The Current Gallery is leaving its 30 S. Calvert St. location, just a few steps ahead of the demolition crews. True to form, the gallery is accepting site-specific proposals for its last show, Abandon Ship, right up until the final moment. And, according to this City Paper story, they plan to shoot video of the demolition this fall, in which all of the installed artwork will also be destroyed. The building will be gone, but the gallery won’t, the space’s founders are currently searching for a new location.
In advance of that, come to the show’s closing reception, this Saturday, August 8th, from 7-10 pm.
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I love the fact that this gallery has been so successful in a building slated for demolition. It would be great if we could figure out how to engage more spaces throughout the city in this way and make active what is currently atrophied. An interesting model is Creative Time in New York:
http://creativetime.org/index.php
The nonprofit places temporary arts exhibitions and performances in public spaces and in buildings that are about to be altered or destroyed. From their web site:
“We like to make the impossible possible, pushing artists beyond their comfort levels, just as they push us beyond ours. In the process, artists engage in a dynamic conversation between site, audience, and context, offering up new ideas about who an artist is and what art can be, pushing culture into fresh new directions. In the process, our artists’ temporary interventions into public life promote the democratic use of public space as a place for free and creative expression. “
PS: Creative Time is the organization that sponsored David Byrne’s Playing the Building installation last year:
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2008/byrne/
It is amazing that one can rip an historic building (series of buildings, yes?) down two blocks from the Inner Harbor with such ease. Does anyone know what is going to replace this building(s) ? I hope it will be better but I somehow I doubt it. These were probably built just after the 1904 fire.
I am always amazed how tall these buildings are in this area located on such small lots with such a vigorously articulated & consistent street wall. It would be much better to just sell them to cooperatives and let them in turn sell them off floor by floor as loft space for whomever wants it and repopulate the historic core kind of like SOHO. These 100 year old tall skinny masonry buildings will never happen again.
I remember in the mid 80’s when the Tower Building was ripped down – truly a great historic loss and supposedly it had some bad foundations — see link: http://www.mdhs.org/library/baltarch/Page17.html
With the relocation of the CBD from the central historic core down to the water moving East one wonders if the business abandonment of the historic core was planned or just happened by dint of selective campaign contributions. I suppose the grand jury and the courts will decide that one… We need a Mayor to “landmark ‘em” like in the 1987 book “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. Of course this Mayor has other things on her mind than regenerating the historic core at the present time — Charleston does a wonderful job of marketing their history as a positive gravitational anchor to attract business & tourists.
A creative discussion is in order about the future of the historic core in Baltimore.
Don’t miss this photo (by Craig) of the Water Street alley behind the gallery:
demolition definitely seems to thrive in economic downturns! i think the proposal for the block where the current gallery has been is at least a hotel but can anyone imagine it getting built right now?
i was talking to a filmmaker in nyc a couple days ago who’s making short films about what she calls the new urbanism (it probably should be the new new urbanism to avoid confusion with the congress for new urbanism), i.e. the re-purposing of architecture in cheap and quick ways for immediate re-use as a means of responding to the economic downturn. http://www.babelgum.com/newurbanism
And related to this she was interested in the temporary pop-up storefront activation policies that many cities have initiated with so much vacant property. it’s interesting that we’d be seeing the opposite scenario right now in the current gallery situation!!
21st century urbanism is all about the infill of holes and the reuse of stuff. Small scale, incremental, and adaptive. England just announced a downtown stimulus plan that’s based on turning vacant storefronts into Cultural Containers: link. There’s a picture at that link that looks like it could’ve been taken right on Howard Street.
Compare that to the still breathless enthusiasm and skyline boosterism on places like the SkyscraperCity Forums, where they were cheering the impending demo of 30 S. Calvert.
I suppose the questions are : A. Why is there a lack of protest over ripping down the fine grained historic core in Baltimore? B. and putting up scaleless under detailed beasts in their place ?
Pretty lackadaisical for a Creative City, n’est ce pas ?
Should we just do a collective shrug of our shoulders yawn and move on ?
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[...] in Baltimore architecture, planning and development. Given the closing of the Current Gallery (as noted previously), and the city’s search for new historic preservation commisioners, what sorts of productive [...]