wac for HFG

wac for HFG - Learn about wacdesignstudio's custom furniture comission and all the details on the Grand Opening of Houston Fixed Gear's new location!

We hope that 2011 is treating you well and that this year you get to reach all your goals. We've been really busy working on custom furniture pieces for our first commision-based project for Houston Fixed Gear.

Houston Fixed Gear is a Montrose-area custom fixed gear bike maker and bicycle parts retailer that established back in 2009. It used to be a small storefront on Westheimer Road, but like many sucessful businesses, they quickly outgrew the original location and Rosi Ruiz, proprietor and store manager, decided to move to a bigger and better space just a few blocks away.

Since the concept behind Houston Fixed Gear is to encourage people to design their bikes, their lifestyle and the spaces around them, Houston Fixed Gear teamed up with us to design and build the interior of the new store.

Borrowing elements and ideas from previous projects like Furniture Sale on North Freeway transaction desk, display units and seating units. Every piece was built using local resources and incorporating the design sensibilities that define our brand. and taking into consideration functionality and needs of the client, we designed and fabricated key furniture pieces that include the

You're Invited to the Grand Opening Party!

Please, join us for the Grand Opening Celebration of Houston Fixed Gear on Friday January 28 at the new location (2309 Dunlavy @ Fairview) from 7-10pm.

This exciting indoor and outdoor event will showcase many bikes from various designers as well as custom bicycles that can be designed to match anyone’s liking! Talented, and “secretly” well known street artist, DUAL will have plenty of art for sale and wacdesignstudio will be there to show you around the store and the furniture pieces built for HFG.

Fusion Taco and Melange Creperie will be selling an array of tasty food in the courtyard while party goers will groove to tunes by DJs Dayta, Elroy Boogie and Squincy Jones, both inside and out all night long. Models in bike wear and accessories will be displaying looks sold at Houston Fixed Gear as they pass rum tastings and cocktails generously donated by Brugal Rum.

This event will be fun for bike enthusiasts, curious and interested bike novices and just those looking for a fun Friday night event! To rsvp you can go to Facebook or send an email to rsvp@thecannonaffair.com.

We hope to see you there!

More About Houston Fixed Gear

In addition to bicycle products, Houston Fixed Gear offers services such as custom bike design, assembly, bike tune-ups, sizing, parts replacement and scheduled maintenance. The new store is located at 2309 Dunlavy Street, Houston, Texas 77006. Hours: Monday-Friday 11am-7pm; Saturday & Sunday 12-6pm (unless Rosi is out riding). Phone: 713.408.6618. website: http://www.houstonfixedgear.com. Twitter: @houstonfixed.

All images courtesy of wacdesignstudio.

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Obus Lofts.

For the past several weeks, wacdesignstudio has been working on a paper architecture project entitled Obus Lofts, a design experiment for the city of Houston of how to redesign the city based on a future of oil and water scarcity while maintaining the core landmark of the city, it’s freeway system.

Inspired by Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus for Algiers of 1933-1944, a massive high-rise development will be proposed under Houston’s freeway system. This project will place several twenty first century narratives together in a proposal to rebuild sprawling American cities in the form of a new condo development.

Obus Lofts will include its own product and furniture line intended for Obus Lofts’ residents, writings, drawings, an architectural model and an animation.

Periodically, we will post progress images and additional writings outlining this project. Here are some still images from the animation video that we are currently working on. For questions please contact us electronically by writing us to mail@wacdesignstudio.com.

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wacdesignstudio on Houston Modern Luxury Magazine.

Back in July, Chris Kelly (a contributor writer at Houston Modern Luxury Magazine) sat with us to talk about art, design and every day life. The result: A one page article featured on the September 2010 Home and Fashion Issue of Houston Modern Luxury Magazine. If you have the chance to grab a copy, make sure to turn to page 58.

In "Artists in Residence: A young couple reimagines city planning-and urban interior design," Chris Kelly introduces our current project (Obus Lofts), writes about our curved furniture pieces and describes some of our favorite things to do in Houston. If you don't have access to an actual copy of the magazine don't worry, you can read the full article online or download the magazine's digital edition here. We'd like to thank HOUSTON Magazine's senior editor Mitchell Alan Parker, the talented photographer Shannon O'Hara, and of course Chris Kelly for all their work in publishing this article.

Additionally, we'd like to thank Tony Medrano for inviting us to present last month at Pecha Kucha Night Houston Vol. 3. It was a great opportunity to meet and learn about other local creatives and talk about our work in just 400 seconds (20 images x 20 seconds each), if you where there with us you know that all the presentations were great and that the format is definitely challenging. The next Pecha Kucha Night Houston will be in November 2010 and Tony is looking for candidates willing to present, so if you want to participate or would like to recommend somebody to present, volunteer or sponsor the event get in touch with him soon.

Thanks for your continued support and interest in wacdesignstudio. To obtain more info on our Obus Lofts project, please visit our blog and website.

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wacdesignstudio will be presenting at Pecha Kucha Night Houston Vol. 3!

Today, we are pleased to announce our participation at Pecha Kucha Night Houston Vol. 3 scheduled for next Thursday August 26th 2010 at Domy Books in Houston, Texas.

Pecha Kucha, pronounced "peh-chak-cha", is an international non-profit organization that seeks to encourage collaboration and the open sharing of ideas in a mix of show-and-tell, open-mike night and happy hour. It has become the forum of ideas on architecture, design, culture and a lot more.

Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of conversation "chit chat" its presentation format (20 slides x 20 seconds) was devised 7 years ago in Tokyo, Japan by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham as an event for people to meet, network, and show their work in public in a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

Pecha Kucha has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. We will be presenting at Pecha Kucha Night Houston Vol. 3 along with other local creatives that include: Farrah Chickerneo, MD Clinical Research Monitor; Carlos Hernandez, Illustrator; Jenny Leonard, Designer; Robert Boyd, Author; Monica Yael Garcia, Designer and Illustrator; Ned Doddington, Architect; Steven Thomson, Writer; Cody Ledvina, Artist; and METALAB, Architects.

To learn more about the presenters and the organization visit the official website of Pecha Kucha Houston and don't forget to follow it on twitter @pechakucha_hou.

This event is free, sponsored by AIGA Houston, organized by Tony Medrano and hosted by Domy Books (located at 1709 Westheimer Rd. Houston, Texas 77098).

Doors will be open at 8:00pm and presentations will start at 8:30pm.

Make sure to arrive early as seats are limited.
We look forward to see you in the audience.
To rsvp click here.

Sincerely,

Scott Cartwright &
Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright

wacdesignstudio
artists // designers

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wacdesignstudio: Images from our apartment.

Just wanted to share a couple of images with you... enjoy!

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"I Love It, But Not For $3,000." Our Thoughts When Selling Furniture.

• A furniture dealer recently said to us, “The more unique an object is, the less willing a consumer is to part with their money for that object. No one really gives much thought to a cup of coffee or a pack of gum, but a customer will contemplate buying a chair or painting for their house for days, weeks, or even years."
  
  
• A poignant definition of capitalism is the Marx description of a circuit in which money (M) is exchanged for commodities (C) to be sold for a larger sum of money (M’), in a never-ending metamorphosis of M-C-M’. In selling unique objects however, one should be concerned with the dashes of the circuit, all of the irrationalities that the consumer brings to the exchange. The dashes are a leap of faith that determines success or failure in selling the object.
  
  
• We envision the process like a fishing trip, you prepare yourself before you enter the sales floor by saying to yourself, “today is the day, today we will find that customer who will buy our objects.”
  
  
• In our limited experience, the consumer doesn’t act as willing to buy as they do in our minds. They walk through our wares sometimes with an awkward contemplation, sometimes an ambivalent meandering around the objects, as if the objects never existed.
  
  
• The problem for us becomes selling our products to people that don’t feel an immediate need or desire to buy them. Customers don’t seem to buy contemplatively. This feels to us unrealistic and completely different from how other business operate.
  
  
• It’s really hard to actually get what an object is worth to produce. How long it takes to make or how many design failures happen before arriving at the finished product are arbitrary factors determining the price. It could be totally fair to price an object at 3,000 dollars, but if it isn’t perceived to be $3,000 by the consumer, then it is actually worth less. The question then becomes for us, “is this object really worth making?”
  
  
• Art and design are exactly like venture capitalism. We had a relative who recently passed away who was a venture capitalist. He attempted to sell revolutionary fleet management technology to the United States military. He worked on his idea for the last 15 years of his life, with the military pondering the technology for that entire time. He attempted to sell them with the only compensation being his dream of the big payoff. He died of a simple complication with diabetes he didn’t know he had. We saw him in the final weeks of his life as a blind man failing to sell his good health to his family. We think of him when we are selling. We think of him when someone loves one of our objects, but not for the amount that we are asking.
  
  
• These thoughts are reminders that help us keep track of the indeterminate time we wait for a customer to make a decision. Design masks our restrained desperation for a sale and it masks our failures from our customers. As we continue to design and sell, these thoughts will always accompany us.

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DESIGN FAIR 2010: MOBILE & OTHER UPLOADS.

wacdesignstudio recently participated at the Design Fair 2010 benefiting Lawndale Art Center. Here are just a few images taken with our mobile devices and cameras that we would like to share with you. Enjoy!

1. Limited edition postcards mailed to invite family & friends to the Design Fair 2010.
2. Lauren Rottet lecturing on the Future of Design at DCH.
3. Loading the truck at the studio with tourists taking pics of the presidents heads.
4. Our exhibitor tags.
5. Sign that defined our booth at the fair.
6. Scott Cartwright and Michael Guidry installing wacdesignstudio's poster.
7. wacdesignstudio's littlest fan.
8. Scott Cartwright talking at Design Fair 2010.
9. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright sitting on wacdesignstudio's curved chair.
10. View from wacdesignstudio's booth.
11. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright sitting on wacdesignstudio's bench
12. Artists Wei Hong and Sarah Schellengberg conversing on wacdesignstudio's bench
13. Raj Mankad and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright.
14. Enjoying the Preview Party.
15. Emily and Jenny Lynn.
16. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright and Iris Trent Siff, co-owner of Mortar.
17. Scott Cartwright and Sacha Nelson, co-owner of Mortar.
18. Adam Gibson and wacdesignstudio.
19. Vernon Caldera and wacdesignstudio.
20. Matthew Blackburn and Jennifer Allbritton with wacdesignstudio.
21. Jenny Lynn, vintage model, and artist Sarah Shellengberg.
22. Jenny Lynn, vintage model, and artist Sarah Shellengberg.
23. University of Houston Industrial Design student and Scott Cartwright.
24. Brenden Macaluso and Scott Cartwright.
25. wacdesignstudio with Joshua and Audrey Hardesty from HARBENGERduo.
26. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright and Industrial Designer Myan Duong.
27. Blurry but fun, Eleanor Williams and Vernon Caldera.
28. Adam Gibson, Peter Glassford and Karen Olds.

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DESIGN FAIR 2010: Lawndale Art Center.

We are pleased to announce our participation at the DESIGN FAIR 2010 benefiting Lawndale Art Center. At the fair, we will be showing and selling our recently launched furniture pieces from "Furniture Sale on North Freeway" and new items specially built for the DESIGN FAIR 2010.

Honoring: Paula Murphy
Co-Chairs: Eleanor L. Williams and Adam Gibson
Preview Party Chair: Vernon Caldera

DESING FAIR 2010, formerly the 20th Century Modern Market, will feature vintage modern objects of the 20th century as well as cutting edge contemporary design. The best in design for furniture, glass, ceramics, lighting books, metalwork and fashion will be for sale to collectors alike.

Also, new in 2010 is The Texas Co-Op, curated by Houston retail legend Mickey Rosmarin who brings his unique and sophisticated perspective to Texas Design.

April 21, 7 pm
Free Lecture: Conversations on the Future of Design by Lauren Rottet, FAIA, IIDA Founding Principal, Rottet Studio. Decorative Center Houston 5120 Woodway Drive, Ground Floor Gallery. Free lecture presented in partnership with The Design Council at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and AIA Houston, hosted by Decorative Center Houston.

April 23, 6 - 9 pm
Benefit Preview Party and Sale: Shop early for the best modern and contemporary design at Lawndale Art Center. Tickets $75 per person / $60 for Lawndale Members and guarantee admission throughout the weekend.

April 24 & 25, 10 am - 5 pm
Fair Days: Two full days of shopping among a special selection of vintage modern objects of the 20th century, as well as cutting edge contemporary design. General admission for the weekend is $5.

To learn more about wacdesignstudio visit
http://www.wacdesignstudio.com
http://www.twitter.com/wacdesignstudio

To learn about other dealers and designers
participating in the Design Fair 2010 please visit:
http://www.lawndaleartcenter.org/events/designfair_2010.html
http://www.twitter.com/lawndalehouston

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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.

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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

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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

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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.”

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POSTCARDS SENT

Postacards were dropped at the United States Post Office, you might be getting one in the mail... "Furniture Sale on North Freeway" Sunday March 7th, 2010 in the abandoned lot of the former Landmark Chevrolet dealership located at 9111 N. Fwy, Houston, TX 77037.

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FURNITURE SALE ON NORTH FREEWAY

wacdesignstudio is pleased to announce “Furniture Sale on North Freeway” a guerrilla retail event that will take place on Sunday March 7th 2010 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the abandoned lot of the former Landmark Chevrolet dealership located at 9111 N. Fwy, Houston, TX 77037.

wacdesignstudio is an independent design studio founded in 2009 by Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright that focuses on the discourse of contemporary art and its relationship to design and architecture.

In “Furniture Sale on North Freeway” wacdesignstudio will be launching its first furniture line, a 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” reflects on the unanticipated failures of highly leveraged businesses and their effects on the city landscape.

wacdesignstudio intends to create the hopeful gesture of a small design business selling its locally designed and manufactured product to local customers.

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wacdesignstudio's brand.

As you may noticed in a previous post, we acquired a copper brand and all of our furniture is being stamped with the name of our design studio.

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While we worked.

We were very excited to share with you a few behind the scenes images of our upcoming furniture line. Sadly most of the images were taken from our mobile phones and Jenny's Blackberry got stolen, so we lost most of our images and videos... these are the only ones we had on our e-mails. Enjoy them...

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Making Progress.

Hello strangers.

Good things will come in February and March. Right now we are just finishing logistic aspects for our Furniture Sale on North Freeway, like the date and times. The postcards will be out and distributed soon. We are also trying to get used to our daily schedules because we both have day jobs... and we need to sleep, eat, think, clean, etc.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Message from wacdesignstudio //
"Live Online: January 1st, 2010."

wacdesignstudio started the new year by finally launching wacdesigsntudio.com

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