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Creative Thinking Busts 5 Myths About Public Parks

by Bruce Goldstone on April 14, 2014

A park caravan, illustrating how creative thinking can redefine public parks. (Image © Kevin Van Braak)

This portable park can park almost anywhere.
© Kevin van Braak

Redefining Parks and Other Public Spaces

Sunny day in central park, illustrating a model for public parks that creative thinking is expanding. (Image © Songquan Deng/Shutterstock)

A picture perfect park,
but not all parks have to look like this
© Songquan Deng/Shutterstock

After a long winter, public parks are once again greening up. On the first nice day, they beckon city dwellers to gather, relax, and play.

The model city park offers a grassy lawn, cozy benches, ballfields, and meandering paths.

But creative thinking is redefining what city parks can and will be. And the innovative projects that result have shattered these five common myths about what makes a park a park.

Tour 13 Paris: The Ephemeral Nature of Street Art

by Meredith Mullins on April 9, 2014

Colorful portrait by B Toy and rubble after the first phase of demolition of the Tour 13 in Paris, proving the fleeting nature of street art. (Photo © Galerie Itinerrance)

The beginning of the demolition of B Toy’s work at the Tour 13
© Galerie Itinerrance

The Long-Awaited Demolition: The Walls Come Tumbling Down

Art is fleeting. It lives for the moment.

Sometimes the artist, like Claude Monet in his later years, punctures holes in his paintings because he doubts himself. The work is destroyed before it’s ever seen.

Sometimes the life cycle of artistic expression is determined by the whim of contemporary tastes.

Sometimes an artist, like sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, creates the work to purposefully evolve over time, with nature as a collaborator. Stones are smoothed by water. Ice melts. Wood rots. Leaves wither. Life. Decay. Death. A natural cycle.

Richard Renaldi Poses Strangers . . . and Questions

by Bruce Goldstone on April 7, 2014

Portrait from Richard Renaldi's Touching Strangers, a project that creates and captures fleeting relationships. (Image © Richard Renaldi).

Sonia, Zach, Raekwon, and Antonio, 2011, Tampa, FL
from Touching Strangers (Aperture, May 2014)
© Richard Renaldi

Touching Strangers Creates and Captures Fleeting Relationships

Two kids and two adults perch on a bed in an anonymous Florida hotel in Richard Renaldi’s striking photographic portrait.

Their body language shifts every time you look back. Are they relaxed or tense? Friendly or feuding? A hidden piece of information explains why the subtext is so hard to read: these people aren’t an actual family. In fact, they just met moments ago.

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