Proxy
Flexible Urbanism: Proxy—two blocks of architectural impermanence, designed by Envelope A+D—is a vibrant focal point for commerce and community in the city's bohemian and diverse Hayes Valley neighborhood.

November 2012
Bay Area residents and tourists gather there to eat fresh food, drink at the Biergarten, enjoy rotating cultural programs, buy the work of local artisans, and watch movies in a covered event space. Part city-wide festival, part neighborhood block party, Proxy, as the temporary venue is called, is an unconventional collection of portable pods and renovated shipping containers spanning two blocks in the Hayes Valley section of San Francisco. Proxy opened in 2011 as a temporary, full-scale experiment in culture and commerce, conceived to celebrate the unexpected vitality inherent in its impermanence. The project is now in phase two of a four-phase, three-year life cycle.

Proxy (also known as ProxySF) gets pegged in the media as an example of "pop-up commerce"—a phenomenon in which retailers acquire short-term leases on vacant storefronts or parking lots and sell their wares, often in a frenzy of media hype, for a few days or even a few hours. "We specifically don't use the word 'pop-up,' because it doesn't really mean anything to us anymore," explains Douglas Burnham, founder of the Berkeley-based architecture firm Envelope A+D, which designed, fabricated, and now operates Proxy. "We think that a thoughtful insertion of compelling temporary uses can be an effective strategy to bring vibrancy to languishing parts of the city. There's nothing trendy or faddish about this."

It all started with a natural disaster. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake irreparably damaged the elevated Central Freeway running through Hayes Valley. After it was demolished a decade later, tears in Hayes Valley's urban fabric were suddenly visible in the bleak appearance of vacant lots. With a recession halting development, the tears became open wounds. Without new construction to rejuvenate the neighborhood, the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development sought entrepreneurs to lease these unused spaces for temporary uses until they could be sold in a better economy. The theory was that these so-called placeholders would generate retail and cultural activities, which, in turn, would rejuvenate the neighborhood.

Envelope A+D responded to the city's request for proposals with "a programmatic matrix of possible temporary uses, which we refined through meetings with the city, neighborhood, and potential stakeholders," says Burnham. The firm won the commission, but there were pros and cons to Burnham's ambitious proposal. His biggest asset turned out to be the neighborhood itself. As a local, he knew that Hayes Valley was home to significant numbers of architects, planners, and city officials. He knew they had advocated replacing the demolished freeway with a denser urban fabric, which could be achieved by introducing a rigorous brand of Modernist design. "Because of the damage that the freeway did to the neighborhood, Hayes Valley is a rougher, more open canvas than most neighborhoods," describes Burnham, and thus "uniquely positioned for a project like Proxy."

The biggest con was major and could have easily erased all that goodwill. Not only did the city offer no funding, grants, or loans, it would also charge rent for the land Proxy occupied. However, the mayor's office was extremely supportive in other ways, particularly by streamlining the permissions process to get the project moving. Still, the financial risk for the duration of Proxy was and continues to be assumed by Envelope A+D. Burnham has been admirably creative in raising capital. First he tapped into his firm's cash reserves, accumulated over two decades. Then he raised money for infrastructure improvements through loans from individuals. He convinced vendors and content providers to pay for the design and fabrication of their own venues and to pay rent. Finally, he found philanthropists for the art components, and corporate donations for frameworks and ongoing events.

With risk comes control, fortunately. "We select all of the vendors and design all of the components. A large part of what we do is the curation of the 'content' vendors [rotating concessions] of the project," says Burnham. "We are looking for people who have passion about what they are doing and are dedicated to a high-quality product. The right mix of vendors is critical to the project's success."

The right mix is critical to environmental responsibility, too. In this case, sustainability is measured not in metrics but in collective resolve. Beyond meeting the energy-performance requirements of the California Building Code, Proxy incorporates several best practices for sustainability. For instance, the "rooted" vendors (continuous concessions) own their own containers, which are primarily glass and steel, modular, and durable. They will take them away at lease end and reuse or recycle the elements. Envelope A+D will remove those units it owns. Infrastructure upgrades will be bequeathed to the next inhabitants. There will also be public displays of sustainability throughout Proxy's duration, including a photovoltaic-array demonstration for on-site power generation.

The architects designed the elements to minimize energy consumption. The units are insulated, but not heated. "We were able to do this only as a result of negotiations with San Francisco building officials," Burnham explains. "We argued that our uses are more like those of state-fair vendors than stores or restaurants, as both serve directly to the exterior." Burnham acknowledges that the no-heat option is made possible by the Bay Area's year-round moderate climate. He believes this demonstrates that there is a much wider range of human comfort than convention acknowledges. As Proxy is, after all, an experiment, he will continue to investigate more ways to conserve energy by rethinking our assumptions about comfort.

Burnham reaches beyond environmental diligence to emphasize the social sustainability that Proxy offers. He sees his experiment as a new model for urban development by temporarily transforming underused, but high-value, areas into thriving cultural experiences. He calls this "flexible urbanism." "If we think about the underused spaces of the city as having the potential to sponsor access to products, services, or amenities that are not readily available, we are working toward more sustainable neighborhoods," he argues. Of course, he acknowledges that the uniqueness of San Francisco and its embrace of outdoor green markets, street fairs, and food trucks is conducive to this model. "On another site, in a different neighborhood or in a different city, the project would be quite different. Though Proxy started as a project with a specific site, we quickly began to see it as a strategy that has implications far beyond that of a one-off project," he says. To that end, Burnham is converting Proxy to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in order to deploy the strategy as a mechanism for urban change.

By Sara Hart

Opened in 2011, Proxy is a “temporary” commercial and performance venue in San Francisco, designed by Envelope A+D. Designed to be ever-changing, it offers an evolving experience for visitors, tailored to neighborhood conditions and interests. Proxy is an example of what Envelope terms “flexible urbanism”: projects that offer “more room for play, room for interpretation – not just a clearly defined set of goals that are stated and carried out in that exact same way until the end.”

The idea: Envelope responded to a call for proposals for multi-unit housing, as part of San Francisco’s plan for an area that had been reshaped by a past earthquake. However, when the economy crashed, the City’s plans for the site had to be reevaluated. “The Mayor’s office came back to us and said: ‘Now that the economy is crashing and all of these projects are going on hold, what would you do if you were going to obtain the two adjacent lots with a temporary lease.’” Envelope developed their proposal, and received a positive response – and competitive short-term lease.

The challenges: One central challenge was that Proxy’s nature as a changing project with a contingent lifespan (and unconventional building materials: shipping containers) meant it existed in a code vacuum: “According to the Building Department, ‘temporary’ is 90 days, so any temporary structure or event in the City’s eyes is 90 days or less. Everything else is meant for brick and mortar buildings.” However, Envelope worked with the City to find compromises and alternatives: meeting seismic standards, but creating unconditioned spaces. “Everyone has been extremely supportive, and because we’ve had such support from the City it’s helped us navigate uncharted waters.” In particular, the Mayor’s office helped streamline the permitting process for the project.

The outcome: The project has been very well-received so far, both by the immediate neighborhood and San Francisco at large. Wallack notes that, “In the neighborhood people really understand what it’s doing to what used to be a parking lot – how this starts to activate areas that used to be vacant.” It also attracts many potential tenants: “We get a ton of inquiries. Multiple inquiries a day, people that are interested in being a part of the project. We’re really curating the site and we’re not interested in having redundant program.”

The bigger picture: “We’re looking at this project as a content machine. How do you infuse dormant sites with program to activate certain areas in a city? How can we start to think about different models for development, not just using a traditional brick and mortar building model?…If we were to do a Proxy where you are, it would most likely be a very different thing, but the core values of the project would be the same: we would be looking to activate a dormant area.”

Let's talk about the BRIGHTERFASTER piece above proxy: why did you choose that space for those words? 

I've never been to San Francisco before. I'd been invited over a few times but it never worked out. I got an invitation to do a show at While Walls [Gallery, Larkin Street, San Francisco], which I thought was a pretty cool gallery, so I said yes. San Francisco has been on my list of places to go for a long time - I wanted to make my show a big deal and paint as much as possible in the streets. I knew San Francisco was pretty art-friendly, so through the gallery and through people I knew here, I started to find places to paint. I came over for about a month at the beginning of March to so the show at White Walls and hooked up with the owners of the [BRIGHTERFASTER] wall. I sent them some stuff of things I'd done in London and they said, "Yeah cool, you can paint that."

My show at White Walls was: bigger, brighter, louder, faster - positive words thrown together. BRIGHTERFASTER just fit. Everything I paint is site-specific - it has to fit on the wall that I'm painting it on. There are things that I want to say but I can't because the wall's not right.

How do you decide where to break words, or size the phrase?

Basically, the height of the wall designates the height of each row - so in BRIGHTERFASTER you could have three or four rows. My problem with this wall [site of: GREATADVENTURE on Octavia Street at Page Street] was the width between the windows. The first letter I sketched up on this was the 'E' and then that gave me the size of each letter going left or right of the 'E.'

So you want to achieve a total encasing of the wall, and then from there you size out the dimensions of each letter. That jumps ahead to this idea about the density of London: is it kind of exciting to have this long view - across Octavia and Patricia's Green - to project your work so massively?

We've been lucky in America because we've been able to get on roofs and get these really unique shots; those are the money shots. Those are he shots you'll use when you make a book in ten years time of your life. I've painted stuff in London that you cannot photograph in one shot. I grew up doing graffiti and we'd paint trains - you could never get the whole carriage in one photo. My whole life I've always patched things together.

Did you get permission for every street piece you did in San Francisco?

I'm trying to get a work visa, as America is quite a big market with regard to stuff that I sell. I don't get paid to paint but it would be nice to get a work visa rather than traveling on a tourist's visa. So I don't want to get arrested. Once I get a work visa, I don't give a shit.

But within London you still do a lot of illegal painting?

It's what's easier; if it's easier to talk to the owner and get permission then I'll do it that way. If it's easier to just walk up on a Sunday morning and paint it....

So there's some bureaucratic gauging....

Yeah, it's like, people know who I am. What I do generally has a positive message behind it, and it's better than what was there before so even without permission that owner's are happy to have it. It takes a lot longer to get permission to paint walls than it does to actually paint walls. Sometimes you find this sick wall and you're never going to find out who owns it, so just paint it.

Or, the owners live in the suburbs and they're never going to see it anyway.

I can deal with the cops, the cops are cool; I explain to them what I'm doing and they recognize my style. I don't look like a teenager, I don't do it in the middle of the night; I do it in the daytime with a big yellow jacket, ladders, and wet-paint tape. I make it look like my job.

That's interesting, the more gutsy and official you look the easier it is.

Totally. The only person who can tell me to stop doing it is the owner of the wall. And if he doesn't show up, then the cops take your name and address and photograph your ID.

On the topic of the law as a navigator of art and dictating whether or not a piece happens - do you want talk about the kind of designation or authority?

Well, if you look at how street art has evolved in different cities - Brazil, London, New York, Los Angeles - London's got stencils, America's got posters, Brazil's got this weird Os Gemeos style. It's all got a lot to do with the culture, the type of paint that you can get there, and the police. Graffiti writers will evolve and do what they can get their name up - posters, stencils, and window-etch. Within street art you see a strong cultural mix around the world coming out because of the materials and the law.

I know you have stuff in galleries as well, but let's go back to the site-specific aspect and the city as context. I always think of graffiti as accentuating scale, and revealing how huge the everyday context is.

To me, this a dull, boring blank wall that no one's going to look at. I'll come along and put something on it and make it a focal point. What I do and how I do it is positive, uplifting, and there's a good message there. Even if I took this message from somewhere negative, everyone is going to interpret it in their way and put their own meaning to it.

It's kind of funny you should say that because I actually interpreted BRIGHTERFASTER as this cynical comment on consumerism, like the myth of brighter-bigger-cheaper-better.

Yeah, totally, I look at some of the pieces I did for the White Walls show and they sound like I lifted them from gay porn videos or something: harder, faster, bigger. [Laughs.] Stuff like that taken out of context and put up on a wall...like GREATADVENTURE came from Biggie Smalls. It's going to mean something different to everyone. GREATADVENTURE means a lot of different things, its life, and it's starting a journey.

It has a real storybook feel, which sort of parallels this typeface, having an imaginative child-like quality to it. Do you want to talk for a second about how architecture shapes your work in that it is all dependent, like you said, on what is existing and built. You don't go and build a wall and then paint it, so talk about taking the next step of building upon something...

It goes back to graffiti; graffiti writers want to get their name up in as many places as they can. It's not about my face and who I am; it's all about my name. I've taken these words and this typography and done it in a style that is recognizably me. I never sign any of the things I do on the street, I never write: EINE. We did a painting up in the Tenderloin opposite this school, and when we went back to finish it all these kids knew who I was. You know, nine and ten years old, and they'd Googled me, and they knew who I was. So, I went and had a little chat with them in their class, it's weird.

But is it cool to think that you could make kids think about doing what they like and having a future, not just having a nihilistic relationship with graffiti culture. You know, "you could be an artist."

I spent years making a very negative, very destructive contribution towards society. And now I feel like I'm making a positive impact on people's environment.

You mean your art being negative before now? How so?

Totally.

You think it was less "artistic?"

Hardly at all artistic, it was just fun. This [current work] is an improvement.

I read about how you do printmaking in a shop as well, were you doing those two things concurrently?

I did printmaking as wel as leaving graffiti and doing street art, yeah.

So, printmaking and screen-printing are very communication-based art forms. Did working in that shop help to develop how you formulated your messages visually?

It was just a job that I put my hand up and said I'd do. I was part of this company call "Pictures On Walls"; it was a bunch of street artists from around the world. People wanted to buy our stuff and we didn't have anything to sell so we set up this company. It was with Banksy, Jamie Hewlett....Oh, I got to run across the road and have a piss.

Oh, right OK.

Just be a second.

[Intermission]

So while you were gone your friend was telling me about how [British Prime Minister] David Cameron gave Obama a painting by you as an official gift. I totally missed that! [Laughs.] What did Obama give Cameron?

Who's the American artist that does typography? [Ed Ruscha.]

[A guy comes up and offers Eine some candy: "I picked these up at the strip club yesterday."]

Yeah, cool, I'll have the Starburst, the purple please. Anyway, he also does petrol stations.

I just wondered if Obama gave him like, a cigar.

The interesting thing was that Samantha Cameron [wife of the Prime Minister] couldn't fly because she was pregnant, so none of the press was going to be talking about what the wives were wearing. So, that kind of heightened the interest in the art.

It's kind of a funny thing because Cameron is pretty conservative right, and has cut funding for the arts quite a bit.

Well, if it were Blaire, he would've picked Banksy.

Really?

Yeah, totally.

Why?

Just 'cause he doesn't think.

[Laughs.] He's just part of the herd?

[Cameron] thought about it; it was weird and totally out of the blue.

Do you want to talk for a second about how this is public art, the reactions of the public, and if you care? Is it funny?

To me, it's funny. But, you know everyone has their own interpretation. 99% of people enjoy what I do even I do it for my own selfish reasons, with my own message behind it.

It's really social experience to be out here. Looking at Andy Vogt's piece down the road - everyone keeps walking by and asking him if his sculpture is a coffee bar.

My stuff is a lot easier to interpret. To me, a lot of art is about a simple, effective understanding.

There seem to be some similarities between how proxy and graffiti utilize architecture. Does architecture affect your work?

Yes, as a backdrop. Obviously the size and the shape of a building will massively affect what I am going to write on this wall, which then affects the message. When I was in Japan, I painted loads of shutters [roll-up doors] in front of fashion shops. But they were all fucking fashion shops with English names. So, although I'm in Japan, the photograph doesn't tell you you're in Japan. Architecture interprets where and what I paint. Without that, it's just another painting anywhere.

Does it feel different painting here in San Francisco as opposed to other cities around the world?

The kids who do graffiti here have got more of a jealous or negative attitude to what I'm doing.

Do you talk to a lot of kids, the taggers around here?

No, I haven't really met them. I know a lot of the older generation. The younger kids, I don't know, they just don't like what I am doing.

How come?

I don't know if it's because I'm getting big walls, free paint and scaffolding? And, I'm a gay street artist? Maybe they got no idea I spent 20 years vandalizing shit and painting trains, and they think I'm one of these new kids? Whatever. "What's these people from London doing coming up and taking our city? Let's fire-extinguish his walls!" [Referring to the graffiti on Eine's graffiti.] But I would've done the same when I was younger, so it's all fun.

We might get a stop-motion camera on top of one of the apartment buildings opposite proxy to sort of track the evolution of the project. I was thinking about proxy as building up and up while BRIGHTERFASTER sort of decays.

That's the other thing about San Francisco; I had to sign all these things saying that if they were to build a building in front of my piece I wouldn't protest as artist. It's like, listen man: I come, I paint a building, I take a photograph, and after that I don't care.

It seems maybe very "San Francisco" to even assume you would have any degree of authorship./

Yeah, like I can stop someone from buying a piece of land because I had some artwork there.

Somebody here would try that! [Laughs.] Which is great. So, how do you decide on practical things like the colors you use? Is it based on the canvas of the building?

Basically, the last time I was here I had a big pot of white and a big pot of orange, and I mixed it together and we painted this wall. And we're back six weeks later and the orange is still there, and we've got a pot of red. We try to so things as effectively as we can.

Because it is usually done in about a day?

Yeah, three days maximum.

So, even if you get permission and have the support of a gallery, you are still operating on a pretty self-generated resourcefulness, very off-the-cuff.

Totally. I've been invited to paint something at Beijing Design Week, and they've sent me photographs of places that we can paint, and they're like, "Can you mock up what you're going to do?" And, I'm like, until I actually get there, get a feel for the area, and see the wall, I can't work out exactly what I'm going to do.

So how do you work out what you're going to do? What do you mean by that?

Just like, people only ever photograph the wall, and never what's going on behind the wall, or what's looking at the wall. Is it a casino? Is it a school? Is it near a shopping center? Is it a racetrack? Especially in China, if there's like 100,000 gamblers behind me, that's going to change what I write.

So, it's some combination of scale, perspective, and the social surrounding. How do you feel about what happens to your work in the end? Would you want to "fix" everything if you had limitless time and money?

No. 99.9% of everything I've done in the last 30 years has been cleaned off, so, I'm used to it. It's going to affect the owners of the building a lot more than it's going to affect me.

When I was preparing to talk about your piece, I kept being drawn back to an image of “Isla en la Isla [Island within an Island]” (1993) by Gabriel Orozco. It’s unclear if Orozco even made the piece or if he just took the photo, but it’s basically a shot taken from New Jersey where these shards of found wood and debris are leaning against a concrete barricade in shapes that purposely or accidentally mirror the downtown Manhattan skyline in the distance. So, not just a reading of the direct material reference of reclaimed wood but in also tying in ideas of scale, the impermanent, the found, the urban construct, it seemed to speak to me while I was thinking about the ambiguity of images through shapes in your work. It looks completely different depending on where you’re standing, where the light is…

It does. Constructing something in the natural world, or even in the gallery, you have an idea of what it is and then you make it, and then it exists. And then you get to see the light. The piece that I made yesterday is the last transitional element [at the end of the structure] moving the whole piece from two-dimensional into three-dimensional. I haven’t even seen it at this time [morning] because I made it yesterday afternoon. So now I’m realizing how the shadows down there on the lower piece are lining up to complete this triangular shape as it’s projecting below. All of that stuff is really unexpected. Once it gets to be about 5 or 6 o’clock the sun goes behind that building and it lights up the entire lower shelf. And when it’s overcast, you really see all the color in the wood because there are no shadows…

I knew that light would be a part of this piece, but I didn’t know it would be such a big part of this piece. That’s been one of the biggest things for me, the environmental effect on the piece. I had an idea of how I wanted to use the fence practically to manipulate the idea of the fence, from it being a barrier to becoming a window, but then in practice the whole thing has kind of become something else. Which is the best part of any kind of site-specific work; you don’t even know what it is until you make it.

I’m kind of amazed how the shadows reveal the angles of the wood in relation to the sun.

Yeah, and on the functional level—which is huge for me because I’ve never done an outdoor sculpture before—my material is this brittle dry wood, which is structural to a point, but it’s split. I actually had it stock piled and it was ready to go. I didn’t want to have to build structure into the site, something that could hold up against the wind. There wasn’t enough time or money. So, I started with the fence because that existed. I keep using the word to “architecturalize” the fence, even though its already architectural I wanted to extrude something else out of the shape…

…Or an awareness of it. It used to be a barrier and now it’s a part of something. Talk about the material a bit more, in terms of looking at time, I read this thing about how you use a lot of wood from 50-100 years ago. Where do you get it? Is the time inside the material important to you? How are you selective about what you use?

My process is an on-going scavenging process, I actually just scrounge it out of dumpsters after renovations or demolitions. So what that means is that I drive around and when I see a dumpster I look inside it. If I’m lucky the wood is actually on the top layer of what’s in the dumpster. [In the renovation process] they knock the plaster out of the wall, take the wood out, throw it in a dumpster, and then the plaster goes on top of it. Many times when I get into a dumpster, the wood I need is covered in hundreds and hundreds of pounds of plaster. Not to mention junk.

That’s interesting because it’s almost like you’re working in rewind of this very practical ritual—the order of tearing things apart and your order of salvaging is the exact opposite of that.

For about six or seven years I’ve become pretty specific about what I will take and what I won’t, mostly because if things are broken in half or ripped in weird long shards, then they’re harder to deal with. I look for whole pieces of wood, which are never longer than four feet long because they’re made to fit between studs—so they’re 48-inches long if you’re lucky.

I also really look for the colors; I discovered that the sort of natural tonal system of the wood and the coloring of the plaster on one side was a drawing medium that I could use. That’s sort of how I first got involved in using wood, through looking at it as a kind of line weight, in a graphic sense. So I would use it as color-specific, but also as a linear drawing tool. I would organize [the wood] by color, getting the really orange stuff in one pile and the yellow stuff in another, and the white stuff in another. Which was actually tricky because wood has two sides, two colors, two types of grains, so I’m always thinking: “am I saving the dark side or the light side?” There’s an element of not knowing what the material is holding.

So you developed this way of selecting because you’re dealing with garbage essentially and organization was the first step to restoring it…

The other part of the process is that most of the pieces still have nails in them…every single piece of this wood I have pulled out of a dumpster, bundled it up, taken it to my studio, then handled it again to take out the nails, sort it by color, wrap it up, store it, take it out, cut it—just the time I’ve spent handling all of the material is kind of a weird.

So you do alter the pieces then through cutting or finishing the edges off? I noticed that some are rather rougher than others, is that by way of selection or have you sawed certain pieces and not others?

I mitered it at the top at 40 degrees. It’s really interesting because a chain link fence is not a 90 degree intersection, it’s at 80 degrees. The ends are as I found them, or some I have broken, and so I mix the two together to allude to the found nature of the material. By leaving the ragged edge it feels more like a relic and not like the material I have processed.

What about the public-making event?

When people came to make the piece, even thought the MCD was hosting it, I had to take a central role. There were a lot of concerns, like no one was able to use power tools or anything. Luckily, a big part of my piece was individually wiring each piece [of wood] to the fence, and there are several hundred pieces here. I pre-cut and pre-drilled the pieces and then people who came to help, in varying degrees of success helped to wire [the wood] to the fence. I gave them some direction…

How many people were here?

About 25 people, it was a six-hour event. I’m going to the Headlands [Center for the Arts] as a resident in September and part of being there is being open to the public, and facilitating an event where the public can come. So this was a huge baptism into that experience. This has been a serious immersion into public relations! [Laughs.]

How much did you keep of what the public made, if you had to quantify it?

I kept a lot—I’d say maybe 15% had to be fixed or changed.

And how much of this final piece was finished in that day?

About 60% of the structure was there, maybe less. At the opening [event] there was about 75% of the final structure.

Not to overly draw analogies between your piece and proxy, but there is a similar thing going on with the shipping containers here—elements from its past life as a transporter are somewhat preserved even if it has been radically transformed into an ice cream shop or whatever. Talk a bit about this specific piece in relation to the material. This very simple position of reflective angles is maximizing visually—there’s uniformity in what was basic scrap wood.

My work is going from a graphic drawing style into a more practical overlay of constraints. So in this case, my own constraint is the wood, which is never longer than four feet. So that’s a limitation because even though I’ve linked them in the past into eight foot sections, the wind at this site is so intense that without building a structural piece to hold the wood up it just wasn’t practical to go beyond four feet sections. That length of wood was overlaid with the constraint of the fence. So using the angles of the chain link and a four foot limitation and the idea that I wanted to create a window from the fence.

So the idea that the angle of the found chain-link fence then physically dictates the larger shape of the piece…

When I originally did my mock-ups of my ideas I wanted the top of the piece to be a horizontal piece that projects off the fence, but because of the wind it just didn’t have a lot of lateral stability.

It’s interesting that these pieces of wood come from this very practical life within the walls of a house, then rescued by you only to return to this world where, “OK, this has to stand up.” It is again expressed through structural limitations and a sense of practicability.

Originally I wanted this window that was about four inches wide, for a very tight view.

So creating a sense of voyeurism?

Yeah, a really heavy-handed direction of the view into a very narrow aperture. Then I realized that because I’m six feet tall it was going to be really high [entry point], and it’s probably better to have it a little wider so more people can look through it. Those were the driving forces on the shape of the piece. I also thought it would be interesting to take this sort of two-dimensional application and gradually make it in a more formalized volume.

It has kind of seismic quality to it. So this beginning part isn’t unfinished? It’s a sort of leading up to the filled out section like blips in the radar.

[The gradual increase in volume] was something I had thought of making early—connecting the two [sections] with these isolated pieces of three-dimensional structure. It is done now because it has a transition and it begins with the most minimal building block that I can leave freestanding. I would’ve liked to have it just be one line that comes over, but it’s like a helix; three interlocking helix-shaped, triangular sort of spirals that are all interlaced. One piece leads to another, which is offset by another, and another…

Structurally, it’s a surprisingly strong piece even though it’s made with all these almost splinters of wood…

Almost like popsicle sticks.

Do you want to talk for a minute about the idea of material reuse in your work? I tend to shy away from focusing on “the reuse thing” because the idea can be sort of politicized but I’m interested in it through an aesthetic lens…

That’s actually where I am too. I hate the throwaway material aspect of our contemporary social situation here. It’s part of my personal axe to grind with modern society, but the thing that drew me the wood was that it was available, very beautiful, and varied. In kind of a tangential way you do get to talk or think about the fact that this is a technique that was very artisan, skilled technique of building walls and trawling plaster, and making curves out of straight lines. There’s a lot of pride in that whole process of this wood. And that it was harvested from old-growth Douglas Fir because the straight grain of the wood was important for making a flat wall. In the northwest there was so much Douglas Fir that these gigantic, 100-year old trees were essentially turned into toothpicks. Those are important in the sort of subconscious legacy of the wood. It’s not something I’m trying to scream out in my work.

Right, it’s not comment on that cycle but it originates in the idea that we already have great building materials in the dumpster. Architecture seems to bump up against those issues from the beginning of any project.

Architecture is like a crystal, it’s a form that grows over time and is a rigid structure with a life span; it’s crystallized. A wall is an assembly of things that are crystals too; plaster in this matrix of wood. So originally I was thinking, “wow this is like magnetically reorienting all these particles.” Taking all these pieces that were very rigidly aligned inside a wall and putting them through this kind of chaotic process, almost like a geological change. Now they’re cooling and re-crystallizing in this way. It was an inspirational way to think about the material. This piece feels like it’s not fully formed or it’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s got a very crisp starting point or focus.

The wood is very splintery, and the splinters hurt a lot within a few minutes because Douglas Fir has some kind of resin that is toxic to your body or your blood stream. I started thinking about how the wood, which has been processed and gone through this whole man-made, systematic building process, and then the housing boom, then renovations, and then into this totally unwanted thing. And it’s got these kind of metal splinters or nails stuck in it and I like to think about pulling them out and releasing it from the first step in that process.

The paradox of an un-housed population with too many houses seems like a spoke in that process. There must be something freeing as an artist also to make something knowingly impermanent. Cutting to the chase of what we know will happen to all of our stuff anyway. Proxy is very practically inspired by the recession, the idea that these lots were originally going to be affordable housing units and now it’s become a temporary placeholder for those plans. It’s also just how we are beginning to think about building, the urban landscape, and time.

And that gets to the idea of installation work in general; it is this ephemeral thing. As a sculptor it’s been really liberating to work that way. In the last year or so my work has been moving into that territory, and not focusing on object making that’s “for sale.” Just focusing on the creative process of making the piece and being in the space and not really knowing what it’s going to be until it’s done.

The piece is the process.

Definitely. A lot of this wood came from a show that I had at Southern Exposure a year and a half ago—a similarly large-scale wood piece. It will be interesting to see what happens to this wood now because it will have been in the sun for a month.

I want to make sure we cover a couple more things like the installation day and the interaction with the public, and then the city as context for the piece. We’ve talked about weather elements like wind, but how does this fit in the center of the city, or the city as gallery.

I keep thinking about the site in terms of the freeway that used to be here, and the unstoppable tide of traffic that is coming in this direction [from Market Street towards the corner of Hayes and Octavia from Market Street]. It affected the way that this piece pointed toward this corner as the kind of terminus of the whole artery of traffic. It feels like this is the direction of the entire site.

It actually made so much sense, it’s so intuitive for it to point this way that I hadn’t thought of the piece being shaped any other way. There’s a horizon in it. But the scale of the fence itself has an interesting motivation—it’s essentially the height at which most people decide that it wouldn’t be worth it to climb. But it’s the same motivation with the height of these buildings, what is the height at which we can maximize people living on one lot, balanced with regulation, and the money to pay for it. It’s interesting that such tangible considerations shape our relationship to scale, or the horizon of the city.

And it continues that way on the outside of the fence, because I wanted to forced the tension into the corner by reversing the pattern on inside, but not on the outside. So it’s weird, it’s not symmetrical. But the city as gallery, there is so much movement through here.

So you’ve worked out at the Headlands [Center for the Arts] right?

At the Headlands, it’s peaceful and nothing is really moving in any particular direction. It’s been interesting thing to see all of people viewing the piece just by walking past it.

The unintentional viewer…

The unintentional viewer, but also the shape is what it is because of the constraints of the materials and the fence. It also has the rough illusion to retail and some kind of public, or human-sized architecture. People immediately assume it’s going to be a restaurant or a coffee shop or the Biergarten, because it’s a standing height shelf and rough a roof-sized height.

So it’s working with preconceptions of scale.

Yeah, the assumption is that this is a business…

That’s interesting on a couple points because it exposes how scale forms in the mind of the public—retail and business—but also that you were able to tap into the rhythm of constant construction that will encase proxy.

And that any new project that’s kind of “artsy” or “weird” is a coffee shop. That’s another kind of zeitgeist—that of course it would be coffee or a bar.

Did the scale of your installation and its subsequent interaction with the public occur to you before you built this piece? Did that surprise you that it would be assumed to be a retail component on site?

It was a surprise. I knew that I would be building something that would relate to people, that would be the scale of a person and their view, but when I decided to make [the chain link “window”] wider, the unintended effect was that it came to look like a counter surface. Which is cool on one hand because it’s very familiar…

Like how people see faces in inanimate objects.

People ask, “What’s going in here?” and then I tell them, “a sculpture.” And then say, “What is it going to look like?” [Laughs.] I really like that question. They look really confused so I tell them that this is a temporary space for the Museum of Craft and Design and this is a public arts piece. And then they’re actually interested and they come in a look at the store. It’s a unique way of interacting with the creative process of making the sculpture and how the public takes it in.

There is the practical reason of why you had to build “inside” of proxy, but talk about why most of what is going on is happening within the fence, when most people who will see this will view it from the outside—or maybe that’s arguable.

It is true, you can’t build out onto the sidewalk in any significant way, so the sculpture had to be on the inside, just functionally. But I started thinking about this institution, just thinking about craft and design as a gallery experience, and I was hoping people would look through this “window” and see what’s going on with the volume on the inside and then come inside.

It’s pretty successful in creating a feeling of voyeurism from both sides.

The site is pretty generic; it’s a huge fence on a parking lot, with stripes still on the ground for parking spots. I felt that if I made a freestanding piece, it would be really easy to stand on the outside and look at it and never come in to the site. You get used to being on the other side of the fence. But by obscuring the view, I wanted to neutralize the fence, making the barrier become a window. In the context of all the visual noise of all the overlapping [wood] systems, the relative calm of the chain-link in between becomes this sort of non-fence.

The fence is necessary but it’s an ugly thing. That you’ve made the fence the least noticeable part yet the entire physical framework of the piece is a nice inversion. I also think the wood is really the perfect material because although there are subtleties in the variations of grains, there is also a standardization, which relieves the overwhelming urban center of the site. All you have to do to get noticed on this corner is tone it down—look at that lime green Victorian!

Whenever I take pictures of the piece, coming from the gallery perspective, I want to delete everything in the background, but it’s there and it’s the site. So that’s been another interesting part of this is the documentation—it’s like half of the piece really.

And you come from photography originally? Have you done sculpture outside of wood?

It’s mostly been plywood or redwood.

Did you start doing that in San Francisco?

Yeah, I went to school for time-based video works at Carnegie Mellon. Now that I’ve been doing more site-specific installations, I’ve realized that the time-based nature of sculpture when it’s not in a gallery under lighting, has this story to tell over the course of a day. So I started doing this time-lapsed documentation of the piece.

We have a time-lapsed camera and are trying to get another one set up on top of one of these big apartment buildings. It’ll be fun to see that sort of hyper-process on video. Let’s get into the idea of the processing of these materials a bit more—I was thinking about the reuse of the container, and started to see commonality in the idea of materials being processed. The container is at first processed by an architect through design, then it’s processed by a journey to this site, and finally it’s processed by a new context. And you’ve process the wood in the same way, it ultimately becomes its new form once it arrives on-site. So the idea of how important site is in the processing of materials…

Re-contextualizing it?

Right. Once it gets in the place, it’s finally arrived at its new life.

That’s definitely true. It’s almost like the concept of a ready-made sculpture, once you claim it as this thing and then it actually is that new thing. One other thing about the time-lapse photography I’ve done on this piece, you can really see how actually flexible this fence is. Even though there’s rigidity in my work, there’s nothing really preventing the fence from bowing and so the piece vibrates and moves in this unexpected way. It’s more of a membrane than a plane.  Another element that goes along with the perceptive view of your casual gaze walking down the street, the fence follows the [line of] sight along Octavia, but the Hayes side actually goes down hill. So I loosened all the fence fitting and leveled all the structural pipes so that’s why [the wood] goes from level to projecting above the fence.

Would you have made something at this scale if it had been out in the Marin Headlands, for instance? You’ve talked about the scale of a person, but what about the scale of the city?

I would definitely like to do something this size at another location. My piece at Southern Exposure was working with scale, making people look up and then connect with the architecture of the room, working with the sunlight through a window in a structural way. Those things are in this piece too. One of the things about this site is that people are out on sidewalk and looking at it right up against it usually.

Whereas the gallery has this very defined perimeter, everyone will sort of stop at the same line or distance of a piece, and then the standard height of a room, triangulates a really standardization in perspective. But here people are leaning against it, or viewing it at the angle as defined by a city corner. How does this piece fit into the larger body of your work?

The context of the sculpture is the major new thing for me. It’s kind of perfectly timed for my work, using site constraints has become a really central part of my installation work. Reusing materials from previous shows in new pieces has become something that I definitely want to do with every piece I make from now on. But also, looking at these constraints, the process is so important to the work.

How did the opening event feel? What did you feel was most different between an opening event experience and the public installation?

The opening was funny because the bar for the alcohol was about 8”x8”. It really took up a lot space, and there was a mountain of glasses.

Did people leave their drinks on the “counter?”

[Laughs.] I was expecting something like that! I’ve actually be expecting someone to come in with their coffee and their laptop and set it down on and have it all just fall apart!

I hope that’s on the time-lapse video.

It was weird to pack a bunch of people in there, I kind of wish we could’ve had the opening on the sidewalk, but we couldn’t do that obviously. Like any art opening, it was hard to see the work. So the “making” event was more rewarding.

Did you keep the public-making component in mind when you visualized this process?

Not really. It was sort of secondary. It didn’t seem like a real deal-breaker with the MCD, I think they just wanted to allow the public a way to interact with the artist and see a piece being made, in a way that’s more than just answering questions, like showing them how things are made. The cool thing about this project is that experience will happen to all the other artists and they’ll have a chance to be interactive and have great conversations with people, or try to get them to look at your piece in a different way, or deal with snide remarks…Somebody as they walked by said, “hey when’s your chicken coop going to be finished?” [Laughs.] And they didn’t stop to talk about it…Like, oh! You got me! You can’t help but be in a dialog with the community when you do something like this.

Even down to our plumbers, they’re like, “can you get a docent around here?"

How was this project different from other things you have worked on?

It's different in that we don't typically work where we're modifying things. We aren't taking things that exist and altering them. Also the sensibilities of it, from a fabrication or craft standpoint...it's more spontaneous than most of the work we do. I'm not saying there wasn't preparation in this, because there was a lot, but the execution of it was more spontaneous and intuitive.

Is that because of client needs? In terms of what people wanted to see?

No, it's just the medium or the venue. It's not a home where the interaction is going to be as intimate. If you consider the shipping container as a material, it's not the finest of materials; the finished product is not expected to be something that is super refined.

There's a practicality to it?

There was definitely some more function over form. There's something very deceiving about shipping containers. They seem very simple and straightforward, but there's so much consideration in plumbing and [getting] electricity into the walls. You're dealing with a non-standard shell, so there are different building conditions.

Talk about something you did that was totally different - maybe in the metalwork that you used or the process you went through.

Seventy-five percent of what we normally do is in the shop. Then we take it out and reinstall it or get it into its final place. But because of the nature of this project: the size of the component [the container] and the size of our shop. it was all done remotely. It was an interesting challenge; everyday was an "install day." We're taking tools out of the shop and going across the street. Everything they are doing is "in the field." That was challenging and also engaging. It felt like we were out in the battlefield.

So, in looking at the broader ideas of proxy, I was thinking about the soon-to-be art gallery and how it will be both temporary and mobile. Did you think about that a lot?

I have definitely had personal fantasies about what I want to do with these things. For years I've wanted…I hate to say "summer home" because it sounds so horrible, but just a place to go outside your everyday norm...like camp. Which is not a realistic perspective for me...but..you could, in a controlled environment such as a fabrication shop, outfit containers, put them on the truck, have them taken out to the sticks, put them on some footings—maybe you put money in some really good footings—and then you've got your go-to place...Each container is just a little bedroom, with maybe a deck and composting toilet. And then in the middle you have two containers with an open-air kitchen and wood-fired woks, a wood-fired oven, and gardens in between them all. It really wouldn't cost much for what you would get. It's somewhere between pitching a tent and building a house.

Move it around and around. It's like either a really clunky motor home or a really mobile house. So you would think about this kind of stuff when you were working inside the container?

I had wanted to do it in my backyard when I first bought my house twelve years ago. I had a pretty dilapidated garage and thought: "Why don't I just buy a shipping container?" All the shops I've ever been in have had containers that were used to store extra tools and hardware. We would always cut them open and throw a skylight in—really lowbrow alterations.

And there's that attitude of making something precisely for its use, nothing more.

There's a sort of responsibility in taking something that has already been made and just appropriating it. I will say, until this project, I had never thought about using a high-cubed container. From a building perspective, it seemed like a more feasible idea. The eight-foot ones are little claustrophobic, but the nine-foot-six inch ones are pretty special. It's a huge difference.

I don't know how many people outside of architecture will care about this, but give me a basic rundown of what you actually used, what parts did you alter with metal? Explain it to a layman.

Some of the containers we got had been cut in half, so they no longer had a rigid end. So, we had to make it rigid again. We used structural tube steel shapes to do that. The tubes mimicked the shape of the "virgin container." So those were two inch-by-six inch tubes with big walls—pretty heavy duty. We would make a frame that would mimic the end and then it would get welded to that container. We would weld the entire seam, so that would be upwards of thirty-six feet of linear feet of welding. Anywhere where we had to put a door in we would cut the core ten corrugation with a metal blade on a skill saw. So we would weld our straight edge to the container then use that to cut with a saw. Then all of those openings had to get framed with tube steel shapes as well, otherwise the corrugation would wiggle....anywhere where we have passages, like Smitten and their dishwasher. The corrugation is just [made] to keep the stuff inside from getting wet. So when you cut that open, it gets very wiggly—it's structurally compromised. We would make a doorframe out of tube steel and then weld that in and it would get rigid again.. Then on the first round [of container fabrications] we made custom doors, which had plate steel on them and tube frames.

To go in between the smaller doors?

Yeah. Anywhere where we put a new end, like flat plate instead of corrugation, it was primarily because... we didn't know where to get (corrugation). It's not something you just go buy. From everything that everyone researched, it seemed to be pretty exclusive to the container industry.

Do you typically imitate materials in your work?

There have been jobs where there are existing metal details that we mimic. Or we've done things where we laser cut floral patterns to match existing guardrails. It's a special part of metal fabrication. There are iron shops out there and job shops galore, but the way they work is: you draw it, they built it, and you come get it. If it doesn't work, it's not their problem. Whereas, I come out of art, I went to art school. I'm obsessed with fasteners and materials. I'm a huge research geek. I have to know everything about what I am doing.

Do you have a lot of artists or people coming out of art school also working for you?

Almost everyone that I've ever had working for me, and who is currently working for me, comes from either architecture or art. One guy that currently works for me didn't go to art school, but he cut his teeth making custom bike frames. He's got some serious fundamentals and tight tolerances. It's not art, but it's the same sensibility.

What were your first impressions of this big thing kind of landing in the center of this very urban, downtown-ish, populated part of the city?

It's guerilla style; it's punk rock. That's what I like about it.

Let's start by introducing your department and what you guys deal with at the city.

We work on larger scale land-use projects in the city, that cross department's roles and responsibilities. Octavia Street being kind of an interesting case because it wasn't just building a roof, it was actually negotiating this deal with CalTrans and all the land north of Market Street that the 101 Central Freeway used to sit on. It went back and forth with voter approval both ways; bring the freeway back, don't bring the freeway back, build a boulevard, cross Market Street with the freeway and touch down on 8th Street, or do what we eventually did. It was a contentious ten-year debate.

And the freeway structure had partly collapsed or had been compromised in the '89 earthquake, too?

It never actually fell, it wasn't stable so they knocked it down. The part between Oak and Fell Streets stayed, and they needed figure out what to do with the rest of it—rebuild it and stabilize it, or tear it down and build a boulevard. But what came was a deal with CalTrans at a state-level: to get the land north of Market Street linked in with our office. CalTrans became responsible for south of Market, and we became responsible for everything north of Market.

Was CalTrans really interested in getting a freeway in there?

Well, their mission is to get the cars around the city, so they're not necessarily in the business of tearing them down.

I'm just curious about the process for setting up these kinds of plans: how does the Office of Economic Development change when a new Mayor gets elected?

It's an interesting department because we work closely with the Mayor. So, although we aren't technically an office directly inside the Mayor's Office we work very closely with them on planning stuff—anything from Treasure Island, to the shipyards, to priority port projects. We serve the Mayor...the Mayor set the policy goals for Octavia; to take the excess parcels that we had from CalTrans and use them for affordable housing. The big goal was building 2,000 units of housing, with half for affordable housing. The Mayor made that a goal and then we went out and implemented that. With members of the community, we decided Octavia would also be a good place to showcase how more modern design can work within the city - this modern boulevard with the old freeway torn down, in the center of this neighborhood as creating a new system for development.

Obviously the idea of proxy could be replicated across the city or in different cities, but what about Hayes Valley was especially conducive to making this happen?

We have a long history with the people of Hayes Valley in implementing this big change. We developed a good working relationship with this community—we love their ideas and they trust what we are doing. Proxy was already being well received because it was taking a vacant lot and turning it into something that really added to the neighborhood and to the commercial quarter. I think this ultimately worked and we were able to do it quickly because of our existing relationship with the area.

In dealing with the issues of the freeway from before…

And planning what was going to be on that boulevard. We got a lot of great ideas from the community in Hayes Valley—they're focused and forward-thinking and want to see things happening in the neighborhood. In a lot of ways we acted as the implementers, but we also acted as fostering those ideas. The "reuse" notion for the parcels [of land] came out of concession city-wide, and then there was an article by John King [of the San Francisco Chronicle] at one point which posed the question "what's the city going to do with all of this vacant land?"

How do you think the economy has steered the ideas of this project? The "temporary" focus came after the recession…

We hit a big dip in the housing market and we all recognized it was going to be a while before anything happened. So we could sit and wait, and park cars on those lots, or we do something like proxy.There's always land that people don't use, or people who are waiting for some other use, so it could work really anytime. But certainly in the downturn, property owners tend to wait for things to recover, so the transitory nature of this project is instantly something more viable.

I'm really interested in your perspective on proxy's exit strategy..the idea that something commercial is ending not because it wasn't doing well. There's that arc that happens in business where ...it declines and finally goes out of business. And then it just leaves an undetermined level of blight, like parts of mid-Market Street. How does that idea of leaving on an up-note transform that model?

That was the big issue in doing all this; people have a lot of issues when it comes to new uses. Even a parking lot—people get used to what's been on there, people benefited from parking there and don't want to see it go. I think we're going to have the same issue when we have the next step. It's wildly successfully right now, people are in lines waiting to get ice cream, so there will be issues when we have to finally be like, time to go. So we have to think early, maybe a year or so ahead of time. The good thing is that maybe then someone like Robyn [owner, Smitten Ice Cream] is ready to move from a temporary space to a more permanent space somewhere in the city. We're also looking at building uses in to the eventual permanent project—in the original iteration of the design competition for parcel K—the first level was going to become an open market place. I think something like proxy helps to further develop innovative ideas like that.

So maybe we should look at those concepts of a successful venture, from the point of view of city regulation. When you look at this matrix of different businesses, or artists, or a designer like Envelope A+D, it's a very informal success that the city is hoping to generate; essentially what people do on Saturdays. And yet, the nature of government is sort of a very formal process. Do you see limitations in making one thing happen with the other?

Our office has a bit more flexibility maybe because we're in charge of economic development so what that looks like could be anything. It could be anything from art in storefronts on Market Street, or the Outside Lands Festival, to a park, to proxy. We have the benefit of not being that department where paper comes in and we have to box it in; we have a broader mission.When we pushed the freeway back down to south of Market Street, we got a lot of people saying, Hayes Valley looks great, a beautiful boulevard, a park, so now what about us? Now we've got the freeway, cars, trash, and homeless, so what are you going to do for us? But they were actually great, now we're building a skate-park underneath the freeway, though it's taking a while. And then where McCoppin dead-ends into the freeway there's an off-the-grid food cart thing every Saturday, which we kind of want to make permanent and make a place where people can sit. The [SFprize:2005] design competition [for housing on the vacant Octavia lots], which was designing a couple of parcels and then going back, was definitely an intentional part of the process. We didn't want to just spring this building style that doesn't really look like what's around it on somebody. Having different shots at it, having more of a discussion between the community and stakeholders about how this kind of innovative design can work and fit in. It may have been a different kind of story if we ...had just all of a sudden put some containers down there.

It seems like a lot of what gets talked about is how this squeezes around different regulatory elements. proxy isn't festival-model, and it's not a permanent construct, so how does this project change the way people categorize things?

We run into that problem a lot. Anything from food trucks to when the Peter Pan production was downtown with the big tent, and even Outside Lands, too, you don't go down to DBI and get a permit over the counter for those things. But, we'd be wasting our time going back to DBI to figure out how to change the code to make this easier. Because next time we have a vacant lot we don't want to go in and duplicate exactly what's been done here, we want to do something new and creative again and that won't fit in whatever we might amend in the building code. So we have to find the right people who embrace these things and figure out how to work with people so projects like this can happen.

How do you think technology has helped or hampered that conversation between the public and the city government?

I think where technology has helped a lot is with a "street blog," like Curbed, which really focuses on architecture, planning and development. Whereas, you used to get that one article in the Chronicle, now it's all becoming way more participatory. Everyone can comment on the story. Something like proxy gets so much attention now, and attention from other cities.

Have you gotten a lot of that, internally in that world from other cities? It's great to hear about that exchange, and we are aware of other places that have similar ideas…

Yeah! Portland's has a skate-park under the freeway, too. We love good ideas! We're always interested in good ideas.