about

senseofplace LAB is an intra-disciplinary laboratory to Research, Develop, Present, Discuss ART + DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PLANNING + LANGUAGE concepts that communicate a ‘sense of place’.

senseofplace LAB was created by Laurie Halsey Brown in 2008. It is is an intra-disciplinary laboratory to develop and discuss art / design / language / architecture / urban planning concepts that communicate a ‘sense of place’. Projects are focused on mobilizing civic participation and designing around distinctiveness. A major aspect of this organization is developing projects that heighten a communities ‘sense of place’. senseofplace LAB works with collaborative partners to lead interactive workshops with community members. Materials from these workshops then result in the production of the community-led design of functional public art works for their communal spaces. senseofplace LAB seeks to serve a broad scope of communities; heightening their relationship to where they live and an understanding of how they contribute to their own communities’ ‘sense of place’. A recent project involved the local SF bike community and the planning commission to redevelop Treasure Island to design a bike rack as a public artwork that reflected the ‘sense of place’ of Treasure Island. They are presently installed in front of City Hall where that have heightened a relationship to both Treasure Island and to bike culture. Other local projects include two Urban Field Notes photo essays for SPUR’s magazine: The Urbanist; one was about the area of the city where Chinatown and North Beach intersect, and the other about architectural/landscape intersections in the Presidio. senseofplaceLAB projects add to the research of a visual language of ‘place’ in order to strengthen the communication process between author and user. The organization site: www.senseofplacelab.com is an archive of global projects that contribute to this investigation.

Laurie Halsey Brown, Director founded senseofplace LAB based on her research and socially based public art projects she developed from 2003 to 2007, which were supported by Dutch and British arts funding. She is a practicing artist, and has shown her public art projects, videos, video installations, photography and drawings nationally and internationally. She has a Masters in Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts. On the senseofplace LAB blog, she creates a series of photo+haikus describing places she’s been. Her work can be seen here.