Dec 3, 2018
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Written Component
Hannah Mann
ARCH 433/533
Ian Harris
Fall 2018
Mission
The mission of our video was to bring light to a neighborhood that is rich with culture, but potentially facing gentrification in the next few years. I wanted to address the current climate without necessarily proposing a “fix all” to the problem. The same way that many other neighborhoods in East Portland (Alberta, Mississippi, Division) have underwent rapid change in the last decade, I wanted to document the Cully neighborhood and what it looks like today.
Abstract
Intro: Orienting audience to Portland in general, and then honing in on the neighborhood of Cully located in NE Portland.
First Scene: Documenting the faster pace traffic of killingsworth; the construction sites that are active as well as the sites that are just bordered off with no activity happening at the time of filming + what that looks like in the context of the neighborhood. Walking down alleyways with major potholes; gravel roads, etc. Documenting low-income communities side by side with new development.
Next Scene: Interview with Lori from the Cully Park community garden. She talks about the struggle and how it’s more than about development. “It’s about families...it’s about people not making enough rent.” She goes on to mention how it’s (rent) gone up twofold. And how people are having to choose between paying rent or feeding their kids.
Shots begin to reflect the community at risk of displacement. More faces of the residents. People of color, houseless, elderly, youth, just a mixed bag of people that makes up the culture of this community.
Closing: Ending on a positive note that strikes some sort of emotional chord with the audience. People feel like they grew up in this neighborhood; as if Lori was their aunt - and they don’t want to see this community at risk for displacement. Old man in wheelchair waves as he smokes his cigarette next to his little dog.
Project Development
The project began when I visited the Cully neighborhood on a site visit with my studio. Although my individual design proposal for studio had nothing to do with the narrative of my video, I knew that I wanted to document this time and place to shed light on what is happening in Portland’s most racially/ethnically diverse neighborhood. As this demographic is the most at risk of displacement to begin with, I knew that it was a topic of importance. Week after week of site visits resulted in hours of footage of the neighborhood, a 45 minute sound bite of an interview with Lori (a woman we met in the community garden of Cully Park), trips to taquerias, elementary schools, parks, more construction sites than I could count, as well as chatting with people waiting for the bus and smoking with skateboarders at what used to be the Sugar Shack. We had way more inventory than we knew what to do with, so we began to piece out what specifically we were trying to communicate in the 2 minute video we were producing. Me with my teammate Courtney learned the capacity and limitations of what our cell phones could do. Some days after a full morning of shooting, we realized that everything was shot at the wrong frame rate or that the screen rotation was locked so it was all filmed in portrait rather than landscape. Through many trials and errors, we were able to compile a collection of our footage to try our best at relaying the story of what is currently taking place in the Cully neighborhood. Courtney did the editing in premiere, I did the storyboarding, and together we collected footage on site.
Course Reflection
As someone is looking into the Cully neighborhood, whether as a developer, an architect, a city planner, or even an artist, this video can help educate in a quick and efficient way what the current climate is of this neighborhood. There are many ways of communicating ideas, and as architects, we mostly rely on poster boards and models. But having another way of communicating an idea can be extremely beneficial. It provides an element that you can’t get from a sheet of paper or a 3D model. Hearing someone’s voice and seeing someone struggle, watching kids play in a classroom speaks volumes more than listing statistics or looking at a pie chart. I think we limit ourselves when we stop learning different ways of trying to tell a narrative in architecture. Since architecture is something that is constantly evolving, changing, morphing, shouldn’t the way that we represent it also be looking to the future? As someone who has always used the same tools to communicate my work in this degree, it has been so helpful to have another outlet to try to express my work through. I also think it has been really interesting to see the students rise to the challenge of using their cell phones to film everything over the course of this term. Each team came up with great deliverables given the fact that no one used actual professional equipment. It just goes to show that it’s not about how much money or how expensive the camera is that is being used, but rather learning the capacity of our phones and utilizing those to the best of our abilities.