Otisco Street ‘green’ home will be replicated nearby
Taken From Post Standard. Written By Marie Morelli
Syracuse, NY — While a construction crew builds the innovative green home named TED on Otisco Street, plans are being made to build TED’s brother in the same Near West Side neighborhood.
TED was one of three winners of the From the Ground Up architecture competition sponsored by Home HeadQuarters, Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Syracuse Center of Excellence.
The point of the competition was to come up with designs for sustainable, affordable, energy-efficient homes that would replace blighted properties and attract new residents to the Near West Side. The homes also would be a template for future development.
A second TED house is in the works, likely for Oswego Street, said Karen Schroeder, marketing and resource development manager for Home HeadQuarters. The group’s construction manager is working with the architects from Onion Flats, Philadelphia, to tweak the design.
“We’ve been looking to replicate some of these things,” Schroeder said Friday. “We just found a real response to the TED design.”
To read the rest of the article, click here.
Making spirits bright, one bike at a time
Via The Post-Standard, Written by John Berry
The 14th annual Central New York Family Bike Giveaway will be Saturday at Fowler High School in Syracuse. The doors open at 11 a.m. and reservations are not required.
Bike donations can be dropped off through Thursday at the Toyota Exhibit Building at the New York State Fairgrounds; Wayne’s & Meltzer’s Syracuse Bicycle, 2540 Erie Blvd. E.; the Cricket store, 3150 Erie Blvd. E.; and Advanced Cyclery, 118 Seeley Road, Syracuse.
The seeds for this effort were planted during the childhood of project director Jan Maloff, of Syracuse, while he attended Charles Andrews Elementary School.
“I lived near Le Moyne College and would ride my bike past Elmcrest. In the ’60s, Elmcrest was an orphanage,” Maloff said. “It was really for kids that didn’t have a parent, or maybe had a parent with a problem, but nothing like you’d see today. Those kids all went to Charles Andrews School.
“I think they had two or three bicycles for five or six cottages up there. So I would play with these kids after school. They would ask to ride my bike, because that was a treat for them. They didn’t have a bicycle.
Jan Maloff, a DeWitt funeral director, tests out an adult tricycle after making some minor repairs.
“That’s how you got around when you were a kid. If you wanted to go somewhere, you got on your bicycle and you went,” he said. “We did a lot on bicycles when we were kids. A real part of Americana was having a bicycle.”
Maloff is still seeking volunteers to help with this year’s giveaway. He believes the giveaway handed out 2,000 bicycles last year and he said donations are about 25 percent this year. But there are still plenty of repairs to be done at the work site, which for the second year is at the fairgrounds.
“Without this kind of space to say ‘this is this line, and this is that line,’ it’s impossible to do. You need to spread these things out,” Maloff said. “I hope we get invited back because I wouldn’t know what to do if we had to go back to the old way. We just couldn’t do the volume.”
Maloff can be contacted at 446-7570 for more information. Tax deductible donations can be mailed to the giveaway at 4612 S. Salina St., Syracuse, NY 13205.
Buyers lined up for all three “From the Ground Up” houses on Syracuse’s Near West Side
Taken from Syracuse.com Written by Marie Morelli / The Post-Standard
From a construction standpoint, it was a fairly quiet, and wintry, week at the three From the Ground Up homes being built on the city’s Near West Side.
Windy conditions stopped framing in its tracks on the two Otisco Street houses, R-House at 619 Otisco and TED at 621 Otisco. R-House is still just a foundation. TED’s four walls are up but it has no roof as of yet.
On Monday, the windows went in on the Live Work Home house, 317-319 Marcellus St., as you can see in the photo above provided by Home Headquarters. Also during the week, the basement floor was poured and the radon mitigation system was installed.
Home HeadQuarters, Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Syracuse Center of Excellence sponsored the “From the Ground Up” design competition that challenged architects to come up with affordable, sustainable homes to help inject new life into the Near West Side, a blighted urban neighborhood a stone’s throw from downtown.
Home HeadQuarters is acting as general contractor on all three houses and is marketing them to buyers — successfully, as it turns out.
Home HeadQuarters has letters of intent from “interested, engaged buyers” for all three houses, said Karen Schroeder, marketing and resource development manager for Home HeadQuarters. A purchase offer on the Marcellus Street house was withdrawn in mid-November but another buyer has stepped in.
Backup offers on all three houses are still being accepted, she said.
Red House brings a different breed of cinema to Syracuse
Written by Nigel Smith. Taken from www.thenewshouse.com
Enter the Red House, a gallery and theater located on the periphery of Armory Square, vying to become an edgy cinema venue with annual film programs.
Their latest program, Overcoming the Spectacle: A Cinema of Pure Means, which opened in October and runs into late April of next year, features a total of 18 films. Billed as a series of films that “look specifically at the cinematic strategies that refute fabricated meanings, thoughts and desires,” the films range from Marxist-minded 1960’s French Situationist cinema to current-day leftist work by such auteurs as San Francisco’s Craig Baldwin and Hungary’s Peter Forgacs.
Though Red House is not easy to pin down as an arts venue - it houses a black-box theater, an art gallery and a bar – all of its exhibitions and programs are connected through a broad mandate of “transforming lives through intimate and distinct experiences in the arts.”
Seated on the third floor in Red House’s communal office space, executive director Natalia Mount said the avant-garde slate of films chosen by curator Lawrence Kumpf fulfills that mission. The program was conceived with the intention to both educate and advocate, Mount said.
“We want people to think about the issues we present, through the types of plays, the types of films and types of art we exhibit,” she said.
Mount met Kumpf through a past collaboration between Red House and Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room, where Kumpf is house manager. The two galleries have been working with the New York State Council on the Arts to establish a connection between upstate and downstate arts organizations in Central New York.
Kumpf – a longtime admirer of Red House – proposed the idea for his film program to Mount.
Over the phone from his office at ISSUE, Kumpf says he wanted to address a question that founded the basis for his interest in politically charged cinema: “What is the political action of the individual?”
Kumpf, who studied the work of Situationist filmmaker Guy Debord at Sunnybrook University during graduate school, took four months to finalize his program for Red House.
For the uninitiated – the kind of audience Red House is hoping to attract - Situationist cinema was a product of the Situationist International, a group of international artists and activists founded in 1957. French Marxist writer Guy Debord was the first Situationist to use the film medium when he adapted his highly influential book, The Society of the Spectacle, into a feature film.
His technique was to edit together pre-existing film and news footage in an effort to, as Kumpf put it, “charge the audience with creating a new meaning.” Given Debord’s influence, Kumpf chose to open the program with his early works.
With their lack of narrative structure, the films of Debord and other Situationists are challenging to even the most adventuresome of viewers, in Syracuse or elsewhere.
“They’re definitely difficult-to-watch films,” Kumpf said. “I sort of like to think about Debord’s use of the image in relation to pop art. Pop art uses images, so the viewer has to construct the meaning of the image. Debord uses popular imagery in his films. But what he’s doing is allowing the popular imagery to show how it’s constructed meaning, and show the fertility of that meaning.”
One of the few contemporary filmmakers who works in the same vein as the Situationists is Craig Baldwin, whose film Mock Up on Mu is being screened on December 3. Using the editing technique spearheaded by Debord, Baldwin sees his films more as essays than movies, and himself as a painter, not a director.
“My cinema is self-reflexive. It doesn’t try to suspend disbelief,” Baldwin said from his home in Los Angeles over the phone. “I wouldn’t say they’re an easy ride. I don’t make films that you can escape into. They’re more of an intellectual argument.”
Ultimately, Mount says, Red House is trying to provide people with something they can’t see anywhere else in Central New York.
“What we’re showing marks a huge departure from what’s at the mall or the Manlius,” Mount said. “We can’t really do what the mall is doing (cinema-wise), but we can’t really be an independent house as well. Just look at the independent houses that closed because they weren’t very lucrative. We’re trying to find a happy medium.”
High-tech walls go up on Marcellus Street “green” house
Taken From The Post-Standard. Article by Marie Morelli
The Live Work Home house at 317-319 Marcellus St. started to take shape today as a construction crew erected super-insulated walls that were made in a factory.
A crew from Land Shapes Construction Co., based in Homer, and the general contractor on the site, Home HeadQuarters, had the house’s back wall up within about an hour.
They are working with structural insulated panels, SIPs for short, composed of about 4 inches of foam insulation sandwiched between wood composite boards. To put up a SIP, the crew puts sealant along the edges, lifts it up and fits it snugly next to the panel next to it. Screws and nails finish the job.
The house is one of three winners of a design competition sponsored by the Syracuse University School of Architecture, the Syracuse Center of Excellence and Home HeadQuarters.
The project is meant to demonstrate that affordable, sustainable and visually interesting houses can be built to help lift up a distressed urban neighborhood, Syracuse’s Near West Side.
Edward Bogucz, executive director of the Syracuse Center of Excellence, explained in an e-mail why SIPs are being used: “SIPs combine insulation with the structure in large panels. Individual panels are inherently air-tight. When SIPs are assembled, gaps between adjacent panels are sealed, creating a highly insulated, air tight building envelope, reducing energy consumption.”
Bogucz said traditional stick-built homes can be made just as efficient, but it’s harder to achieve such airtightness in the field. “With SIPs, the number of parts is reduced dramatically, and the insulation is integral to the structure, making it much easier to achieve superior performance of the building envelope,” he wrote.
Making the panels in a factory also reduces waste, he wrote.
The Project
The mission of the Near West Side Initiative (NWSI) is to combine the power of art, technology and innovation with neighborhood values and culture to revitalize Syracuse's Near West Side neighborhood.
Properties
Seriously inexpensive home/studio ownership opportunities.