Spreading the Word

Sometimes we are so focused on our own practices and communities that we don’t stop to think that there may be worthwhile messages to share with others.

Practitioners who traveled to CNU 26: Savannah (Congress of the New Urbanism) in May learned about Norfolk’s Vision 2100. A multi-disciplinary team led and in-depth discussion on efforts to address sea-level rise and resilience to protect the city’s sweeping tidal landscape from recurrent flooding. The Ohio creek Watershed project, funded by a grant as a result of the National Disaster Resilience Competition, was featured. Presenters included Stephanie Bothwell, Urban and Landscape Design, Washington, D.C., Ann P. Stokes, Ann P. Stokes Landscape Architects, Norfolk, and WPA’s Mel Price.

WPA then headed to New York City for the AIA National Convention, June 21-23. WPA helped make eight videos for the Small Firm Exchange, dealing with such issues as attracting and retaining talent.

Neighborhood Rising

After three days of lively charrettes, residents of Norfolk’s Tidewater Gardens community are closer to a new envisioned future.

WPA participated in the mid-July event for the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative HUD Grant with the City of Norfolk, NRHA, The Communities Group, Ray Gindroz, and the lead architect and planner, Torti Gallas + Partners.

Meeting at the Basilica of St. Mary’s, participants advanced a plan for the St. Paul’s Area Redevelopment Phase 1 that creates a framework for new development that meets the needs of the community. The next round of community input is expected in August.

The plan includes new street connections, flooding abatement and a range of housing options from mid-rise apartments to single family, along with an enlivened Church Street to include new retail.

This most recent charrette, as with all planning efforts for the community, is guided by seven planning principles:

– Create a park system to protect from flooding and provide recreation amenities

– Create a community-wide campus with educational opportunities for all ages

– Restore church Street as the heart of the community with shops, food stores, health and medical facilities

– Create pedestrian Scale connections to opportunities in the larger community

– Build a pattern of neighborhood streets and blocks to create a framework for a mixed-use, mixed income community

– Provide a diverse mix of residential development ranging from single-family and town homes to small and large scale apartments

– Provide employment opportunities at the edges of the community for residents

 

 

 

 

 

Rendrings provided by Depiction Illustration 

Summer Feature: JT’s Camp Grom

If we were to write an essay, “My Summer Vacation,” a highlight would be attending the opening of JT’s Camp Grom on June 10. This new Virginia Beach adventure park was created especially for wounded veterans and their families, the families of fallen military heroes, and children and adults with disabilities.

This unique experience, a vision of the YMCA of South Hampton Roads and the Virginia Gentlemen Foundation, is a place for fun, healing and hope, allowing those in wheelchairs and with other special needs to engage in a full range of outdoor activities. WPA is proud and honored to have been part of the team helping to bring this idea to life.

Located on a 70-acre parcel of land on Prosperity Road, the camp includes a Welcome Center, Wellness Center, Amphitheater, Cafeteria and Tiki Café, lake with fishing pier, Adventure Ropes Course, and an Aquatic Center featuring a Splash Park and Flowrider – surfing/body boarding attraction.

WPA designed the Welcome Center and Canopy Connections, contributing more than $130,000 in pro-bono design services to the project.

The 4,000-square-foot Welcome Center houses offices for the YMCA and Virginia Gentlemen Foundation, a boardroom, reception area, first aid center, and locker rooms.

BRITTON + SAUNDERS | WABI-SABI

BRITTON + SAUNDERS | WABI-SABI
Alternative Perspectives

presented by popblossom
208 East Plume St, Norfolk, VA 23510
Showing: July 6—Sept. 1, 2018
Opening: 6:30-8:30pm, Friday, July 6th
 
popblossom is pleased to present, WABI-SABI (Alternative Perspectives). Please join us for the Opening Event, Friday, July 6th from 6:30 – 8:30pm at WPA Studio + Gallery, located in The Monticello Arcade in Downtown Norfolk, VA.
 


Sculptor May Britton and popblossom’s Lorrie Saunders have come together in a collaborative effort to explore exhibition as medium. Seeking an alternative to the traditional mode of art and exhibition-making, Britton and Saunders blurred the lines between artist and curator by eliminating prescribed or defined roles—their goal, to create a co-authored and co-produced exhibition as a single work of art. With creative energies fused and armed with a non-traditional approach, Britton and Saunders thought it fitting to construct an installation inspired by an unconventional point of view—they settled on wabi-sabi—the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature.
 
Turning to the natural world for inspiration as well as material—wild grape vine and flowers—Britton and Saunders’ installation reflects the rustic simplicity of the wabi-sabi aesthetic while acknowledging beauty in imperfection.
 
May Britton is a fine artist whose figurative and abstract sculptures and site-specific installations have been exhibited widely with many works held in both public and private collections in the US and abroad.  A registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-500), yogic philosophy and teachings continue to influence her life and approach to art-making.
 
​​Former gallery owner Lorrie Saunders is the founder and director of popblossom. She has curated over 50 successful exhibitions of various media by artists of regional, national and international acclaim and whose works are held in public, private, and museum collections.

World Below the Brine

We’re very excited to announce that WPA, in association with Rhiza A+D and Piece of Cake Productions, has been selected by the City of Virginia Beach – Office of Cultural Affairs to design, fabricate, and install a piece of interactive temporary public art at Rudee Inlet Loop. Drawing inspiration from the vivid Walt Whitman poem of the same name, “World Below the Brine” will simulate the ever-changing shore, above and below the water’s surface by creating an canopy that both captures the wind and translates the sun into a “play of light through the water.” The piece consists of a tall steel framework anchored by four concrete benches and supporting a torqued stainless steel wire grid on which 200 painted metal paddles with cast glass counterweights will pivot in wave-like motion as breezes pass through. During the day, visitors will walk below the piece and be covered in moving diffused light and shadow. At night it will be illuminated with LED lighting that will respond to the movements of visitors, creating the visual of a floating anemone visible to passers-by from Atlantic Avenue and the nearby Rudee Inlet Bridge. “World Below the Brine” will debut this September and remain through the Spring of 2020. We are also excited to share that AP Art students from Virginia Beach City Public Schools will be lending a hand with fabrication and installation right at the beginning of their first semester, and that Lynch Mykins will be our structural engineering partner. Stay tuned here and on our Instagram @wpa_norfolk for updates on our progress.

ELIZABETH DORBAD | THE ARCADE

popblossom is pleased to present THE ARCADE, selected works from the series, ITINERANT ARCHITECTURES, by Elizabeth Dorbad. Please join us for the Opening, Friday, April 6, 6:30-8:30pm at WPA Studio + Gallery, located in The Monticello Arcade in Downtown Norfolk, VA.

In the ongoing series, Itinerant Architectures, Elizabeth Dorbad ponders the impermanence and mutability of architecture while engaging the notion of architectural time. Using abandoned architecture as subject matter and material, Dorbad produces works across a range of media including, photography, drawing and video as well as sculpture created out of the rubble of discarded mobile home trailers.

Dorbad considers architecture a transient sculptural system and recreates the structural identities of buildings through what she calls, architectural intervention, “the direct actions of cutting, superimposing or adorning,” the resulting sculpture or installation is then captured in a photograph.

Based in San Francisco, Elizabeth Dorbad’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries. Her global project, ITINERANT ARCHITECTURES, with iterations in Memphis, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Berlin, Kassel, New York, and Los Angeles, continues with the latest iteration, THE ARCADE, in Norfolk.

400 Granby Street  Suite 301 Norfolk, VA 23510 Studio: (757) 227-5310

© WPA Website Maintained By

400 Granby Street
Suite 301
Norfolk, VA 23510
(757) 227-5310
© WPA
Website Maintained By