Third Ward, TX [part 1]
Third Ward, TX is a 57-minute-long documentary on a community planning initiative in Houston, Texas’ third ward as depicted by filmmaker Andrew Garrison. As quoted from the website:
Project Row Houses is the unexpected home of cutting-edge art and visionary thinking about inner-city renewal…When deep-pocket developers arrive, art, life, and real estate collide and Project Row Houses must offer new thinking about livable communities.
So this is part one of a two part post [I apologize for the lack of ‘post’ in this one]…I already ordered the video and will repost my thoughts, feelings and the like once I have gotten a few views under my belt. In the mean time:
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2016380282930995146[/googlevideo]
What I have gathered thus far [and what immediately sparked my own interest], is that there is a poverty stricken community – full of dilapidated houses, the whole nine. An artist [Rick Lowe] helps to inspire residents of the community to come together by creating paintings on the boarded up facades of these afore mentioned rundown homes. As a result, a greater sense of community and activism is, well, activated – ‘turning nothing into something.’
I found out about the film from the March/April issue of ArchitectureBoston [great issue – highly recommend picking it up. Excellent round table on the goings on of planning in a small town – Hopkinton, specifically, which happens to be a neighboring town to where a bunch of mass cats I know live and/or grew up.]
::Post by Dubs::
Posted: June 12th, 2008
at 7:19am by Dubs
Categories: architecture,housing,urban/master planning,film
Comments: 4 comments
4 Responses to 'Third Ward, TX [part 1]'
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'Third Ward, TX [part 1]'.
That blue hued image of houses across from downtown about… those were torn down before I did a project in architecture school about the lot you see across the street, which is now a highly profitable surface parking lot.
Ian Garrett
12 Jun 08 at 11:58 am
Hey Ian, thanks for the info [and for checking out AMNP].
of course it’s a parking lot now…it’s amazing how zoning occurs in towns [even in connecticut where i’m from]. if there are [and in the two cases i’ve seen personally] any type of residential house/building/etc. in proximity to commercial zones [100 yards or so] they can be rezoned for commercial uses – no questions asked. Now, the firm i work for were going to create an adaptive reuse, mixed-use building in one instance, but in the other case [we weren’t working on], they were going to tear down housing to increase parking for a new set of ‘luxury condos’.
it’s a bitch, i know, but i guess that is the world we live in today. much easier and more inexpensive to raze the old and build brand new than to find ways of recapturing the old world charm. maybe i’m just too nostalgic…
Again, thanks for the info and check out my follow up post to this documentary. just got word that the video is shipping out today, so be on the look out.
Dubs
17 Jun 08 at 8:54 am
Hope you liked the film.
We made this poster in a hurry for the film premiere at SXSW. We stopped using this poster (photo by Earlie Hudnall, Jr.) shortly after the film premiere because it is actually Fourth Ward in Houston. Although it is a powerful capsule image of the threat to a part of Third Ward, and the architecture and vicinity to downtown are similar, and the photographer is a Third Ward resident–we decided the poetic license was just not enough. As your previous writer pointed out, the houses were torn down
Andrew Garrison
1 Aug 09 at 2:50 pm
Wow–just saw the Third Ward TX Part II and thanks for all that. http://architecture.myninjaplease.com/?s=Third+Ward+TX
Andrew Garrison
1 Aug 09 at 2:55 pm