-
Snow Day Building
By Brittney Boudwin “Is this really what’s happening outside?” I asked out loud to no one last Saturday morning after spotting a snowflake icon for the current weather condition on my phone. “Our first build day of the year is a snow day?!” I questioned as I put on a second pair of socks. Again, […]
Continue reading -
If Eyes are the Windows to the Soul, So are Windows
By Scott Boylston One hundred and eighty years. Seventy one years. Five years. Two years. What will the next time span reveal?
Continue reading -
Harmony Shacks + Kickstarters
By Scott Boylston WE DID IT!!! Thanks to 78 super-generous individuals around the country, we exceeded our Kickstarter goal for helping fund the Design for Ability greenhouse! WOW! What an incredible number of civic-minded and giving individuals—thank you for your extraordinary generosity!
Continue reading -
The Jones Street Waltz: What a Long and Sweet Dance it has Been!
By Scott Boylston Almost exactly two years ago, Debra and Chuck Caldwell invited us into their recently purchased 1866 home on East Jones Street in Savannah; a majestic, yet previously neglected corner-lot house on Savannah’s most beloved street. At that time Emergent Structures was a still-yet-fully formed idea centered almost exclusively around the Savannah Gardens […]
Continue reading -
Place, Identity, and a Reverence for Transformation
By Scott Boylston YOU KNOW …if you had already joined our Kickstarter campaign, you’d be done reading this already! (before you read on, join it NOW!) First, thank you to all of our early supporters! This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship! We are all new to each other, so a good place to […]
Continue reading -
Landfill Harmonic
Emergent Structures was very happy to see our work featured on a recent post on the website Ethics in Graphic Design.* But we were frankly more excited about finding a trailer for the movie Landfill Harmonic, which tells the story of the children from the slums of Cateura, Paraguay and their “recycled orchestra.” This is beyond […]
Continue reading -
Standard Magazine digs our work!
The latest issue of the Austin, Texas-based magazine, STANDARD, has published a 2-spread interview with ES president Scott Boylston, on Emergent Structures and the Design for Sustainability program at SCAD. We’re proud to be featured in such a great magazine that’s chock full of great sustainably-oriented design! See for yourself: STANDARD.
Continue reading -
Walls Can Talk
By Kate Bordine I recently attended SCAD, and focused my MFA Design Management thesis around the creative entrepreneur as a catalyst for revitalization in a post-industrial city. This topic brought me to conduct field research in Detroit, MI where I began documenting organizational triple bottom line approaches, and the individuals behind this movement. Common perceptions […]
Continue reading -
The Partnership Garden at the Moses Jackson Advancement Center (EyR8)
Emergent Structures was created in response to material reclamation opportunities that arose from the Strathmore Estates (now Savannah Gardens) redevelopment effort in Savannah, GA. Examples of the projects that we’ve created, executed or facilitated as the result of this redevelopment sprinkle our blog roll over the last 3 years. As with many stories of innovative […]
Continue reading -
Yes, why not more Shumans!?
“How can we recreate what’s happened here in every school?” That was the question Dr. Thomas Lockamy, Superintendent of the Savannah Chatham-County Public School System asked at last week’s Shuman Elementary ribbon cutting. And we couldn’t agree more with his sentiment. Robert F. Kennedy once said, “There are those who look at things the way […]
Continue reading -
Now Open: The Greenest Garden in Town!
By Scott Boylston / photos by Meagan Hodge Ready, set…grow! With Shuman Elementary School’s new garden already in full bloom, Emergent Structures partnered with Savannah-Chatham Country Public School System, Savannah-Chatham PTA, and IKEA to officially celebrate the completion of the garden. This week’s ribbon cutting was celebrated with great fanfare, thanks to a wide variety […]
Continue reading -
Considering a Passage of Time
“…with Time all things are revealed..” —Rabelais By Scott Boylston While talking with columnist Jane Fishman out at the Shuman Elementary School garden, I watched from a distance as my two young daughters squatted in the dirt beside the pergola that Emergent Structures recently finished. They punctuated their somewhat intense focus on the ground in […]
Continue reading -
Our Own Backyard (part 1)
By Scott Boylston Sometimes we neglect to call attention to things happening in our own backyard, and this is the case over the last few months with Emergent Structures and our board member Ramsey Khalidi. Long before Emergent Structures, Ramsey was reclaiming materials and whole buildings through his company Southern Pine Co., and his intimate […]
Continue reading -
Mercy, That’s a Pretty Floor!
By Scott Boylston If this floor could talk, what a story it could tell. Like a butterfly, it would tell stories, not only of its day-to-day existence, but of its dramatic transformation between 2 distinctly different lives it has lived. And like children in awe when they are first told that the weightless beauty of […]
Continue reading -
Bricks, Carbon, and Guilt-Free Ice Cream
By Scott Boylston When confronted with abstract ideas or large numbers, most people prefer to be given concrete examples. This is especially true when it comes to matters of sustainability. Very few people, for instance, will remember that the creation of a large solar array can reduce CO2 emissions by 570 million pounds a year. […]
Continue reading -
Move Over Omnivores: The Detritivores Are Here to Clean Up After You
By Scott Boylston (a version of this blog post can be read in the April issue of WellFed magazine) Do the words bottom feeder make you hungry? Do they make you want to say, “yes, ma’am, may I have another?” Do you have dreams of bottom feeding that wake you with a deep hunger for […]
Continue reading -
For instance, in Savannah… (part 3)
Steven Zimmerman and Ken Bruzenak, students from an MFA Graphic Design course at SCAD, uncovered and recorded stories of innovative material reclamation occurring in Savannah, Georgia. This is the third of three stories. By Steven Zimmerman and Ken Bruzenak The First Baptist Church, a half-block sized Greek Revival structure built in 1833, is located on […]
Continue reading -
For instance, in Savannah… (part 2)
Steven Zimmerman and Ken Bruzenak, students from an MFA Graphic Design course at SCAD, uncovered and recorded stories of innovative material reclamation occurring in Savannah, Georgia. This is the second of three stories. By Steven Zimmerman and Ken Bruzenak On East 35th Street in Savannah there is a worn and dirty block long building that […]
Continue reading -
Holiday Reclamation
by Sara Jo Johnson It wasn’t the tryptophan—unless the Tofurkey folks were really going for authenticity. Perhaps I could trace it to the end of the quarter—only one of my students leaned on a metaphor, but the concept has infiltrated the field of design, so maybe they are invisibly bouncing around the walls… Maybe one […]
Continue reading -
Emergent Stuctures in Motion
By Scott Boylston Several months ago, Zoe Pu, a 2007 graduate of the MFA in Graphic Design at SCAD sent me an email, asking if there was anything her Dynamic Typography class could do to further the cause of Emergent Structures (after getting an MFA in Graphic Design, Zoe spent a few years in New […]
Continue reading -
In the Zone
By Scott Boylston We’re looking forward to our summer. The old saying goes, you get what you ask for, and yes, we most definitely have. We have complexity, oh yes we do. But along with the complexity—along with this wild collaborative network we’ve nurtured—we have excitement, and meaning, and passionate interest from those throughout the […]
Continue reading -
Seeing is Believing
Logos :: n :: In classical rhetoric, the means of persuasion by demonstration of logical proof, real or apparent. By Scott Boylston Ideas can either be validated or delegitimized in the court of public opinion by the ways in which they are presented. That sounds simple, perhaps even obvious, until you consider that the way […]
Continue reading -
Objects of Significance?
By Scott Boylston This is a photograph of one of countless small objects we’ve found during our visits to the soon to vanish homes in Savannah Gardens. It does not take much to imagine a hand on this object; a level of human commitment to its presence; a memory—tragic, mundane or jubilant—that clings to its […]
Continue reading -
Deconstructing the Unit
By Scott Boylston What do we value? As individuals? As a culture? We value those things whose worth is apparent to us; we value what we perceive as valuable. And when the true value of something has been obscured by misperceptions or assumptions, we need new ways of seeing those things. From the beginning of […]
Continue reading -
How Little our Eyes Permit Us to See
“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” ~Dorothea Lange Pimprae Hiranprueck, a photography student at SCAD, recently accompanied a team that has […]
Continue reading
- 1
- 2