Richard Johnson Design
post tool
studio for urban projects
Founded in 2006 the Studio for Urban Projects is a research and working group that perceives art as a means of advancing civic engagement and furthering public dialogue. Their interdisciplinary, collaborative, and research-based projects aim to provoke change by reframing perceptions of the city and physically transforming elements of the built environment. The studio works collaboratively with individuals and institutions in the presentation of projects, public programs, and publications. The storefront was designed as an event and studio space to convene discussions, conduct workshops, present films, and gather around meals. The design was conceived as an interior wrap that transforms to enable the multiple functions of the storefront.
bryant street studio
dearborn street
soex offsite
SoEx Offsite was a design build project for a store front in the heart of the mission district in San Francisco. This project was planned and built as an inexpensive prefabricated system that simply was erected within the existing interior space. The design was intended to support the center with an office and the artist participants with a laboratory, to showcase a yearlong program of urban investigation. The off-site project was a series of public art projects and related programs investigating artists? strategies for exploring and mapping public space. Similar strategies can be traced to the Situationist?s derive, the practice of drifting through urban space, and psychogeography, the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The year-long series features eight projects utilizing strategies such as simple acts of walking and note taking, to projects employing high-tech and technological apparatuses as a means to disseminate geographical and historical information, to performances, actions, or events.
linda street
sumner street
22 x 15
22X15 was a project created to examine the phenomena of urban development shaping Charlotte, North Carolina. Focused on the interaction between urban growth and atrophy that seemed to characterize this fast-expanding southern city, we created web site as a tool for investigation. Entitled 22X15, for the dimensions of the city, the site formed a log of our impressions and research tracing the forces of development. Thematically, the site included a broad examination of urban expansion from the conception of the highway system and the vision of the skyscraper to the damaging effects of the automobile and the abandonment of the inner city. Exhibited for eight months in a public shopping mall, the site was housed in a structure inspired by forms of mobile architecture. 22X15 was presented as an installation in the exhibition Turning Point: South 2000.
24_hr
anatomy theatre
Inspired by seventeenth century medical experiments on the body, "Anatomy Theatre" was an installation created to dissect the movements and sounds of gallery visitors as they passed through the installation. A series of electro-mechanical sculptures were calibrated to both sense and interpret the presence of viewers. These impressions were then re-introduced into the piece as an evolving interpretation of the ambience of the installation. Shown at San Francisco State Universities Gallery.
field conditions
Field Conditions was a project proposing architectural installations in San Francisco?s under utilized urban sites. The project mapped abandoned spaces in the South of Market area including dead-end streets, the spaces in between buildings, and natural arteries covered over by the forces of development. These sites were then divided into four distinct latitudes, each offering a unique opportunity for responding to the urban landscape. Exhibited as three progressive installations at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Field Conditions proposed a series of temporary architectural interventions reclaiming these lost spaces.
trace
TRACE is a project, currently under development, that that examines the layering of physical space with the on and off zones of the wireless network. The project seeks to blend the corporeal experience of the city with the invisible qualities of the network, creating a narrative mapping of the hybrid space between them. This mapping is one that challenges purely static notions of public space to promote a temporal logic of the city that reflects the fluctuating character of the wireless network. TRACE was exhibited at VIPER Basel | 2004: International Festival for Film Video and New Media in Basel, Switzerland, the at ISEA2006/ZeroOne International Symposium of Electronic Art San Jose and the Conflux Festival in New York. TRACE is funded by the San Francisco Exploratorium as part of the "Invisible Dynamics Project." Developed in collaboration with Alison Sant, Ryan Shaw, Ram Subramanian, Richard Johnson, and Michael Swaine.
space medicine
"Space Medicine" was a site-specific installation created for the "The Edible Complex" an exhibition at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, California where artists were asked to make pieces using food as a medium. The installation was composed of four kinetic sculptures, installed within a tent structure. In each of these pieces, potatoes were used as batteries to trigger mechanisms within each sculpture. The installation investigated themes related to experimental energy sources, biotechnology, and visionary science. Surrounded by the museum?s exhibits, "Space Medicine" created the atmosphere of a futurist laboratory equipped with self-automated experiments implying technology gone awry.
super natural
proximity
Proximity is a video capture suit designed to record a series of chance encounters collected on walking drifts through the city. Re-appropriating surveillance technology to the body, footage is captured via four small camera, fitted to the front and back of the apparatus, that are triggered by a proximity sensor when one?s personal space is entered. The resulting video presents the residue of these urban encounters. Proximity was exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of the group show Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible. Created in collaboration with Richard Johnson with technical help from Michael Swaine, Andrew Benson, Ram Subramanian, and Rachel Strickland.
exchange
zenith tower
led task lamp
machine in the garden
The Garden of Forking Paths is an open exploration of the history of gardens. This multi-layered investigation and landscape installation, takes it name from the Borges story, "The Garden of Forking Paths?. The book uses the genre of the detective story?a genre that requires clue gathering and puzzle solving?in order to explore the way time branches into an infinite number of futures. Similarly the Garden project has been conceived of an Inescapable labyrinth or complex diagram of physical connections. The visitor is suggested to use the Garden Project as a laboratory to understand and experience the new physical collection of landscape interpretation. This 2000 sq ft installation will be along the Napa River and run by the Oxbow School of Art. Design Team: Marina Mcdougall, Phil Ross and Richard Johnson
linda street greening
garden for the environment
fog catcher
The fog catchers are a relatively simple technology that is now being used in parts of the world where there is a lot of fog or cloud, but little rain and no well water. Fog catchers represented an ingeniously simple idea. A fine mesh netting braced against the damp wind, so that water would condense on the filaments, then collect in troughs and flow by pipe to where it was needed. This technology is best suited to areas where fog is consistently available and can be intercepted on land. Fog collection actually imitates the work of nature. Trees serve as natural fog catchers; a forest growing in an arid area can drip as much water into the dry soil as might ever arrive. This 500 sq ft structure that harnesses the water vapor is being proposed for the Point Reyes National Seashore.
southern exposure
This prominent 4,200 square foot inner mission location features high ceilings, natural light and three large industrial roll-up doors, creating a sense of openness, and architecturally connecting the organization to the street, the neighborhood and the life of the city. Soex?s new design offers a simple and flexible program that reinforces the diverse programmatic needs of soex. Which include, two large gallery spaces, a dedicated youth education space, an open office plan, and a shared community area. This new space allows SOEX to continue their work supporting artists, and provides an accessible, open, and comprehensive art space. photo credit: cesar rubio photography
world trade center memorial
This was an open international competition that was conducted in two stages. The first stage (Stage I) required the submission of design concepts on a single presentation board. Members of the Memorial Competition jury evaluated the submissions. Stage I evaluations were anonymous. At the end of Stage I, the jury selected eight finalists to proceed to a second stage (Stage II) during which the finalists further developed their design concepts. The jury selected these finalists based on how their designs met the principles of the Memorial Mission Statement and Program as well as excellence in design. The design consisted of 3,022 audio vessels arranged on the memorial site, one for each life lost at the World Trade Center. These markers are configured around the original tower footprints and will function as devices for leaving an audio tribute and listening to it one year later. Individuals may choose to leave their contributions on any day of the year, marking a wedding anniversary, birthday, or other significant date yearly, monthly, or daily. These stories will continually cycle through the site as they are renewed in active remembrance by visitors to the memorial throughout the year. As these testimonies interweave across the site, they will form both a tribute to the individual as well as a point of collective reflection.
liminality
Metabolism and Dematerialization of an installation If the Exploratorium is being shaped by a multitude of external forces could we heighten this exchange by reframing these internal and external forces? If so, this new context, in the form of a architectural installation, could be considered a shaping force itself and be deployed to redirect flows - material and informational. This includes the spatial distribution of facilities and visitors? and the patterns of spatial interaction, especially those that are manifested by flows. As the museum acts as a register of these flows, these new installations would need to be developed to trace these new relationships as they are displayed and visualized. This symbiotic relationship between the physical and the nonphysical will enable one to reexamine the typology of the architecture. Flexibility, would the highest order in this new transformation. Visitors, through their engagement, would become just as important in dictating how the installation would function and relate across the museum floor. These new distributed installations would act as transparent gauges of change in the museum floor/landscape, registering interconnections through the structure of the building.
southpoint
The Southpoint: from Ruin to Rejuvenation was a competition to provide architects and designers with the opportunity to engage in the development of the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. The site, located at the ruin of James Renwick Jr. Smallpox Hospital, provided a platform to discuss issues of preservation, site complexity, and New York?s unique and inimitable physical environment. Inspired by its tradition of being a public gathering space for festivities and art installation, the Universal Arts Center program called for a multi-use facility to accommodate both performing and visual arts.
powell street project
Flow ? to circulate without resistance. When one walks under the Powell Street Underpass it is difficult not to think about flow. It is a crossroads where thousands of people pass overhead daily. On the ground, hundreds converge on the weekends to shop at the wildly successful Powell Street Plaza and Ikea Store. They stream steadily in and out of the parking areas and move throughout the areas arterial maze of streets and alleys whose surfaces themselves hide vascular systems of water, wastewater, power and communications. All are designed to deliver services to the dwellers of the city in a seamless, unimpeded flow. At a more visceral and immediate level, one is aware of the steady movement of an invisible traffic overhead whose speed and volume is revealed by the steady cadence of tires converging with roadway expansion joints. It is an ethereal sound ? the pulse of a giant organism of iron and rubber whose daily migration to and from our centers is like the Bay water?s tidal flow. It is not invincible like the tides: its? flow can be arrested by unpredictable impediments whose consequences can echo in complex patterns throughout the Bay Area and beyond ? but when the flow is steady, it is like the sweet forces of nature ? flow without resistance. Submitted by Peter Richards and Rick Johnson
dreamfarm
canopy_moire
d_lab
Systems of Flow-Natural Artificiality Relay-Networks In all forms of warehousing, goods need to be transferred, housed and repackaged for delivery. The warehouse as shelter has served this function and has become an emblematic symbol intertwined within the physical and virtual landscape. As this system grew and accepted these symbols of commerce, transport corridors were transformed into relay-networks of commerce. As seen from the highways and freeways, the warehouse has taken on the qualities of a mirage blending into the landscape and our psyche. This transformation has been reinforced to a greater degree today because of new computer related technologies. As these digital technologies where introduced into warehouse design there?s been a gradual shift in the nature of how the warehouse as a system is positioned in the landscape. This transformation has allowed the warehouse as a building system to become a fluid part of a much larger system. The warehouse, which historically has been seen as a single node in the landscape, is now part of a vast network of other warehouse nodes.
Trans_formation
The Transbay terminal in San Francisco
house_24
web broadcast studio
Designed and Built for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California. This 1000 sq ft. prototype web broadcast studio was first used for Live @ the Exploratorium. Developed by the Exploratorium and Zane Vella, in collaboration with NASA and the NSF, the studio was first used as a foundation for a series of 14 real time Web cast programs, titled the Hubble Servicing Mission: Looking Beyond Boundaries. The success of this prototype web studio set a precedent demonstrating the potential viability of on the floor Web casting and remote audience engagement. The Exploratorium had almost 1000 visitors on site over 10 days and over 20,000 on-line users.
permanent atelier
the lab
Designed and Built In collabration with Smash TV, the Production Lab was a 1200 sq ft installation with five unique stations allowing visitors to get involved in each of the steps required to produce their own multi-media show, including using a video camera, composing digital pictures and graphics, and creating sound effects using an audio mixing board. After creating Their multi-media production the video was immediately projected in Zeum's Floating Gallery, located in the upper lobby.
thick skin
Utilizing CAD/CAM technology, this project focused on the design and fabrication of an outdoor installation that evolves from the scale of the human body. After selecting a sight in a high profile public plaza, our team of five designers chose to relate to the sight specificity by deriving the form by the way people typically moved through the space. After documenting the motions of people within the site, we used new Motion Capture Technology, typically used for movies and video game production, to document the movement of the body, and translate then to the computer. The motion capture process involves wearing a suit of LED lights placed at key joints of human motion. Twelve cameras in the studio capture the motion of the lights, as the body moves. A computer then produces an animated 3D model of these joints in space. This model was then used to create a shape that defines the volume the body occupies while moving through the space. These volumes were then subtracted from the cubic envelope of the installation. The resulting form was designed to be utilized by people visiting the plaza and installation. design team, nash hurley, beau trincia, luke wendler, joshua zabel and richard johnson
blue rain
Nestled into the corner of the library façade are more than 23,000 blue Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). To the casual observer, a shimmering cascade of light appears to flow down the wall but it becomes quickly evident that what one sees are actually words flowing through each other at different rates. By tracking one line of text, the observer will discover that they are looking at keyword searches being carried out within the library database. The studio's role was to work with the installation Artist Michael Brown on the design and prototype of the final LED units. The scope of work was to produce a simple steamlined water tight unit that could be easily reproduced, repaired and replaced.
platform bed
modular shelving
re_ex
Re-Exploratorium was a Advanced Architecture Studio at the California College of the Arts. Co-taught in 2006 by Jordan Geiger & Rick Johnson. The Exploratorium, San Francisco's groundbreaking Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception is about to move from its historic location in Bernard Maybeck's Palace of FineArts to a Pier along the city's waterfront. This is an occasion to meditate on a host of complex architectural issues, for a real project with a real program, client and site.The studio will meet with administrators and curators at the museum and visit present and future sites as part ofthe process of investigating this unique institution's architectural potentials. The Exploratorium is unprecedented in its exhibits and the manner in which they are developed and presented. Housed currently in a building adapted to its use, it is now transitioning to another adapted site at an urban threshold. Projects therefore require a response and attitude towards a history of museum architecture, towards the displayand explication of scientific knowledge, and to relations between art and the sciences. The studio will propose new modes of study and display that exploit synthesized models of physical andelectronically mediated architectures for the museum.
clearing house
the well
The Well is a site-specific video installation for a office tower in San francisco. Projected within a light well in the building, the piece combined live video of the event with images of sites within the city that were both under construction and recently abandoned. The installation used the language of surveillance to describe the event within the context of rapid urban development.
claiming space
performative playground
Design Build for a non-profit Artist collaborative Tinker's Workshop. The project consisted of 10,000 square ft. installation of stage workshop and multi - configured courtyard space. We are building a wall that provides seating and work surfaces, in addition to working on a plan for paving a work area and developing a system of modular poles that will provide structure for sun and wind protection. The project features sustainable and recycled materials, including rammed earth and second-hand chain link fence.
mccoll center for visual art
portable effects
Portable Effects: A survey of Nomadic Design Practice. Project Team Rachel Strickland: Direction, Jonathan Cohen: software, Colin Burns: Production, Lorna Ross/ Laurie Vertelney/ Rebecca Fuson: concept & prototype, Peter Spreenberg/Dennis Poon: Interaction development, Maribeth Back: sound, Russell Zeidner: Architecture, Rick Johnson: construction and project management at the exploratorium. Everybody is a designer in everyday life. Yet we share no common vocabulary for describing everyday design practice, and few would even claim to have a coherent method for pursuing it. Through glimpses into human mobile nature, Portable Effects is an interactive anthropological exploration which prompts each of us to consider the design motives and methods that underlie our daily transactions with ordinary objects.
gray area foundation for the arts
geometry playground
RJD worked as the lead Exhibition Designer with a team of twenty other exhibit developers, Scientists and Educators from the Exploratorium to develop "Geometry Playground: An Immersive Learning Laboratory?. This indoor 5,000 square foot traveling exhibition that includes a combination of immersive, table-top hands-on and electronic game elements on spatial and mathematical learning (Seeing, Moving, and Fitting things together) outdoor versions of selected exhibits from the full exhibition for public and school playgrounds and museums; a Web site that is optimized for Web-enabled mobile phones; three artist residencies related to exhibit design; and Exploratorium-staff conducted research studying variables that affect learning geometry in immersive environments. The project aims to engage public audiences with geometry in new ways both in museums and throughout communities and to improve the profession's knowledge base on learning in physically immersive environments. Other partners include: Landscape Architecture, Inc., the Science Museum of Minnesota, and three science and children's museums around the country (Brooklyn Children's Museum, Sciencenter - Ithaca, NY, Science Works - Ashland, OR).
composition for departure
Departure, part of the group exhibition, ?Electricity is your friend", was inspired by 19th Century textile mills. This kinetic Sculpture which contained ten robotic arms slowly over a month buried itself in a sea of thread.
site
SITE was a site-specific video installation created for the grand opening of the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. Projected within the facade of the building, the piece combined live video of the event with images of sites within the city that were both under construction and recently abandoned. The installation used the language of surveillance to describe the event within the context of rapid urban development.
trough sink
http://concreteworksblog.com/2009/09/23/concreteworks-at-soex/
urban archaeology
dining table
exchage installation
shelf unit
conference table 04
post ur verse
At a time when the America?s love affair with the automobile could be at a tipping point, Post Your Verse (working title) will become a sounding board for city residents to communicate their thoughts and impressions publicly about their relationship with auto transportation. Using the street banner as the primary medium, it is the intention of the project artists to stimulate a conversation among Culver City citizens about the role the automobile has had in shaping their life styles and a speculation about how external changes could affect the way people live and work in the future. Utilizing the cinematic experience of driving along Washington Boulevard, Post Your Verse mixes contemporary communication media with the historical. Phased over three years, Post Your Verse will display a series of banners occupying most if not all the light standards on Washington Blvd. Between Walnut Street and the 405 Freeway. Drivers who regularly use Washington Boulevard will notice the gradual accumulation of banners printed with community generated verses over the three-year period of the project.
zero_01 2010
RJD was asked to submit an exhibition design strategy for ZERO1. San Jose?s Biennial: Build Your Own World is Located in the heart of San Jose in an 80,000 sq.ft structure. The structure, South Hall, will be open for artists and designers to create projects for exhibition, performance, provocation, and interaction. From a marsh-as-electric-plane-landing-strip to a public orchard to artificial atmospherics to a public ?tech shop,? this innovative platform will build on the dynamic histories of garage hacking and citizen science.
public orchard
The project "Public Orchard" is a 1000 sq ft out door pavilion, created by RJD and The Studio for Urban Projects for the ZER01 2010 ?Out of the Garage, Into the World? exhibition, that explores the feasibility of public edible landscapes. The project asks how we reimagine and redesign our cities to allow them to become part of an urban foodshed? How we can make the planning of our cities more participatory, transparent, and reflective of the need for affordable and healthful food? What models, current, imagined, or historical would help us to understand future directions for food production in our cities? For the exhibition, the Studio will be constructing a park like architectural installation outside the North doors of South Hall. The installation will be a prototype for a new kind of public classroom and gathering space in an urban orchard. The space would be made up of heritage fruit trees, a horticultural reference and seed library, a community kitchen, and hands on workshop space. Conceived as an annex to our storefront space in San Francisco, it will be programmed with salons, hands-on workshops, talks, and be a departure point for a bus tour of local orchards.
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