2017 was the inaugural year of the Studio Outside Internship Project. Four interns (Ann, Vanessa, Chandler, and Lu Rui) explored ways to activate spaces under the I-345 freeway that are currently dark, dangerous and difficult to navigate. They designed and discovered ways to turn these underpasses into usable public space. This year we explored something different in Deep Ellum: alleys.

This fall we hosted the second Outside Studio Sounds, our annual effort to explore and inspire new forms of music + creativity.  Joined by friends, we convened for a night of music, art, and refreshments. Our goal was to see what connections could be made through a joyful and unique sonic evening. Not your typical rock-n-roll show and certainly not a typical office event, Outside Studio Sounds is about creating an experience we can use music as inspiration in our work and life. 

This summer, Studio Outside has been working with the Girl Scout's leadership to create a framework that strategically consider their national property portfolio. The Girl Scout movement holds 112,000 acres in over 800 individual properties. Owned primarily by the 112 local councils around the country, creating a collective vision to maximize the value of this property is a great challenge.

Thirty days, four sheets of plywood, six piano hinges and five landscape architects. The result: a replicable, easily assembled, deconstructable, and shippable shade structure endearingly referred to as the “Cootie Catcher,” which took home the Best in Show and People’s Choice awards at Field Day 2017 last month.

During my time living and working abroad in Mexico, I perceived a concept which shaped me personally and professionally. It was a notion which was unfamiliar to me at the time but that is now fundamental: the idea of the living streets. Initially, to think of the street was to think of my car. It was understood the street was intended for vehicular traffic, minimal pedestrian movement and nothing else. It felt as if I were to cross the street, I would be invading the space meant for the car.

Mexico City radically reshaped this notion for me. Once there I was shocked, not by the cracked pavement or the large puddles, but by the activity on them - an ever-ending motion which was active, dynamic, energetic, as I like to say, pulsing. It was the interaction between neighbors and strangers, the echo of chatter and laughter, the flow of people moving from space to space like the flow of water. These spaces not only transported cars, even better, they served as pedestrian highways, meeting points, leisure areas, commercial venues and music stages. All of these activities which before seemed to occur in different locations, they were now happening in the same place, the streets.

A normal week at Studio Outside involves a lot of drawing and design, client meetings, site visits, and guiding the construction of landscape architecture projects all around the country. But every once in a while, we get the opportunity to impact our community in Dallas not just by designing something, but by building it with our own hands. 

Last month, Outsiders gathered at a south Dallas home to partner with the Hearts & Hammers organization, whose mission is to refurbish qualified homes owned by low income citizens within the Dallas Metroplex, in renovating the outside of the home.

Reimagine Crowdus is a month-long temporary public space along Crowdus Street in Deep Ellum, intended to serve as a quick and cost-effective experiment to determine the public space needs within the community. For the month of September, Crowdus Street has been transformed into a new pedestrian plaza offering a variety of seating, street trees for shade, a cool new shade structure designed by Gensler, and an art installation gateway designed by Design Future Dallas. Throughout the month of September, free events such as concerts and outdoor movies are helping activate the space and serving as an example of what the space could eventually become.