Blog
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Three UTC Projects Inspired by Valencia 826 Thursday, April 29, 2010
This semester, senior designers at UTC were presented with a very unique and very interesting project. To create a storefront in keeping with those of 826 National, a highly unconventional network of youth tutoring and writing centers.
Essentially Odd tells the story of how 826 National began and what follows is an abbreviated excerpt:
What is now 826 National began back in the fall of 2001, when Dave Eggers and some friends were looking to rent a space on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. They planned to open an after-school tutoring center for the kids who lived in the neighborhood; it was a simple and only semi-formed notion. The plan was that the front of the building would be used for tutoring and workshops, and the back would house the offices of McSweeney’s, their small publishing house.
The landlord was open to the idea of a tutoring center, but the address was zoned for retail. They had no choice, the landlord said: at the front of the building, they had to sell something. So they just had to come up with a concept. In remodeling the space. the group found beautiful wooden beams, old and whitewashed, along with almost perfect wood floors. Very soon, the building had taken on the look of the hull of an old ship. And someone said. “You know what you should sell? Pirate supplies.”
Soon the store had its own distinct aesthetic and even a certain mythology. The work was fun. Creating the store was fun for the volunteers, and the fun rubbed off on the students who came to 826 Valencia for tutoring help. Soon a good majority of the volunteers and students had come through the storefront. They would walk in off the street, curious to see the bizarre shop, and would learn about the programs and opportunities happening just behind the store.
So when groups started sister 826 centers in other cities, they used the same model – a storefront facing the street and welcoming the community at large, and in the back, plenty of room for desks, chairs, field trips, workshops, and one-an-one learning. And the storefronts were as varied as the cities themselves. In New York they opened the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., LA’s storefront is the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, Chicago’s Boring Store sells spy gear, Seattle boasts the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., Michigan is fronted by The Liberty Street Robot Supply and Repair Store, and Boston has the The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute.
Each 826 center worked with local artists and designers to craft a distinct fantasy retail environment. Local creative types would leap in to conjure a wonderful world that would delight customers and intrigue kids, and the products they created, when sold, would help pay the rent.
This semester, under the direction of Professor Matt Greenwell, the senior graphic design majors at UTC were asked to approach this idea as a design problem; in effect, to develop a thematic concept for an 826 National Store, to brand it with a logo, signage, packaging, and copy—and to stock it with “products” in the spirit of both the theme of the store and of 826 National.
As a class, they quickly agreed to try doing it in a way that would live in the world, if even for a little while. So when they heard about a Leadership Chattanooga initiative to promote the potential of MLK Blvd. and the small (but largely vacant) retail area near the UTC campus, the two groups came together with a quiet hope that it will occur to someone that this is a good enough idea to pursue right here in Chattanooga.
The UTC class of designers split up into three groups to create three separate storefront ideas: Instacitiocity, peddler of big city smells and sights; The Everlasting Shop, where you can buy forever in a spray bottle; and Mad Lab, a monster pet shop. All three shop ideas will have a public window display all day Friday at 515 E MLK Blvd (across the street from Champy’s). Stop by, do some window shopping, and consider the possibilities.
