Honor Award
CityFabric
Matt Tomasulo, Student ASLA, Graduate, North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Faculty Advisor: Simon Atkinson
Close Me!Wear You Live™. Mix a hand screened figure-ground map with a movable "pin" button and you have a contagiously analog civic tool to talk about your city.
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Close Me!Chicago CityFabric T-Shirt. Not only are the maps informative, they are a graphically inquisitive unique addition to your wardrobe.
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Close Me!The CityFabric Canvases. This triptych pictured above is 1"-1200 and calls a domestic kitchen home, acting as a conversation piece for the owner to share previous places in life.
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Close Me!Building CityFabric Blog. A portal for CityFabric to share its intrigue for maps, passion for the city and trials/tribulations with the many facets of starting up a small business.
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Close Me!CityFabric via First Friday Downtown Market. We run a monthly booth at the downtown Raleigh arts market – allowing us to interact/chat with local Raleighites about their city, maps and CityFabric.
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Close Me!City Scaled — Observations in City Design, Planning and Development. The first curated exhibit, entirely at 500 scales, allowing users to systematically examine different city's built environments to one another.
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Close Me!The Exhibit. Exhibit is organized large to small: NYC, Chicago, Paris, BCN, Philadelphia, SF, Austin, Boston, Seattle, DC, ATL, Raleigh, Durham, Richmond, and Chapel Hill.
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Close Me!Collaboration. Partner with a local, well-known handmade bag maker – local small businesses unite while sharing our maps and connecting with a new demographic.
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Close Me!Map Info and Interaction. Map information is deliberately separated from the exhibit pieces. To-Sale cardboard pieces of Central Park, the National Mall, Boston Commons, the Pentagon and a local park — Dorothea Dix
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Close Me!Map Info and Interaction. Simple scale cutouts allow the visitor to interact with the "art," beginning to reveal just how different each civic landscape really is.
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Close Me!Your Story via CityFabric Maps. The maps provide an unusually detailed amount of civic info, allowing anyone, once familiar with map and orientation (that's part of the learning process), to tell their story.
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Close Me!The Canvases. Digitally printed on raw fabric by a local, small business in Durham — Then hand prepped, treated and stretched.
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Close Me!Getting Out There. Blogs and local press are showing a lot of interest in the potential of these maps to build civic pride and understanding for your place.
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Close Me!CityFabric Tees — "Wear You Live™"
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Project Statement
What's your favorite place and why? CityFabric is a simple, yet effective way of using maps to talk about your place, physically and experientially. CityFabric uses diagrammatic figure-ground maps to depict cities in an abstract and graphically innovative way via T-shirts and hand stretched prints. Deemed "urban landscape and design" you can wear, CityFabric presents a set of valuable tools for any citizen (not just designers) to visually tell a story and initiate a dialogue about their place.
Project Narrative
—2011 Student Awards Jury
Intended Purpose
Provide a simple and effective, yet innovative communication tool for community members to talk about their place. Through a simple, educational map infused with different products, individuals are provided with a means to talk about their city via a contemporary take on the historic Nolli map. The Nolli map-type "figure-ground" has served as a vital tool for landscape architects, architects and planners alike for centuries. CityFabric examines the value of the figure-ground with the non-designer, attempting to introduce a new visual language to better understand and talk about the urban landscape.
Audience
Everyone, especially the non-designer. As much as we are landscape architects, planners and designers admire and love maps of our place, these figure-grounds reach is beyond the design niche market. The intended audience for CityFabric is any who wants to talk and learn about the place that they love. The simplistic and non-touristy map is meant to encourage resident tourism while helping build civic pride for your city. To date, community action committee members, middle-schoolers, soccer moms, doctors, city councilmen and design enthusiasts alike are all currently supporting the idea of CityFabric.
Message(s)
There are different ways to look at, talk about and support the place that we live. The physical environment, open space and real estate development patterns have a profound impact on the way that we translate the place that we live. CityFabric offers a new and innovative way to examine, observe and analyze your city. Each product is coupled with "nutritional facts" about each city's past events that have led to each particular figure-ground.
Impact & Effectiveness
A quasi-network of these maps is sprouting up in Raleigh and the triangle. People are very eager and exciting to talk about where they live. We have been approached by a variety of for profit and non-profit organizations (including schools) about partnering on different projects that focus on visually capturing and discussing a place.
Distribution Method
Physically, digitally, virally, word-of-mouth, face-to-face and interactively. As a summer project, CityFabric started as a way to talk to people about their city in a different way. 75 shirts were originally printed with a figure-ground map on them to be sold at a local arts market in the heart of downtown for a First Friday event. The dialogue about our hometown city was non-stop from 6pm until well after midnight (when the market shut down). We were blown away with how excited people were to talk about their city, learn about their city and talk about the built environment. We are now in 5 stores, 3 in Raleigh, 1 in Chicago and 1 in Boston. We recently curated an exhibition using our canvases titled "City Scaled: Observations in Urban design, Planning and Development". The exhibit has been a huge success, allowing visitors to interact with 15 different, 1'=500' scale, hand-stretched canvas maps of cities.
(By request, the exhibit is going to continue at a second location after two successful months in the downtown studio/store Stitch)
Circulation & Distribution
We write a blog titled "Building CityFabric" which supports the CityFabric brand. The site offers a transparent view into the business decisions that are made and projects pursued, as well as any/all things that interest us about the "places" that we build and live in.
Additional Project Credits
Collaborator & Partner
Ben Hood
Handmade Bag Collaboration & Exhibit Space
Holly Aiken
Photography & Support
Nicole Alvarez