Hello Wood - Pop-Up Wine Bar

This year at Hello Wood we worked on creating Human Scale Activities focused on the theory of Adaptive Use - creating flexible spaces that can be easily adapted for multiple, or unforeseen uses.

Thursday afternoon one of our team members, a guy from Yorkshire, England, completed a table that looked to high.

"It's not too high," he said standing at the table acting like he was holding a drink, "it's beer high."

Immediately my mind went through a dozen interactions I had had. I knew there was expensive red wine at the bar they did not serve, I knew they had liver pate in the kitchen (they serve it for breakfast), I have built a bar out of

found items before - POP-UP WINE BAR.

About 15 minutes later we had a plan. Friday from 6:30 to 7:30 v"we will host a pop-up wine bar, go write it on the board!"

Good turn out, great use of our space. Super great use of our "mobile" section that we had built on Thursday. The Chapter House was transformed. I tried to get all our team members to put black shirts on.

In the late afternoon it started to pour rain. I thought the event would be ruined, or cancelled. Lucas said not to worry.

'The rain will stop and whe the sun comes out it will be an even better evening," he said.

He was right. By 6:00 the rain had stopped and the quality of light was amazing as the sun set. Janus wines brought ten bottle of red down. We wrote up a sales board and opened for business. The raking light in the late evening glistened off of the Cathedral and the pictures taken on this evening will be the ones published by Hello Wood and put into the video. It was a staggering evening, and that's not just the wine talking.

Hello Wood - Midnight Cello Concert

When Lucas presented our architectural theory he talked about "adaptable use" with the idea that we were going to create a space that allowed "human scale activity."

We were able to do programmatic activities because we were already starting with a built form... The Cathedral we illstalled last year. So really, the "art" we intended to create was activating the space.

On Wednesday, half way through the week, we happened onto a midnight cello concert. What I mean by this is one of the team leaders was also a concert cellist. On Tuesday I saw him playing out in the middle of no where. On Wednesday he came over to our site and asked to borrow a shovel.

"You can have our shovel if you play a cello concert at the Cathedral," I said.

"Are you saying you will only let m'e take your shovel if I agree to play cello?" He replied.

"Yes"

At around 11:30 the power went off at Hello Wood and we held a 20 minute cello concert. 130 people came to our site and sat in silence. It was one one the coolest events I have ever been a part of. Magic.

Hello Painting

Last year it felt like Hello Digging; this year it was Hello Painting

After a year, the Alt Cathedral installation was still in pretty good shape. No rot at all on the burned-wood foundations.  As much as we painted last year, however, it was very obvious we missed lots of areas.

So, the first day we began painting the structure with a semi-transparent white stain. The third day we got new paint and painted another coat. But we used a clear coat instead of the white stain. New paint had to be ordered. So, on days six and seven we painted everything again.

On the bright side, the installation received three coats of preservative. The white paint blended the old work with the new work, and we recieved. A lot of comments that painted white the installation looks even more spiritual in nature.

The images on the Hello Wood Facebook site and Instagram posts look amazing. Painting the whole structure white turned out to be one of the best design decisions made.

A Good Project Starts with a Good Team

We had great students on our team this year at Hellowood Wood. At its heart, Hellowood Wood is an educational platform that calls itself an art and architecture camp.

The job of team leaders is to teach aspects of design and construction methods to architecture students. We had students from Hungary, England, France, Poland, and China.

This year, we were adding on to the existing installation we built last year. It is tough coming on to a project that is already built, but this allowed us to really improve the usability of the habitable art installation and during the week we hosted a couple of events that turned out to be very cool.
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