Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers, “what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?” Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed, and perhaps mildly exaggerated by Steve and Packard to create a series of 6 posters for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street Program (official press release).
6 foot tall by 4 foot wide prints
6 designs, each in edition of 4 (24 total)
Catalog Essay by Stephen Duncombe
If “politics is the art of the possible,” as the 19th century German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck once wrote, then what sort of politics are Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert proposing with their posters? Movable skyscrapers. A martial arts studio on a BART train. Public transit by elephant back. Commuting by zip line. Transforming San Francisco into wildlife refuge. Turning a football stadium into a farm (and linebackers into human plows). Every one of these proposals for our “awesome future” is patently impossible. Urban planning is a serious business: the domain of accredited academics, trained technicians and pragmatic politicians. What’s proposed by Jennings and Lambert — artists, of all things — is not serious at all.
Read the rest of Stephen Duncombe’s essay written for the Wish You Were Here catalog.
Download 2000px tall png images (6.1MB file)
More on the project
Urban Visions Panel Discussion
A panel discussion about the future of San Francisco, Urban Visions, took place on February 4th, 2008 at the California College of Art. The panel was presented by the San Francisco Arts Commission and Livable City.
Steve and Packard would like to thank:
- Peter Albert SF Municipal Transportation Agency
- Prof. Nezar AlSayyad, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
- Prof. Timothy P. Duane, Dept. of City/Regional Planning & Dept. of Landscape Architecture/ Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley
- Drew Howard, SF Muni Light Rail
- John Peterson, Public Architecture
- Tom Radulovich, Livable City, BART
- Seleta Reynolds, Fehr & Peers
- Electric Works Priniting
- Stephen Duncombe
Prints Available
Smaller prints from this series are available both as a low-cost poster and a fine art edition through Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.
Elements added to Open Clip Art Library
Print quality and thumbnail sized images of many of Steve Lambert’s drawings have been added to the Open Clip Art Library. All drawings on Open Clip Art Library are available for use and have been released into the Public Domain without copyright. Some of Packard Jennings drawings have now been added to the Open ClipArt Library as well.
Developed at Eyebeam:
