If you happen to be in the San Francisco bay area and are looking for something to do I recommend stopping by Johansson Projects gallery in Oakland http://johanssonprojects.com/ to have a look at the Article X show hosted there. (Disclaimer: one of the two artists featured, Kristina Lewis, is my sister-in-law so please look past the possible bias!). You will find her work to be deconstructionist in nature, that is, she takes apart common things, the everyday world of utilitarian objects, in such a way so as to give them new life and give us a new interpretation of them. You will find, for example, a commercial-grade electrical switch box, with the wires pulled out through the switch and frozen in the air as if permanently starched. It will make you think.
We here at Novawest also want to make you think. In opposite tension to Ms. Lewis’ fascinating work, which turns everyday items into art, we desire to bring art to the everyday. The built environment is our 3-D canvas. Through design collaboration, community involvement, public/private cooperation and the “paintbrushes” of dozens of talented individuals who work on our projects, real estate development becomes a multi-dimensional experience. Our buyers, tenants and neighbors are our jury. If we create a small, cottage home that enables a senior couple to live elegantly within walking distance of the store and pharmacy we have succeeded. If we can turn a patch of unkempt urban dirt or asphalt into a mixed-use building that provides needed office space and more active street life we succeed. If we can re-configure an approved, but un-built project into a plan that aligns better with the expectations of the local community we are successful.
As with Ms. Lewis’ art, we hope that our projects will make you pause and consider the way we should approach the development of spaces in our urban, exurban and village environments. The economic meltdown hit all of us in the industry hard. For many it was devastating. Yet, we are reminded of the old oriental saying, “a crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind.” Here, the opportunity is to inhale deeply and examine the foundations that led to the collapse. Easy money, ponzi-like speculative fervor and a failure to connect the means to the ends contributed to the downfall. Aware of this excess, as we exhale slowly, we should approach our development responsibility with a post-modern attitude, with skepticism or ambivalence about the notion of endless prosperity and rising property values. In almost pedestrian fashion developers will have to dwell longer on the fragile barrier between what is desirable and what is necessary. In the future that I see, what will make money has to first make sense. By pulling the wires out of the socket, Ms. Lewis might say, we will see the importance of the fundamentals in a whole new way.
We invite you to return to our SuperNova resource center often as we intend for this site to develop into a newsroom for thoughtful development and a virtual laboratory for new concepts that can make a difference in our communities.
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