The Space Savers Project

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Thomas Buildmore
Today was pretty awesome

NCHRP-350 approved plastic Type III barricade, 48x48 aluminum sign, engineer grade reflective orange with black lettering, hot rolled high carbon steel, weather resistant baked enamel paint, reflective sheeting, flashing light.

The interaction between the infrastructure and people living in the urban environment has been of interest to me for sometime. Recently, I have been attracted to information delivery systems, visual literacy, and semiotics. My intervention into this blurry line of public versus private space attempts to cannibalize the symbols and language of road construction.

E Girard, between Frankford and Day St: I have actually never had a car, so I don’t know how bad the parking situation is. However, I’m pretty sure parking tickets, jerky drivers, and digging cars out in the wintertime all suck. I ended up having to transport my Space Saver on the subway from my studio in Old City to Fishtown for the on-street exhibition. When I arrived around 10 AM there was no parking. It was really frustrating and I didn’t find a space until around 11 AM.

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The Space Savers Project is a citywide public arts project, inspired by the Philadelphia custom of “saving” on-street parking. Saving public parking spaces, while technically illegal, is widely practiced throughout the city. Items like recycling bins, upturned garbage cans, cinder blocks and broken furniture are traditionally used as space savers. While the objects effectively “save” spaces, they can be visually crude and imply threat/ possession. We called on artists to design and create alternatives to the objects traditionally used to save spaces. This is public art project as well as an environmental and social experiment. We wanted to re-imagine what space saving in the city can look like. We wondered: Can a change in the aesthetics change the message of space saving? Or is the act of space saving immutable? Perhaps by replacing traditional space savers with art, we can transform the practice of saving spaces and begin new community dialogues.

Is saving a parking space with a work of art different than saving one with a cinder block tethered to a street sign? The Space Savers Project may reveal an answer.

The creative goals for The Space Savers Project are:
To re-imagine a Philadelphia custom;
To transform environments and social customs;
To engage viewers outside of traditional gallery spaces.

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