The abandoned Jerry Myers Fish Hatchery in Skagway, Alaska was a vocational project offering local high school students a chance to work with even smaller fry.

Eureka, Ikura!

A photo dating from 1971 at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game’s digital archives depicts only a single main building named the “Skagway Salmon Hatchery”. Under one name or another, it would appear the endeavor enjoyed an extensive period of successful growth… much like a young salmon, one might say.

Down the Hatchery

The hatchery had always been operated by the City of Skagway school board – run rather well, as in 1989 it was named the Alaska Vocational Education Program of the Year. On the heels of this triumph, the complex was renamed the Jerry Myers Fish Hatchery. The bronze plaque above is dated June of 1990, though it doesn’t appear to have aged all that well. Alaskan weather will do that.

Skagway the Hard Way

Skagway is situated about 100 miles northwest of Juneau in the Alaskan Panhandle. The smallish city (officially a “Municipality and Borough”) was founded in 1897, achieving widespread fame and notoriety as the jumping-off point for prospectors lured north during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Run, Salmon, Run

Those golden glory days have long gone – Skagway only has about 1,000 permanent residents today. That said, the population roughly doubles in the summer when cruise ships dock at the Port of Skagway. Almost a million tourists visit Skagway annually – not exactly a gold rush but respectable (and profitable) nonetheless. Fees and taxes collected from these temporary visitors help fund projects benefiting locals, one of which being this abandoned fish hatchery.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Caviar Wishes An Abandoned Alaska Salmon Hatchery

Since 2009 over 50,000 Little Free Library book exchange boxes have sprung up on lawns worldwide, though some are worthy of a surprised second glance.

You’ve probably passed a Little Free Library during a recent walk, ride or drive though your neighborhood. Odds are you passed it off as a personal project of some local do-gooder or over-achieving parent but the so-called “Little Free Library Movement” is bigger, broader and more organized than anyone could guess.

The first Little Free Library was created by Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin as a tribute to his mother, a former schoolteacher and lifelong book-lover. Bol’s pioneering concept was meant to look like a miniature one-room schoolhouse but that design isn’t mandated, even for those who register with the non-profit Little Free Library Ltd. website and receive an official sign they can affix to their box. Size isn’t de rigeur either though the above Tardis library box is larger than most… especially on the inside. Flickr member ap^ snapped the example above from Bloomington, MN on April 27th of 2013.

Bustsellers

If you’re calling your Little Free Library “Headless Books“, it follows that your book box be decorated to display that fact. Crafted from a disused bREADbox and topped by a headless (and topless, at the risk of being redundant) mannequin torso scrounged from a local garage sale, The Headless Library can be found in NE Minneapolis.

Since September of 2012 the torso-topped library shared yard space with Penny’s Childrens Library – another ex-breadbox topped with a plastic lawn-ornament penguin because why not? Sadly, this library was trashed and the penguin stolen by unknown assailants during a spring blizzard in April of 2013… at press time the penguin was still missing. We suggest looking for it on top of a British woman’s TV set.

Book To The Future

Dubbed the Little Free Library 3D X, this futuristic little library comes to us courtesy of designer and Flickr member Robert Sekula (ethno folk funk architects) in cooperation with Andrej Poliak. Never thought you’d see the words “futuristic” and “library” in the same sentence, did you?

Morel Of The Stories

What is it about Minnesota and odd Little Free Libraries? Flickr member Marie Janssen (jamuraa) snapped the above “Little Tree Free Library” in New Brighton, MN, on August 11th of 2012. Another source states it’s modeled on a mushroom of the morel family.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Book Box Bonanza 12 Freaky Little Free Libraries

Better dead than read? Though the librarians’ shushing days are long past, you still won’t find many places quieter than these 11 abandoned libraries.

When the Soviet Union finally fell, it fell hard… just like the uncountable number of books, pamphlets and manuals at this abandoned scientific and technical library somewhere in Russia. While a case may be made for tech manuals being out of date and thus superfluous, there’s still something to be said about the terrible waste of knowledge almost completely covering the former library’s floors. The above images were taken in March of 2008 by jst-ru.

Our valiant photo-documentarian returned to the abandoned library in February of 2011 only to witness an unbelievable sight: every last trashed book had been removed and the floors swept so clean they could practically be eaten off of! Who could have done this and what happened to all of those books? Somehow one doubts the literature was salvaged and donated to other libraries; instead we’re guessing someone in the neighborhood enjoyed a warmer winter than usual.

Outta Cass

Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Michigan opened in 1917, and twenty-five years later the eight-story brick & limestone edifice was the largest high school in the state with 4,200 students attending. Among the school’s more noteworthy alumni are singer Diana Ross and musician Jack White, both of whom no doubt visited the school’s well-stocked library to research their projects.

In 2005, however, Cass Tech moved to a new building leaving quite a lot behind in the old one. Are those metal detectors just inside the library’s doors? These incredible “Now and Then” images from Detroiturbex superimpose the Cass’s vibrant past onto its sorry present.

It’s Miller Time!

“The Miller Avenue Library in Oakland has been abandoned for a few years, it seems”, according to Flickr user aaron.michels, who captured the above images on May 22nd of 2008. One clue alluding to the time of its abandonment is the discarded library card of a presumed twenty-something born in 1955. Pornstache FTW!

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Chapter 11 Eleven Eerie Closed Abandoned Libraries

What if high schools replaced shop classes with results-driven, full-scale architectural projects, where the goal was to collaborate and make something substantial for the entire community? If it sounds idealistic, perhaps it is – the reality on the ground can be full of setbacks and surprises, as this film illustrates in evocative detail. The title of the documentary in perhaps intentionally open-ended, because, unlike the phrase’s cinematic inspiration (Field of Dreams), what will happen if you build something is never quite clear until you try.

Directed by Patrick Creado, If You Built It is the compelling story of a one-year design/build program set in a small American town – a story that is both inspirational and heartbreaking. Its protagonist teachers are enthusiastic visionaries who are exceptionally driven. Its director shows these strengths but is unafraid to also highlight their steep learning curve, right alongside that of the students, who struggle at first to understand what two outsiders want to teach them and why.

Studio H, a collaboration of designers/builders Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, is named for its focus on “humanity, habitats, health and happiness”. Its mission is born of a noble desire to enable people to change where, how and how well they live, all through design.

Of course, working with a community as outsiders is challenging, as this pair learned when they moved to Bertie County, North Carolina, for the first year of their program. Their mission: to start small and build up to a student-decided project for the community, which turns out to be a farmer’s market inspired by contextual farm architecture.

In the press, idealized renderings and carefully-staged architectural photographs often gloss over the gritty reality of designing and building projects, as well as the slow change in thinking that comes with learning to design. Likewise, a look at highly-funded architectural programs and never-to-be-built college-student projects can make it easy to forget we have an opportunities to educate high school students everywhere through designing to build.

For anyone not educated in design, this movie provides  a unique window into how it can be taught and how understanding design processes can help us see unrealized possibilities in our everyday lives and built environments. For the broader public, the documentary also provides fascinating insights into the present and uncertain future of rural America.

In the end, the film is neither a tale of outright success or total failure, but it does show how even the best intentions may not work in every situation. In a key flashback, we are shown scenes of a home built for charity by Miller as a thesis project that ultimately failed in practice but also provided him critical real-world feedback on projects where the owner is just a passive recipient. Anyone interested in the intersection of architecture and education should watch If You Build It and sign up for screenings to share it with students.

A synopsis: “IF YOU BUILD IT follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller to rural Bertie County, the poorest in North Carolina, where they work with local high school students to help transform both their community and their lives. Living on credit and grant money and fighting a change-resistant school board, Pilloton and Miller lead their students through a year-long, full-scale design and build project that does much more than just teach basic construction skills: it shows ten teenagers the power of design-thinking to re-invent not just their town but their own sense of what’s possible.”

1 window plus 1 window equals 2 windows – seems obvious, but it warrants at least a double-take, so to speak, when you see it so explicitly expressed. Simple black-outlined, white-filled, faux-three-dimensional shapes that render urban happenstance into something with a humorous sense of order.

Dubbed Sum Times (itself a cute play on words) this latest street project by Aakash Nihalani skips the alpha and numeric and heads straight for the symbolic, turning everything from trash cans and dumpsters to windows and doors into educational equations.

The basics of multiplication, divisions, addition and subtraction – literal object lessons that makes chaos more comprehensible, and might even teach school children a thing or two (including how to subvert their surroundings).

Regular readers and fans may recognize this artist’s style from similarly-abstract street artwork including this urban tape art series and this set of shifting geometries, each of which also impose a kind of three-dimensional geometry on flat urban surfaces.