Rebuild’s most celebrated project is the Stony Island Arts Bank, a former loan and savings bank – and symbol of Black wealth – that sat abandoned for years. Gates purchased the bank from the City of Chicago for one dollar and through a combination of fundraising and the sale of “bank bonds,” raised funds to transform the building into a site of creative exploration, cultural preservation, and artistic engagement. Re-opened in 2015, the Bank is now a gallery, media archive, library, and gathering space. 

In 2016, Samaria Rice, the mother of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot and killed by a Cleveland Police Officer, asked Rebuild to create a temporary home for the deconstructed gazebo near where Tamir was murdered. In 2019, Ms. Rice joined Gates and the Rebuild team to erect the gazebo in its full form on the Stony Island Arts Bank lawn. The Tamir Rice Memorial Gazebo now stands on the South Side as a reminder, a monument, and a call to action for systemic justice.

The Foundation also operates a Kenwood Gardens, a public garden that was transformed from thirteen contiguous vacant city lots. The gardens hold a retreat at Currency Exchange Café, a currency exchange turned not-for-profit café and incubator for culinary and hospitality artists of color; Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, affordable art and housing collaborative with space for public arts programming; and a community hub for creative entrepreneurship at a former elementary school. 

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In 1995, Palleroni founded the BASIC Initiative, a groundbreaking educational program between Portland State University and the University of Texas at Austin which sought to move students out of the design studio and into communities. It supports a range of projects working with poor and underserved constituencies. For example, housing and community services for migrant farm workers, housing for Native Americans and schools and health clinics in central Mexico. These programs combine appropriate technologies with reinforcing local values to inspire self-initiated development.  

Palleroni also developed and implemented the U.S.’s first academic certification for those wishing to pursue a career in public interest design. The certification requires coursework and field work addressing diverse issues including: non-profit management, urban poverty, ecology and citizen participation. Certification is open to both graduate students and working professionals interested in entering the field of social design.

Along the way, Palleroni has trained and mentored generations of public interest designers who continue to influence the field in their own way. As a leading member of the Design for the Common Good Network, a network of design consortiums from around the globe, Palleroni has worked towards creating spaces for new work in the field of social design to find a growing audience and greater support and engagement through biennial conferences and exhibitions. He has succeeded in being a revolutionary for the past thirty years and shows no signs of stopping. 

We had an opportunity to speak with Sergio Palleroni about his thirty year career in Social Impact Design on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

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In its early days, the studio became known for recycling and reusing – at a time when the word ‘upcycling’ didn’t exist. However, the work contained an intrinsic environmental responsibility and budgetary constraints often forced Mockbee and his students to be creative.

The Rural Studio’s projects have become increasingly complex over the years and often feature multiple teams of students working semester after semester. Students work together with community members to find projects, design solutions, fundraise and ultimately build. The program is notable for teaching students the entire process of social design, including outreach and grant ­writing. Students spend their entire fifth year in Hale County working on a project and then often stay a year after graduation to finish construction. In addition to housing, the Studio has produced a number of community projects such as a town hall and an animal shelter, to name a few.

The Studio undertakes serial projects as well, and is well known for its 20K house project. The project is actually a full line of houses – 21 have been built so far. The project’s ambition is to create a line of houses which can be designed and built for twenty thousand dollars, which can then be added to a contractor’s product line.

To date, the Studio has completed over 170 projects and educated over 800 students. Through its work, the Rural Studio has actually served as a template for public ­interest, design/build education, inspiring dozens of imitators at universities around the world.

In 2010, Sam Wainwright Douglas captured the work in his documentary Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio.

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Public Works’ programmatic direction comes from a belief that public space is a powerful convener and the way that it is organized can create new, more productive forms of social interaction.  For example, the Granville Cube project began as a piece of “street furniture;” a simple metal frame structure that travelled to various locations around the Granville New Homes site in the South Kilburn neighborhood of London. Modest in its construction, the structure stimulated community connections and served as a place for small scale local events. Public Works organized weekly events that involved local residents, ranging from caroling, flower planting, creating fish tanks and other esoteric functions. The Cube, while small in scale, shows how designers’ simple interventions can often catalyze entirely new forms of community interaction.

Public Works also launched “The Public(s) Land Grab,” a live research project seeking alternatives to capital-led urban development and its intrinsic inequalities. Increasingly, cities and citizens rely on developers to fashion their environments. This project investigates whether residents can build the capacity to develop without developers. Can they use regeneration as an opportunity to level social inequalities and address local issues such as unemployment and community well-being? The initiative began with a community garden in a vacant lot and then used a building workshop, legislation and negotiation with the city council to build local agency. The research will culminate in a handbook of citizen strategies that can be used as a counter to capitalistic development.

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PRH now occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as a home base to a variety of community-enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities. Although PRH’s African-American roots are planted deeply in Third Ward, the work of PRH extends far beyond the borders of a neighborhood in transition. The PRH model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world. 

PRH programs touch the lives of under-resourced neighbors, young single mothers with the ambition of a better life for themselves and their children, small enterprises with the drive to take their businesses to the next level, and artists interested in using their talents to understand and enrich the lives of others.

All of the arts and cultural programming of PRH is referred to as “Public Art,” developed to respond to, involve and reflect the community. In PRH philosophy, arts and community are integrally necessary for each other– art is not viable without community and community is not viable without art.

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Quest to Learn emphasizes “situated learning” where students are asked to take on the identities and behaviors of designers, inventors, writers, historians, mathematicians, and scientists in contexts that are real or meaningful to them.

Quest to Learn fulfills all state and federal mandates for teaching, but it uses the internal architecture of games—rules, components, core mechanics, goals, conflict, choice, and space—to guide the design of learning experiences. Thus, throughout the Q2L curriculum, game design is used as a learning strategy for students. The core of the school is the Mission Lab, which is an onsite game design studio staffed by designers and curriculum developers who work closely with teachers and kids to design learning activities.

The Quest to Learn approach strives to present creative and engaging learning strategies to address children’s interest in digital media and video games. The Institute of Play is demonstrating that the classroom can adapt to reflect the realities of the information age without sacrificing learning.

In addition to school design, the Institute also designs training programs for educators, consults on curriculums and conducts corporate training.

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Originally, FCP began as permanent exhibitions of paintings, photography, and music events. Now, the seven courtyards, linked together by small buildings, host expositions, exhibitions by international and local artists, and politically charged artwork. Additionally, the center is home to shops, a garden bar, cultural events, talks, screenings, and workshops. Recently, an architectural school for children was opened. 

Unlike many cultural projects that rely on government funding, Farm Cultural Park arose organically. Through networking and word of mouth, FCP has managed to attract some of the best artists, both in Italy and the world, to exhibit their work in a small, out-of-the-way town.

Now, several elderly local women who had clung to their homes in the semi-abandoned town center live amongst the exhibition spaces, happy to have company and to once again reside in a neighborhood that is safe and alive. Furthermore, a growing number of local youths have come to volunteer at the project. 

Farm Cultural Park has won countless awards, including the Human Design City Award of the City of Seoul, and was invited in 2012, 2016, and 2020 to the Venice Architecture Biennale. The space has been published in international media such as The Guardian, Vogue, and Domus. As of 2021, the Farm is an official Partner of the New European Bauhaus.

As a two-year, extended program starting in the summer of 2023, the Farm will open “The Monastery,” in a monastery from 1100 AD in the woods of Mandanici. A dense program of creative residences will bring together architects, urban planners, landscape architects, artists, anthropologists, botanists, scientists, and musicians.

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The group’s first exercise mapped the locations of fruit trees in public spaces in Southern California for local residents and the homeless. Fallen Fruit then expanded to include nocturnal fruit foraging tours open to the general public.

Subsequently they introduced “public fruit jams,” collaborative gatherings where participants bring home grown or street picked fruit to turn into jam alongside friends and strangers. They also organized fruit tree adoptions, with the intention that they be placed on the periphery of private properties and made available to passing pedestrians.

In 2017, Fallen Fruit launched Endless Orchard, a collaborative fruit sharing map.  Anyone, anywhere can help expand the project by mapping fruit trees in public space or by planting more fruit trees next to sidewalks in front of their homes, businesses or community centers for everyone to share.

Fallen Fruit’s work has been incorporated into exhibitions at major museums throughout LA, and Endless Orchard has expanded internationally. According to Young, the group’s work is about community. The programs and initiatives they have developed draw people together by creating a shared experience around a shared resource.

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bcWorkshop first drew widespread acclaim for its RAPIDO housing program, launched in 2008 in the Rio Grande Valley after Hurricane Dolly. Post disaster, the recovery process can take many years, and in poverty-stricken areas rebuilding must also contend with pre-existing inequalities in the infrastructure. Rapido seeks to shorten this timeline to months. It is a bottom up, community-based approach centered on families that goes beyond architectural issues to examine every level of process, including social, economic and political contexts. RAPIDO is founded on a deep commitment to collaborate with residents, drawing them into the design process at the very beginning and keeping them involved throughout. The result integrates community outreach, case-management, housing design, construction and resource deployment. The program has since been exhibited internationally, including at the world UN Habitat Conference.

On a more intimate scale, the Congo Street Initiative is a resident-led revitalization effort in the Jubilee Park neighborhood of East Dallas. Congo Street began as an alley in the 1920’s. Its residents were poor, but the community was closely knit. The street flooded continually and over the years the small homes fell into disrepair. In 2008, bcWorkshop began the Congo Street Initiative as a way to redevelop the block without evicting longtime residents. Working with a team of architecture and engineering students, they redesigned the street and six houses on its north side using four guiding principles: 1. Collaborate with homeowners on design. 2. Keep the small scale of the neighborhood. 3. Promote sustainability 4. Respect the residents’ economic situations by ensuring the homes could be affordably maintained. This sort of social resilience actually functions as a form of disaster resilience, letting bcWORKSHOP work at both ends of the scale.

We had a chance to speak with Brent about the origins of bcWORKSHOP and the evolution of their process on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

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Project Row Houses is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

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