A new collection of shirts, jackets, dresses and more from fashion designer Mary Katrantzou recalls two very different design movements, one focusing on the hand-made (Arts & Crafts) and one on powerful, industrial-age graphics and shapes (the Bauhaus).

Debuted on the catwalk of London Fashion Week, this series celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, featuring colors, geometries and typographies recalling the school and movement. These are imprinted, however, on delicate and decorative apparel.

“The collection explores an intermingling of two different breeds of aesthetic, using their components to discover a new hybrid,”says Katrantzou, who drew inspiration in part from vintage Bauhaus posters but also Victorian-era patterns.

“I don’t think anyone would put the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus together conceptually, but I think it was the beginning of modernism, even if aesthetically it is not as visible.” In a way, these divergent styles represent different paths, but both were built on attention to detail and a belief in the careful and complete designs of everyday objects. Her pieces stitch together the utilitarian and organic sensibilities of the two movements.

“We wanted to choose some of the colours that are present in William Morris’ work and the Arts and Crafts movement, and bring them into the Bauhaus posters, and vice versa. I always loved the Bauhaus posters for their symbolic nature, and equally, I think William Morris as a visual language is equally distinctive.” Katrantzou, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, draws a lot of ideas from architecture and built environments, often referencing structures from streets to steel trusses.

Over the past decade, over 1,000 artists and 60,000 visitors have taken part in this incredible seasonal arts event, coming together to create an annual temporary community-on-ice in one of the nation’s coldest states.

Known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” but also as a center for the arts, Minnesota seems the perfect place for the Art Shanty Projects – a temporary autonomous zone where two disparate concepts to come together: the tradition of ice shacks built for fishing and the idea of public, interactive, community-built art on those same iced surfaces.

Comparisons have been made to Burning Man, but those sell short the unique local nature of this undertaking. One thing they do share, however, is a harsh (if opposite) environmental context that makes serious demands on buildings and shapes their form and function. The resulting structures are a mixture of wooden stick-framed shacks, metal geodesic domes, triangular tipis and other proven engineering approaches mixed with creative touches and unusual applications.

In years past, first on Medicine Lake and later White Bear Lake, the spaces these shape have featured a little bit of everything, from interactive games and dance floors to indoor and outdoor theatrical and musical performances. Sometimes a wild art car or two can be spotted patrolling the streets of the the shanty village as well and strange sculptures have been known to crop up in between buildings as well. While some things are scheduled, visitors learn to expect the unexpected.

This winter, the Art Shanty Projects is taking a break from the On-Ice Program to celebrate 10 years of success and complete a pivotal transition into an official non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. However, the organization is hosting a fundraising retrospective featuring some of the best shanties of years past as well as a custom-brewed beer specifically created for the event, taking place on February 28th at the Fulton Brewery in Minneapolis (more details can be found on ArtShantyProjects.org). Anyone wishing to donate to next year’s program can also do so online at Give.MN. This year, ASP is also a finalist for an Art Place America grant and is competing for a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant.

More about ASP: “Art Shanty Projects is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which relatively unregulated public spaces can be used as new and challenging artistic environments to expand notions of what art can be. Our organization values artists, art in all communities, and the importance of interaction between the two. Through an array of artists receiving fair wages for their work, we broaden perceptions of art while maintaining respect for the environment and communities in which we work.” Note: the writer of this article serves as on the Board of Directors for the Art Shanty Projects, an unpaid position.

Half-forgotten historical urban rivers are set to resurface in San Francisco as part of a civic installation project designed to fill in their historical footprints with a bright blue work of temporary art. The project will stretch across roads, sidewalks and other urban staples with colorful swaths reflecting part the city’s hidden history.

It might seem obvious upon reflection, but few people realize just how many surface waterways ebbed and flowed on the surface of a city like this before development forced their paths into culverts, tunnels and sewers. Set to debut at the Market Street Prototyping Festival (more on that below), this piece explores the intersection of past and present through installation art. Still at a conceptual stage it remains to be decided whether the work will involve physically painting the streets or projecting light down on them from above.

From project creator Emily Schlickman: “Every city has invisible histories embedded within its landscape. Up until the 19th century, ephemeral streams ran through nearly every valley in San Francisco, channeling rainwater to peripheral tidal estuaries. This project, ‘Ghost Arroyos’ seeks to reveal these forgotten waterways of the city through a simple, but powerful intervention. Visitors … will be invited to trace the path of the waterways while listening to a curated recording of hydrological soundscapes and oral histories.”

Emily is a designer living and working in the Bay Area. She is interested in the intersection of landscape processes, art, and systemic design and aims to incorporate these issues into her work. Hers is just one of dozens of crowd-selected projects set to line Market Street during the festival and spanning multiple neighborhoods.

CityLab writes more about the historical waterways of this urban environment: “There was once a time when San Francisco was glistening with creeks and arroyos, or streams that stay dry for part of the year. When Spanish explorers arrived in what’s now the Lower Haight in the late 1700s, they found a healthy brook and named it Fuente de Dolores. Down in the Mission there was a gulch whose water helped sustain cattle and crops. In 1878, the municipal government took another natural channel under modern-day Cesar Chavez Street and turned it into a sewer.”

Some additional information on the festival itself (with a further video introduction above): “Market Street will transform into a public platform, showcasing exciting ideas for improving our famed civic spine and how we use it. Winning entries, as diverse and exciting as the people of San Francisco themselves, will be brought to life for three days along Market Street’s sidewalks, where millions of pedestrians from all walks of life will have the chance to experience, explore, and interact with the prototypes.”

Like other projects in the mix, Ghost Arroyos is designed to be interactive and community-driven. “The goal of the Prototyping Festival is to unite diverse neighborhoods along Market Street, encouraging these vibrant communities to work with designers, artist and makers to build a more connected, beautiful San Francisco”

An amazing hybrid of preservation and transformation, this project involves carving a series stunning spaces inside a huge series of concrete silos set alongside the waterfront of Cape Town. Once the tallest structure in the city, but abandoned since 1990, this converted complex will provide a home for 80 art galleries and create a hub for cultural activity.

The spatial solution proposed by Thomas Heatherwick Studio involves scooping out huge voids within the existing industrial heritage site. This approach in turn exposes visitors to the tubular interiors of the silos via a newly-formed atrium while conserving much of the original building exterior. Meanwhile, below the surface, a series of re-purposed underground tunnels and storage spaces will provide additional access to the architectural history of the complex.

The non-profit endeavor will exhibit contemporary African art via indoor galleries as well as a rooftop sculpture garden, bookstore, restaurant, bar and more. THS will be working on the Zeitz MoCAA (founded with the collection of entrepreneur Jochen Zeitz) with a series of local partners including Ven Der Merwe Miszewski (VDMMA), Rick Brown Associates (RBA) and Jacobs Parker.

In an interview with DesignBoom, he architect sough to ask and answer the critical quesiton: “How do you turn forty-two vertical concrete tubes into a place to experience contemporary culture? Our thoughts wrestled with the extraordinary physical facts of the building. There is no large open space within the densely packed tubes and it is not possible to experience these volumes from inside. Rather than strip out the evidence of the building’s industrial heritage, we wanted to find a way to enjoy and celebrate it. We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy its tube-iness.”

Of the project, David Green (CEO of the V&A Waterfront) said: “thomas heatherwick understood how to interpret the industrial narrative of the building, and this was the major breakthrough. His design respects the heritage of the building while bringing iconic design and purpose to the building.”

Regarding the search for a perfect site, Jochen Zeitz explains that “for five years we investigated suitable sites across Africa. The V&A waterfront provided an iconic heritage building, situated in one of the most visited and iconic sites in [the country].” Meanwhile, all of the existing silos will be capped with glass to let in light and show off their shape from above.

Forms of funding are fast evolving in the digital age, and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture 2012 Leading Creatively conference provided a window into how different artists, organizations and institutions are adapting to new models of making communities as well as money. For anyone interested in either funding the arts or raising funds for their own artistic projects, there were good lessons to be taken from this event. Discussions became most compelling when speakers and panelists talked slightly outside their own primary areas of professional experience, but more on that below.

Of particular interest was a panel titled Pennies from Heaven: Crowdfunding and Community-Supported Media/Arts, led by moderator Nathaniel James of Adventures in New Giving and founder of the Seattle chapter of the Awesome Foundation. The latter, while not his primary project, follows a wonderful giving-circle style model: each month, ten board members toss $100 each into a paper bag, then choose whose awesome idea to fund from the communal kitty. As he pointed out in conversation, the result is ordinary people acting like serious arts board members, tackling tough questions of feasibility and the like – consumption replaced with conspicuous participation.

Stephanie Pereira, Art Program Director of Kickstarter came out from New York City as a representative of one of the most powerful and impressive platforms for crowdfunding in the United States (soon to expand to the UK and beyond). There is hardly a good way to sum up Kickstarter, save to say it has been a remarkable democratizing force in raising money for everything from art and photography to music and film. A veteran of community-generated art scenes, Pereira also mentioned projects outside of her own direct purview such as Sunday Soup that grants funding through the vehicle of semi-informal community meals.

Local Scott Stulen, Project Director of MNartists.org, part of The Walker Center, was on hand to talk about another form of small-scale artistic funding that has huge potential (already being activated in dozens of states): the CSA, or Community Supported Art, modeled on Community Supported Agriculture where people sign up to receive a mixed basket of produce from local farmers. In this case, of course, the box is filled with the work of regional artists, who submit their work for review, and, if successful, are funded from ‘shares’ sold to 50 participants, each of whom gets a grab bag of all kinds of art (everything from ceramics, sculptures and photographs to concept art, vinyl records and performance tickets). But like his fellow panelists, Stulen went beyond his primary project of discussion to mention the role of crowdfunding in bringing cat video creators to the recent (and hugely successful) CatVidFest at the Walker – basically, producers leveraged their followers to raise money to travel to the event.

A Soap Factory tour during the conference served as prelude to an opening-night introduction to a new installation that also served as an apt closing-night gathering for conference-goers. Why We Do This by Andy DuCett was not the product of crowdfunding, but the overnight transformation from Friday to the opening on Saturday was a testament to a dedicated community of the volunteers putting in hard work to finish everything off on time. The results are impressive, and anyone in the area would be well advised to see the series of vignettes that will span the whole main floor of The Soap Factory for the next two months. And speaking of collaboration: the most fun part for this particular visitor was seeing how people reacted to and interacted with the installation, suspending disbelief and laying down in the fake grass to stare at flat clouds, or gathering around to spot bigfoot lurking outside a faux cabin. Thanks again to Josh Wilson of NAMAC for arranging press passes and other connections for the event.