Article about Coffee Trader

http://onmilwaukee.com/dining/articles/marycoffeetrader.html

First week in review

With 20% of our program already over, it is hard not to feel the rush to understand, interpret, and "see" buildings with the eyes of an academic. I, for one, feel an irrational disappointment/frustration at not "seeing it" right away. But reflecting on our conversations with our professors this week (Arijit, Anna, and Jeff), you draw house after house, and only after the 100th house do you begin to visualize patterns, typologies-- the character of a built structure becomes intuitive. So instead of rushing through a (fairly new) process to arrive at an unknown conclusion, it is perhaps better to slow down. Slowing down enhances subtle observation-- allowing us to notice slight changes, oddities, or relationships, clues that will ultimately show us what a building has to communicate.

As a part of the Nature group, I've spent my week at the exquisite Villa Terrace, enjoying lunches on the terrace and cartwheels through the manicured greenery. Such behavior put us in the unique position of experiencing the Villa Terrace as a guest, or even perhaps an inhabitant would during its pre-museum years, allowing John, Matt, and I to wonder about how quiet it must have been before Lake Drive was built. This lends itself to the issue of transition from private to public, the opening up of the lakefront to community spaces and beaches. This will be an interesting point to highlight during our interviews next week: was the manmade beach seen as an intrusion of privacy or as a process of beautification?

I have visited several homes/manors that have been turned into museum spaces, particularly in the UK, where titles and nobility have a much stronger (and ongoing) history. It is always interesting for me to find preserved homes of families who simply wanted to donate their beautiful house. While the A.O. Smith family certainly acquired much company wealth, they were not the county's Lord and Lady-- and therefore, the details of their everyday lives were not coveted or admired in quite the same way as a Lord's doings may have been a source of pride for laymen. In this way, the exhibition of this home proves to be a bit difficult to understand. With much of the original furniture and artwork removed, we are left simply admiring the physical structure and idyllic location, not necessarily the Villa Terrace as a "home." The personal element is slightly removed. What is the museum trying to do with this space? 

After Jeff's talk on Friday night, I'm sure we all agree that the Villa Terrace exists as an ideal spot for guest lectures. As for the rest, it's time for some interviews!

How some stories are born

Some stories emerge from nowhere. They establish themselves unnoticed–suddenly marking new traditions and leaving lasting imprints.  The Von Trier roundtable has been a place where some sneaky stories materialized in an unplanned manner.  At the end of a tiring day we regroup in this neighborhood bar. A few chairs are drawn around a small table; then another table added. A few more chairs are borrowed from the lonely man drinking alone in the corner.  Before long we take over the dark musty front room of Von Trier’s classic cocktail lounge. Much of the discussions that follow revolve around our impressions of fieldwork; events that took place that day and accounts of unexpected moments. These stories were not about the information collected or the methods used to collect them.  

Picturing Milwaukee: BLC Field School: The first Friday of the first week at BLC field sc...

Picturing Milwaukee: BLC Field School: The first Friday of the first week at BLC field sc...: Still to work on the leftover digitization of the drawings done on the site, meta tagging and Panoramio of the site but I am really excited...

Picturing Milwaukee: BLC Field School: The beginning !

Picturing Milwaukee: BLC Field School: The beginning !: It has been four days since we started working in field school. We are looking at the Historic Water tower neighborhood in Milwaukee. We ...

The first Friday of the first week at BLC field school......AUTOCADs, META TAGGING, LECTURE & THE DANCE AT WATER TOWER

Still to work on the leftover digitization of the drawings done on the site, meta tagging and Panoramio of the site but I am really excited to share the experience of the first Friday of the first week at field school.

The lecture at Villa terrace by Jeffrey Klee was interesting.On their attempts to create Colonial Willamsburg not only as the place of privileged but also trying to interpret the life of the ordinary and exhibiting their lives too.Though the idea of restoring the whole late eighteenth cent. to early nineteenth century town and converting it to a living museum is pretty extravagant to me as an outsider. But I guess U.S.A. can afford this. I also appreciate what Jeff said, their purpose was more into educating people rather than exhibiting stuff was convincing, but still a question prevails, "Is Colonial Williamsburg  successful in educating people who visit?"

The Dance Performance at the water Tower was an icing on the cake.It was organised by the Peck School of Arts on the occasion of its 50 years celebration.Stephen Koplowitz, www.koplowitzprojects.com is a renowned choreographer whose works are site specific, who showed his work with the Water Tower. The dance was accompanied by a live choir. It was an excellent ambiance on the lake front at 9 pm with a dance performance with the water tower as a stationary prop.

The performance was not like commonplace dance performances which use the historic buildings in background, but it used the building in its choreography to tell the story of the building itself. What I understood from it was that the dance begun with the dances showing the present situation with the people and their response to the building which gradually took us to the choreographer's interpretation of the relation of the people to the building in past. Moreover the dancers reflections were projected gradually from bottom to top pier showing the life of people with the water tower and lake from present to past and bring back to present. With beautiful lighting effect it was a great attempt to make the building alive.

I found an interesting connection between this art work and the work we are doing at the field school.In both the cases we are trying to interpret the social life of the past. In our case though the architecture of buildings, culture of landscapes and oral histories and in the choreographer's case it is probably through imagination and the observation of the recent activity.


नियति

Panoramio Tags

http://www.gnomeplanet.com/tutorial/panoramio_batch_uploading.php

Dancing on Site UWM Summerdances transfigures two Milwaukee landmarks

TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 2013 

Dancing on Site UWM Summerdances transfigures two Milwaukee landmarks

The beginning !

It has been four days since we started working in field school.

We are looking at the Historic Water tower neighborhood in Milwaukee. We are focusing on the Bradford beach area, the Villa Terrace (residence converted into an art gallery) on the lake front, some of the residences in that precinct and the businesses on the Downer Ave. The students have been divided in groups of three to study each of these areas.

For the first week we were supposed to document the buildings in the assigned areas, investigate the cultural environment and based on that were expected to interpret the society of Milwaukee now. Further we are also going to build up on interpreting the society of Milwaukee which existed before, from various sources.We want to understand the change.

I was in a group which was studying the Bradford beach area. Bradford beach is not a natural beach. It is an artificially created beach on the lakefront. The action replay of what I observed while measuring, having my lunch on the beach and talking to people there, I have started to interpret certain things.The beach with its tiki bars, the cabana and the artificially created green areas for water purification, the North Point custard and the Lake Park in proximity to the beach are three spaces for leisure with different characters in the closest proximity to the lake.They are different in character in terms of  1.) the amount of time they can engage the people there 2.) the activities the people do there and 3.) the kind of the people who come there.

These spaces are visually connected to the beach and physically or visually connected to each other but there  invisible boundaries which separate them.

The questions which have stated arising are
1.) What was the character of the beach earlier?
2.) Was it done for the society then because they needed it or was it done with some purpose which in turn became a part of Milwaukee's culture?
3.) How did the change in the culture and the attitude of the society brought changes in the cultural environment on the beach?

नियति

Two Lectures

All set for the Field school.

नियति 

Daily Schedule: DRAFT: Subject to change

BLC Field School wins a national award

Picturing Milwaukee: Thurston Woods Pilot Study, the 2012 BLC Field School directed by Arijit Sen received the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) 2013 Award of Merit. The Award of Merit is presented to recognize excellence for projects (including civic engagement, special projects, educational programs, exhibits, publications, restoration projects, etc.), individual achievement, and organizational general excellence.

Sen will receive the award on behalf of the field school participants on Friday, September 20, 2013 at the AASLH annual meeting in Birmingham, AL. The 2013 BLC Field School will be held at the Historic Water Tower Neighborhood.

Course Reading Assignments

Readings for the course are held under 2-day reserve at the UWM Library. Some of these readings are available as pdfs too. They are located here.

There are specific readings for the 4 different projects.

The cultural landscape of Bradford Beach
"The Beach," In John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1987) :53-72.
David Howes, "Architecture of the Senses," In Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism, Mirko Zardini (Editor), (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Lars Müller Publishers, 2005): 322-31.

Good Neighbors
Dana Cuff, "The Figure of the Neighbor: Los Angeles Past and Future," American Quarterly 56: 3, (September 2004): 559-582
Catherine W. Bishir, "Good and Sufficient Language for Building," Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 4, (1991): 44-52

Downer Avenue: A Commercial and Public Street
Richard Longstreth, "Compositional Types in American Commercial Architecture," Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 2 (1986): 12-23
JB Jackson, “By Way of Conclusion: How to Study the Landscape,” Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, Edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977): 307-320.

Villa Terrace
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/villa/hd_villa.htm
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/i/italian-renaissance-villas-and-gardens/
James Ackerman, The Villa as Paradigm, Perspecta 22, Paradigms of Architecture (1986): 10-31
Chapter 1: Nature and Culture in the Garden, In Claudio Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth Century Italy. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990): 8-19

Local Parks
http://www.lakeparkfriends.org/history.shtml
Lorne A. Platt,  "Planning Ideology and Geographic Thought in the Early Twentieth Century: Charles Whitnall's Progressive Era Park Designs for Socialist Milwaukee." Journal of Urban History 36:6 (2010): 771-91.
Galen Cranz, “Women in Urban Parks
,” Signs 5: 3, (Spring, 1980): S79-S95

Welcome

Welcome to the 2013 BLC field school at the Historic Water Tower Neighborhood

2013 BLC Field School  

Picturing Milwaukee: Promoting Stewardship and Conservation of Local Heritage

Historic Water Tower Neighborhood

Project Partners and Co Sponsors

Historic Water Tower Neighborhood

Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Madison (http://www.blcprogram.org)

Milwaukee Preservation Alliance, Inc.

A unique field school

The BLC Field School project seeks to broaden and popularize historic preservation and ecological awareness in the City of Milwaukee and beyond.  We have carefully planned and executed a unique collaborative platform that engages students, faculty members, and staff at UWM with local communities, Milwaukee residents and multiple stakeholders to collectively examine cultural and environmental heritage. We do it through collecting, analyzing and disseminating stories of stewardship and cultural heritage in local neighborhoods. Using a series of digital platforms and techniques we make these stories available to the general public in quick and efficient ways. 

The second of these field schools is scheduled for Summer 2013 at the Historic Water Tower neighborhood on the shores of Lake Michigan. During this 5-week field school we hope to bring nationally renowned historians and experts to work with community members and students in documenting and interpreting the built and natural resources of this neighborhood.  We plan on using a unique method of data collection and analysis – a mix of environmental analysis, spatial mapping, oral history interpretation, ethnographic and observational studies, asset mapping, digital humanities, and archival research.  Through this method, we document neighborhood stories of identity, culture and architectural heritage, and everyday strategies of environmental stewardship practiced by residents of local communities in Milwaukee.  Such stories include how residents remember and maintain their homes, institutions, public spaces, gardens, and yards, how community members relate to the landscape, how they experience weather and nature, and how they care for flora and fauna. In short, we examine how residents of these neighborhoods envision and execute their role as stewards of their urban environment.  We expect to find novel strategies that people use in order to create and sustain community identity, public space, promote and police their worlds, mark and guard their territories, conserve their ecosystem, value their built heritage, and improve their home spaces.

Our long-term goal is more ambitious.  We seek to address a fundamental limitation in the current narrow understanding of historic preservation that focuses on buildings with limited references to the larger context.  According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, stories of ecological conservation and sustainable stewardship can produce an expanded understanding of our built heritage as part of a larger ecosystem and contribute to an enhanced understanding of the urgency of protecting our heritage.  Recent experiences with historic preservation battles fought in the City of Milwaukee have taught us that successful practice of historic preservation must include the viewpoints of diverse stakeholders within this expanded understanding of our physical, cultural and ecological heritage. 

Historic preservation, ecological stewardship, social justice, community based art practice and storytelling have one common thread. These are all about the "ethics of caring."  We don't usually think of "caring" when we talk about preservation and local history. In discussions of social justice or urban movements the words "justice" and equity are more common. In the US arguments of justice and equity often borrow from scholars like Rawls and Hume and we encounter words like distributive justice, libertarian justice, and of course, social justice. The principle behind these concepts is equity, driven by individual rights and merit, not care, nurturance or relationships. Many have commented on the gendered nature of the use of the terms justice versus caring (Hofstede, 1980). 

Our fieldwork at BLC Field Schools explores grassroots knowledge and we examine everyday life of community members. Consequently, most discussions revolve around relationships and caring, not around policy and equity. Our research demonstrates that the extents of stewardship (caring) are proportionate to social power. For many home, neighborhood, environment, even the world came up as objects of caring. But we also meet people who could barely care for their own body, keep oneself healthy and happy. They could not afford to save the world even if they wanted to.

The above realization has framed our future plans.

The 5 year long Picturing Milwaukee project will take us to 5 communities along North Avenue with the same overarching questions - what do you care for, how do you care for it, and why do you do so? Can we learn the art and practice of caring from local residents? Can such knowledge be incorporated into the ways we practice historic preservation and ecological conservation? Can we document these practices and show the world how every community cares - in different and innovative ways? Can we show the world that an act of caring can be a struggle too!  Beginning with Summer 2013 and ending in Summer 2017 the selected neighborhoods include Historic Water Tower Neighborhood, Brewers Hill, Lindsay Heights, Washington Heights and Metcalf Park.  Located along an urban (social/ecological/demographic) cross-section these neighborhoods are along North Avenue, a thoroughfare that connect the city to its suburban outskirts.

We argue that rethinking the way we think about preservation, by integrating values of environmental stewardship, civic engagement, and sustainable development into the discourse of historic preservation will require us to fundamentally reimagine the way we read architecture and the built environment.  Traditionally we visualize a city by using maps that demarcate neighborhoods and delineate administrative boundaries. In this project we hope to use urban cross section (transect) as an alternative way to read the selected neighborhoods along North Avenue. By visualizing the city as a continuous cross-section we are able to construe culture, people, flora, fauna, topography, climate and biomes as continuous flows that bridge across neighborhood boundaries.

This project is significant because of its unique methodology and its innovative rethinking of preservation practice. It serves as a national model for University-Community collaboration and a preservation+conservation field school curriculum as we combine research, community engagement and teaching.  It is innovative because it focuses on integrating local knowledge with expert ways of reading the city and seeking to create a critically informed citizenry who can serve as advocates and stewards of our urban built heritage. The project uses digital tools to collect, analyze and disseminate information efficiently to a wider audience and explores innovative ways to incorporate new technologies into a curricular and service-learning context. This novel collaboration between an academic institution and neighborhood groups that, once successful in Milwaukee, may be duplicated in other cities.

At the end of this project we expect to produce a monograph listing stewardship strategies that complement more traditional approaches to historic preservation.  We plan to produce documentation and exhibits of places of cultural relevance using criteria suggested by the residents themselves; these places may include historic buildings, landmarks, structures, cultural landscapes and traditional cultural properties.  We also expect to produce a series of 4-minute multi-media documentaries comparing, explaining and evaluating best stewardship practices and strategies found in each neighborhood.