https://www.marishafarnsworth.com/projects-forte daily 1.0 2025-05-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520986598892-02D2SPR9MMRG86JACW2L/trailhead_of_the_tenderloin_national_forest.jpg Projects - Trailhead of the Tenderloin National Forest 2012 The Trailhead (the Trailhead of the Tenderloin National Forest) reversed a trend by installing the first public benches in Mid-Market since the City of San Francisco removed seating along Market Street, Civic Center Plaza and United Nations Plaza in the 1990s. Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Commission’s Artery Project, The Trailhead was an urban ranger station that provides trail maps of the Tenderloin National Forest initiatives and housed a plant nursery, an art gallery space, and a workshop space for youth. Visitors could drink coffee at the cafe and sit by the pygmy forest on Market Street. A collaborative effort that was programmed for 6 months, The Trailhead incorporated design, curation, maintenance and labor from staff members of Intersection for the Arts, the Luggage Store Gallery, the Hyphae Design Lab, Holy Stitch and farm:table. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520989273599-N56EJS2G6HWIO64TZFGK/magnolia_editions_magnetic_wall.jpg Projects - Magnolia Editions Gallery 2013 This 1000 square foot remodel within an existing 9000 square foot warehouse provides a new gallery space for Magnolia Editions, a fine art studio. The gallery is partitioned from the workshop space with translucent polypropylene panels and rolling barn doors. A series of movable magnetic boards allow for a the quick display space for works in progress. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520214617043-NWDVBBGISR9REI9JN12B/wall_close.jpg Projects - Earth Wall 2008 For this permanent installation at the David Brower Center in Berkeley five distinct soil types were collected from Berkeley residents’ basements and backyards and blended into a vertical representation of our local geology. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520990880615-ZWR6VKR0WBCOHLCPETMS/block_by_block_ramekan.JPG Projects - Block by Block 2015 Block by Block, San Francisco’s third Living Innovation Zone was a temporary kinetic installation composed of blocks of milled urban timber and illuminated plastic. The elemental form of the blocks and their basic treatment: stacking, swinging, pivoting, suggests an intrinsic reconfigurability. The form is open for occupation and interpretation––a platform for performing, protesting, playing––and for simply enjoying life on the block. Block by Block presented the first opportunity for public seating along Market Street since the City of San Francisco removed all public benches in the 1990’s in an effort to reduce the visibility of drug dealing and homelessness in the neighborhood. Lacking public seating, Market street became a stark 30’ wide sidewalk with no respite or place to pause, while homelessness and drug dealing remained a constant in the Central Market neighborhood. In contrast to the City’s Parklet movement, Block by Block presents a truly public space. Parklets, through their prescribed enclosed form and frequent association with commercial entities have become implicitly privatized pockets along our public sidewalks. Precisely because of this inclusivity, Block by Block became a highly discussed experimental site, creating important and overdue dialogue between city agencies and the neighborhood. Block by Block was the hub for Light Up Central Market, a series of six installations along Market Street organized by the Luggage Store Gallery and made possible by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s Imagining Central Market grant.     https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520990143070-QDFHFS64XLOTZE0Q40CI/exterior.jpg Projects - The Pocket House  2017 The pocket houses are a series of small moveable structures built by Laney College carpentry students to house students experiencing homelessness. Nationwide, up to 14% of community college students experience homelessness, and at Laney College, the percentage is estimated to be much higher. The inclusion of students in the production of these shelters, coupled with the development of a coalition of politicians, policy makers and community members, resulted in the development of social support structures, in addition to physical architectural structures, for students experiencing homelessness. The rhomboid forms of the Pocket Houses are skewed, allowing area for clerestories and lofts. Wrapped in steel for durability, each end is sliced revealing a different material and hinting at the space within. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520214881941-BR181X0YZB3C5G9HD1O3/IMG_4489.jpg Projects - Village Green 2016 The Village Green is composed of four archetypal structures traced in galvanized pipe and organized around a central square. The iconic buildings: a school, a factory, a town hall and a house were decorated incrementally by community participants, adapted and reimagined to fit the needs of different events and activities. The Village Green was developed for Eden Nights Live, an ongoing placemaking event organized by DSAL, the Deputy Sheriff’s Activities League, on the border of Ashland and Cherryland--two unincorporated towns near San Leandro that experience elevated levels of crime and lower income relative to the greater Bay Area. Despite a dense population, streets see minimal activity and youth have limited options for after-school activities. Eden Nights Live presents an opportunity for community to gather and reimagine new configurations for their public places through the prototyping events in this reconfigurable space. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520991282927-L6IYUP3FWXTPMHDWJ611/DPP_bike_rack.jpg Projects - Department of Public Play #001 2016 Department of Public Play (DPP) is a fictional government entity dedicated to subverting utilitarian elements of the urban landscape by developing installations that bridge infrastructure and sculpture. DPP develops projects that are open-ended and subject to interpretation, reexamining the signs explicit in everyday spaces and the comportment which they engender. DPP #001, begins with the arc of a prototypical bike rack and extends and stretches the steel tube through a series of rotations and reversals. The resulting bars and loops orient to the body at different heights and configurations, creating a series of conditions for improvised play. The project, part bike rack part play structure, was built with the help of students from John O’Connell High School, who through the construction process worked in a metal shop, learning how to weld, make jigs, and to fabricate with steel. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520810299439-N8PXVR4KHKGA6I94SNRN/burning_man_temple_exterior_marisha_farnsworth.jpg Projects - The Temple 2017 The Temple, a temporary pavilion created for the Burning Man event, was built entirely from 100 dead trees, calling attention to over 100 million pine trees standing dead in California’s forests--a result of anthropogenic impact. The trees, dead less than 6 months, were milled into 3” x 6” sections and assembled by 100 volunteers in only two weeks to create a 90’ tall pyre. The tectonic was developed for its ease of construction: a repetitive assembly system created of uniform parts. The stacking arrangement supported the primary program with a series of shelves and alcoves for participants to leave objects. Stepped columns expanded towards a latticed canopy that spanned the structure and cantilevered to 27 feet. Stacked wood, configured in patterns reminiscent of indigenous basket weaving, emphasized the construction methodology that relied on the aggregation of smaller components. The tree mortality crisis is partially attributed to the long-standing Forest Service policy of fire suppression, which countermanded prior indigenous practices of prescribed fire. The pavilion is an interrogation of fire in our culture: calling attention to the dying forests that, deprived of small fires, are now at risk of igniting in uncontrollable conflagrations and simultaneously challenging the Burning Man community to take a more critical view of fire, its impact and its role in our environment. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1566929012504-7A30FNBQRLKGH8EZS1KX/phase_change_installation_view.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1566931244942-DU01PN4FUL2M9YIDYIHP/bouyant_concrete.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520990547860-T81K6LXCEPHSQ4O506LK/youth_speaks_construction.jpg Projects - Adaptive Architecture 2008 Designed and built with the help of a team of youth from the non-profit Youth Speaks for their annual event Life is Living in West Oakland, the project was designed to be erected in several hours in preparation for the Graffiti Battle, a live painting competition between renowned graffiti artists from the Bay Area. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1577991612418-CGYY2F9DWIR9WCJI0CGI/IMG_9617.jpg Projects - PProphet 2018 PProphet, created for Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts provided a urinal for the public and turned the captured urine into distilled water and struvite, a magnesium-ammonium-phosphate fertilizer critical for plants, which irrigated and fertilized an orange tree growing in a container garden. Oranges and water were served to visitors, illustrating their participation in the nutrient exchange. The name PProphet hints at several aspects of this cycle. Phosphorus (P) is a critical resource that plays a fundamental role in agriculture, but is undervalued in our current economic system and not recaptured from human waste where it is an abundant resource. For example, in the East Bay, sewage drains to a plant in West Oakland where it is treated; solids are separated and used as landfill cover and on non-food crop farms, which is a good start, but about 60 million gallons of nutrient-rich water is dumped in the bay on the daily-not good for the Bay ecology and furthermore a waste of nutrients and water. PProphet reclaims this Phosphorus, while at the same time, analyzing your urine. There are over 300 variables that can be read through sensors, from how dehydrated you are to what VOCs and chemicals you have been exposed to or consumed. This installation address this feedback loop by highlighting issues of data privacy: who holds the data that reveals these chemical exchanges in our environment and in our bodies and how might they profit from this data? PProphet is the latest in a series of public urinal projects created in an ongoing collaboration with my former partner, Brent Bucknum. This project was created by Marisha Farnsworth, Brent Bucknum, and Daniel Fleischman for the Hyphae Design Lab. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1576905242252-JGLHE0OTCGHTCS3XJH22/image-asset.jpeg Projects - PPlanter 2015 The PPlanter is a public urinal that uses modular biofilters (microorganisms and plants) to treat urine and wastewater. A rapidly deployable, light infrastructure model, it requires no utility connections and can be easily relocated to meet the community’s changing needs. The PPlanter was designed for San Francisco, the city with the most billionaires per capita, where thousands of people experience homelessness and lack access to restrooms. The plate steel structure unfolds into a working diagram of the processes it accommodates: a grid of containers house wetland plants that incrementally evapotranspire liquids and, in consort with microbes, consume nutrients. The living plants create a microclimate and a visual screen, while their growth acts as a visual indicator of the human participation that ensures their survival. PPlanter is part of an ongoing research project made possible with the support of many volunteers and organizations including Urban Biofilter, The Hyphae Design Lab, The Luggage Store Gallery, and The Seed Foundation. The design of PPlanter 3.0 (pictured here) was led by Marisha Farnsworth with support from Brent Bucknum and Graham Prentice for Urban Biofilter. The project team included Paul Troutman, Anastasia Victor, Gino Orlando, Meg Prier, Bobby Glass, and Sydney Moss. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520989840233-8RKJ2CC0018I1BLE72G9/exterior_man.jpg Projects - Microbe-construction  2012 Microbe-construction is a proposal for a new kind of architecture based on the cultivation of microbes. Microorganisms can produce materials similar to those currently used in construction: insulation, plastic and stone-like substances. These materials are generated as microbes consume waste: construction waste, refuse, sewage sludge, agricultural waste, and desalination effluent can be transformed into new materials. Microbe-construction is a process of improving our building culture through cultivation and fermentation: arranging nutrients and enacting specific environmental conditions to orchestrate growth and decomposition. Where our waste is collected municipally or consolidated through industrial processes, microbe materials can be grown in a large-scale operations as add-ons to our conventional waste management systems. Living with microbe-structures, cultivation can be more individual. Inhabitants assume the role of the designer-cultivator. Maintenance no longer entails a trip to the Home Depot, but involves a continual process of cultivation in fungal gardens, fermentation vats and nutrient preparations where residents develop the materials that best suit their needs. Strains can be identified and selected for their performance, for example: rate of growth, resistance to infection, color, durability, or insulation value. Neighborhoods are defined by microbial strains. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1669923708184-M4HUP0JZGTA9MXH6JO4J/Screen+Shot+2022-12-01+at+9.57.24+AM.png Projects https://www.marishafarnsworth.com/about daily 0.75 2020-09-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520797629882-5BQ8MWX155J9TG5OZ6QV/marisha_head_shot.jpg About https://www.marishafarnsworth.com/publications daily 0.75 2020-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1555353589281-9I31DLM9W7AV8HKA3XCQ/sagehen_trees_logging.jpg Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a9c952d36099bb6a69608af/1520989840233-8RKJ2CC0018I1BLE72G9/exterior_man.jpg Publications