March 22, 2010

Notes and Thoughts on "Furniture Sale on North Freeway."

As announced through postcards, e-mails, twitter and blog posts, Furniture Sale on North Freeway was recently staged at the old Landmark Chevrolet Dealership in Houston, Texas.

We arrived to the site early in the morning with every object that we made for the event and set up shop in one of the corners of the empty car lot. It was a cloudy and windy day without a soul in sight, except for the thousands of cars zipping down the freeway at 80 mph. We had our first customer around 9:30am, and from there we had visitors every 45 minutes with most people coming in groups, driving out from inner loop Houston to the site. People from the neighborhood situated behind the dealership also stopped to chat, with conversations ranging from being angry about the quality of product the dealership provided when it was in business, and being angry about the 700 yd x 175 yd concrete void left behind after the business had dissolved.

Little was spoken of our intentions, or our gesture of attempting to sell six modest objects in a space that once sold and held in inventory more products than a husband and wife partnership could possibly fathom.

Our initial intentions were out of boredom, we were originally building pieces of furniture to fit our small apartment over weekends in our family run cabinet shop in Spring, TX, with materials left over from construction jobs. We would drive back and forth on I-45 passing the empty shells of former businesses and billboards selling ugly products far cheaper than someone could build and sell locally. Our point of departure for this idea were our conversations on how ridiculous it would be to find a local market for one of a kind, small-scale furniture meant for an aging 600 square foot Montrose apartment.

Next, our conversations turned towards the site, nestled along a stretch of empty commercial space. Like many, we felt frustrated by the lack of vibrant local activity in spaces like Landmark Chevy that are found throughout Houston, space that is overbuilt and left empty that many are forced to drive by everyday. Our hopeful gesture of peddling local goods was one possible, albeit unlikely solution to these empty spaces requiring excessive capital, volume of goods, and a large customer base to fill.

Our personal fantasy was a large community of modest profit, small-scale and local businesses that could occupy these empty spaces, selling whatever goods they chose to make. We imagined that this business structure could enable a dialog with the local consumer, giving them tremendous power and input to what they needed in their community, replacing the currently accepted mass produced illusion of choice of goods that are bought without knowledge of their true costs of production, labor, or environmental impact.

March 10, 2010

OffCite. Design. Architecture. Houston


From OffCite.org
"FURNITURE BUYERS UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOOSE BUT YOUR LA-Z BOY."
by Steven Thomson

“I came home with a high fever; my ears still hurt. Just from the noise — a ringing in my ears. It is very toxic. But it’s Houston.” Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright is describing the after effects of Sunday’s Furniture Sale on North Freeway (announced last week on OffCite), a daylong event at the abandoned Landmark Chevrolet dealership on Interstate 45. Presented by wacdesignstudio, which consists of husband-wife team Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn, the guerilla retail event launched the studio’s first furniture line, designed and fabricated with an attention to the modesty of scale, materials, and production.

Located outside the crumbling remains of the Landmark Chevrolet Dealership, “Furniture Sale on North Freeway” reflected on the unanticipated failures of highly leveraged businesses and their effects on the city landscape.

The happening attracted about 50 people who had received mailed flyers, picked up information from Catalina Coffee, or began following the studio on Twitter. Because the space was not rented, Scott and Jenny brought an envelope full of cash to pay off potential security guards (there were none), as well as food for any wandering homeless people. The crowd was a mix of architecture students, writers, and curious locals from the adjacent Hidden Valley ranch-style development located behind the dealership. For Scott and Jenny, bringing the intelligentsia outside of their element to the edge city and putting the locals’ neighborhood eyesore to use was just as relevant as displaying their wares.

Mr. Cartwright grew up in the midst of the Woodlands McMansion boom. His father owned a custom cabinetry company, to which Scott owes much of his sense of craftsmanship, as well as keen sense of economy of material. Scott met Jenny, a native of Caracas, while both were studying at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. When the couple came back to Houston upon graduation, Scott found that his native Woodlands had been almost completely built out, leaving a dismantled craft construction industry in its wake. The Cartwrights chose to interpret the recession on their own terms, founding a hyper-local design studio focusing on the discourse of contemporary art and its relationship to design and architecture.

They define their “design art” as any artwork that attempts to play with the place, function, and style of art by commingling it with architecture, furniture, and graphic design. The forms are simple and composed of repossessed construction materials. Explains the duo, “It is more about the objects than about comfort and pop, we are currently not designing furniture to please anyone or solve other people’s problems, we are designing and building furniture as a way to find the answers to/and/or compare them to global and local issues concerning the current state of the economy and capitalism.”

Though no pieces were sold, the show on the North Freeway created a dialogue with the community on the failure of high leverage business, massive turnout, and mediocre quality goods versus the idea of a low leverage business, locally built, and individually handcrafted. In the long run, wacdesignstudio believes that this model will be the standard for creating a sustainable, growth-oriented local economy.

Posted by Steven Thomson on March 11th, 2010 at 2:14 p.m on OffCite.org

March 08, 2010

THANK YOU!



To everyone that had the chance to go to The Furniture Sale on North Freeway, thank you... we truly appreciate your support. "Thoughts and Notes on the Furniture Sale on North Freeway" will be published this weekend on this blog. And to those that were not able to go to the event and would like to know about this and upcoming projects contact us via e-mail at mail@wacdesignstudio.com

March 05, 2010

OffCite. Design. Architecture. Houston


From OffCite.org
"GUERRILLA FURNITURE SALE"
by Raj Mankad

In January, the New York Times reported that employment at US architecture firms had dropped from its July 2009 peak at 224,500 to 184,600 by November. Commercial development has ground to a halt, the big car manufacturers have pulled the plug on many dealerships, and a number of big box stores have closed. As an article by Susan Rogers in the next issue of Cite will discuss, vast amounts of land in the city are withering, wasting, wild, and waiting. It is in this context that two young designers have announced a “guerilla retail event,” the “Furniture Sale on North Freeway.”