Linden Tree Presentation: June 9th (at) 7:00pm

INNOVATION & PROCESS – A peek into the journey of inventing and developing an innovative device in emergency patient ventilation

As a team member of Smart Design in New York City, Ian Halpern contributed to award winning designs for clients such as Burton Snowboards, Johnson & Johnson, Oxo, and Hewlett Packard. Following a brief stint with IDEO's medical device studio and the BioDesign group at Stanford, he co-founded ArtiVent Corporation – a medical device company that has attained FDA clearance for its first product.

Linden Tree Presentation: May 12th (at) 7:00pm

EXAMINING FORM IN JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN & FASHION

Sarah Lonsdale is an editor and co-founder of the online interiors site, REMODELISTA.  She worked in television and advertising for many years, of which nine were spent in Tokyo. She is the author of ‘Japanese Style’ which was published by Carlton books in 2001. She was also a contributor to an online Japanese woman’s magazine long before blogs ever existed.  She has lived in London, Paris, Tokyo and San Francisco and currently lives in the Napa Valley.

Linden Tree presentation: April 14^th (at) 7 pm 

MY NEPENTHE – Bohemian tales of food, family and Big Sur

Join us for an illuminating discussion about food, wine, family, art and architecture. Enjoy delicious treats from Romney's book while viewing images from Nepenthe's early days as well as a rarely seen trailer from the 1964 movie The Sandpiper, featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and filmed in Big Sur.

Romney (Nani) Steele is a writer, a cook, and an artist, and the granddaughter of Bill and Lolly Fassett, creators of Nepenthe Restaurant. She grew up at the family restaurant and opened Cafe Kevah

Linden Tree Presentation: March 10th (at) 7:00pm

Rebar will introduce their work and share details from various projects currently on the drawing boards, including recent transformations of pavement into parks, modular sidewalks and mapping the tacoshed.

"In November 2005, a group of landscape architects, artists, and others calling themselves REBAR “rented” a metered parking space in downtown San Francisco and transformed it into a tiny public park, complete with grass, a bench for seating, and a tree for shade. The park lasted only for a matter of hours, and was met with a mixture of “surprise, approval, joy, and indignation,” but, surprisingly, no one was arrested or fined. In the two years since this intial act of guerilla urbanism, the idea has exploded into something of an international phenomenon." --On Site Issue 19: Streets, Spring/Summer 2008.

Based in San Francisco, Rebar is an interdisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of art, design and activism. Rebar’s work encompasses visual and conceptual public art, landscape design, urban intervention, temporary performance installation, digital media and print design.

Rebar remixes the ordinary, repurposes the ubiquitous and restructures the fabric of the urban environment by exposing hidden assumptions and shared meanings embedded in the everyday experience of the built world. Perhaps best known as the originators of “PARK(ing) Day” – an annual global event where artists and citizens transform metered parking spaces into temporary parks – Rebar has created numerous innovative artworks and conceptual projects around the globe.

Rebar has exhibited its work and lectured worldwide, including the Venice Architecture Biennale, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, ISEA, 2009 Dublin, ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Parsons School of Design, U.C. Berkeley, the Univ. of Michigan, the Univ. of Mass. at Amherst and many others.

Linden Tree presentation: February 10^th, 2010 (at) 7:00pm

COLLABORATION AND CONSTRUCTION – The Creative Process of Managing the Culture of Construction

Whirling Dervish  (wurl-ing dur-vish) n. 1.  A mystical dancer who stands between the material and cosmic worlds.  His dance is part of a sacred ceremony in which the dervish rotates in a precise rhythm.  He represents the earth revolving on its axis while orbiting the sun.  The purpose of the ritual whirling is for the dervish to empty himself of all distracting thoughts, placing him in trance; released from his body he conquers dizziness.

Linden Tree presentation: January 13th (at) 7pm

REBUILDING A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE

Throughout history, human communities have found ways to live within the carrying capacity of the places they lived.  What we now think of as art, was deeply integrated into their architecture, resource management and spiritual connections to the Earth. Since the 1960's, contemporary artists have begun addressing the needs of communities and ecosystems directly through the arts, pioneering a reintegration of aesthetics, restoration science, spirituality, urban development and green planning.

Linden Tree presentation:  November 11th (at) 7pm

SILKING SPIDERS, CONSTRUCTING A FARADAY CAGE AND DECOMMISSIONING GUNS: Producing Contemporary Art at The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Mary Anne Friel is a Master Printer and Project Coordinator for the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.  The FWM curates a widely respected Artists in Residence program which enables artists to achieve challenging projects by connecting and fostering interaction with a broad range of specialists in science, industry, media and design.

Linden Tree presentation: October 14th (at) 7pm

MUSEO DEL ACERO HORNO3, Monterey Mexico

A team of international designers collaborated to transform a decommissioned blast furnace and a brownfield site into a modern history museum dedicated to the region’s rich history of steel production.  Borrowing from materials endemic to the site, innovative landscape design weaves together with modern architecture to usher an old relic into the 21st century. Environmentally sensitive technologies — such as green roofs and a storm water collection system — offer a new approach to the landscape while respecting the original context.

Linden Tree presentation: September 9th (at) 7pm

Ranch Houses: Living the California Dream

With its archetypal open plan and embrace of indoor-outdoor living, the California Ranch House is at the very heart of the California dream.  When we think of ranch houses – those low-slung, informal dwellings that formed new suburban communities after world War II – we are thinking of just one part of a phenomenon that has its roots in the state’s late nineteenth-century Spanish and Mexican ranchos, and which continuestoday in houses that are startling and up-to-the-minute.  

Linden Tree Presentation: August 12th (at) 7pm

TODAY is a jewel box of seemingly random, yet thoughtfully selected, images created and dispatched daily via email. At times tender, wicked, nostalgic, amusing, and dazzling, each edition is presented without narration, editing or explanation by its author, designer Eric Baker.

"It all began as a goof. One day I sent a good friend about 50 random pictures of cheese. I don't know why, but to me cheese is funny, perhaps it is the word itself and its various connotations. Eventually I began looking closer, or should I say broader at 'things'. Things lost on the fringes... ordinary, odd, beautiful things. Esoteric images, old diagrams, typography, cartography – visions of a once promising but now extinct future."

Linden Tree presentation: June 10th (at) 7pm

SLAPSTICK AND THE SUBLIME – A case for the sight gag as conceptual beauty

Raised in a midwestern amusement park, Jonn Herschend is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and experimental publisher preoccupied with how emotional confusion, absurdity and veracity play out in the realm of the everyday.   For his presentation at Linden tree, he will be screening a series of short clips ranging from 1930’s slapstick films to works by contemporary artists.  He  is interested in the ways that the sight gag and deadpan humor have been used historically and how they might be further pushed as a means to bridge the gap between conceptual art and aesthetic beauty.  The screening and talk represent issues that he is currently exploring in his own work.

Linden Tree presentation: May13th (at) 7pm

SEEING THE LAND – Two Contemporary Napa Landscapes

With an unyielding passion for design and its relationship to natural and man-made forms, the husband-and-wife team of Eric and Silvina Blasen practice a progressive blend of landscape architecture, embracing utility while exploring contemporary relevance and innovation in outdoor planning. 

“Our interests are design, art, and the environment. This passion drives our work and our everyday lives. For us, sustainability is not a checklist of techniques to be done but rather a commitment to execute the lightest touch possible on the land. It is this notion of preservation and restoration that is the essence of sustainability.”