initial evaluation from the parking lots is that the expansion would be temporary. However, after further investigation it is clear that the poles had been permanently fixed to the ground and the tarps securely fastened. While shopping in the final addition space (tarp coved open area) the ambiance is that of an open market. However, upon entering the market it was obvious that the space had previously been a residential home. Under the tin addition were two residential garage doors and an entry door (which resembled a small mud room). The market extended further back into structure, through the garage space (now filled with fruits, vegetables and other perishables) and into the previous living space. The garage was easily defined by the still existing exterior siding inside. However, once through the garage the space was no longer recognized as residential.

View Foulee Market in a larger map

Doorpaper Self-Introductions

BOTING ZHANG

These are the fruits of my attempt to "loosen" the corridors of my 176-unit apartment building.

We are a community of strangers. Elevator rides are generally silent. I wanted to turn the elevator into a collective art display, but couldn’t get the go-ahead from management.

Realizing that our doors are our own private space, I papered half the doors on the first floor with varied designs. I kept some design uniformity based on the building’s red logo, but left plenty of white space for personalization. As I decorated my own door, I was asked what I was doing in three languages. I met a handful of neighbors this way.

Many had removed their doorpaper by the next morning, but others participated. Four un-doorpapered neighbors asked to participate. Several others, alas, reported that their doorpaper had been removed anonymously and left in a heap in our building’s courtyard.

View Uwajimaya Village in a larger map

Your Title here

Your 150-word summary

Insert Code for google map, if you want to include one. Here's how:
-to imbed a link to your map into the blog, see video: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mymaps/create.html

-to imbed the actual map into the blog: In Google's "my maps" click Link. To resize and preview the map for the blog, click Customize and preview embedded map and resize to 426 by 320. Then copy the web address from the Paste HTML to embed in website field in your browser and paste it into the HTML code of your blog entry

Insert Code for slideshow (click here to create slideshow)
Under customize design make sure to click on the Music/Video and uncheck "Automatically play music in show". Also please use the Gallery effect for displaying your images.

EXAMPLE: