Robert Muller 's Good Morning World

Dear Robert and Barbara

I would like to thank you for your daily words that I receive from Good Morning World.

I start each day reading your words and it always allows me to help create my day framed in happiness.

I would like to share with you a story printed recently in the Boston Globe which highlights the work of a remarkable woman and her group that are walking the path toward peace, joy and growth that you describe each day so well.

The world is full of people providing the medication for humanity you prescribe.

Thank you for your time, your wisdom, your words and your truths.

Your humble servant,

Chris Fallon
"Earth Love it or Leave it"
                January 1, 2006

Sustaining a positive trend
Artists for Humanity facility is EpiCenter of architectural ideals
By Robert Campbell
Globe Correspondent 


The building is called the EpiCenter. One detail sums up the whole place. It's the railing of the mezzanine, which is constructed out of a row of automobile windshields.

The windshields were salvaged from junkyards. Each once belonged to a Crown Victoria, the Ford model favored for police cars and taxicabs. Black-belt car buffs will spot a few Focus windshields too.

The shields make a wonderful railing. Running along the edge of the mezzanine, which overlooks the main gallery of this building for young artists, they resemble TV monitors. It's as if the entire construction were about to burst into light, sound, and action.

We're in South Boston at an organization called Artists for Humanity. The EpiCenter is its new headquarters. This is a place where high school kids come from all over the city to learn to be artists. They arrive at the nearby Broadway Red Line station and walk to the EpiCenter to spend an afternoon doing painting, sculpture, graphics, crafts, and photography. Like the windshields, the kids find the chance, here, to be creative, surprising, and practical.

A fair amount has been written about Artists for Humanity, a group started 15 years ago by painter Susan Rodgerson, who still heads it. ''AFH's mission is to give at-risk teens the opportunity to be engaged as artists through after-school apprenticeship programs that pair them with master painters, sculptors and photographers," says the official statement.

The teens are called interns and their teachers, most of whom have come up from the ranks of interns, are called mentors. There are a dozen mentors and a few advisers from outside too. Interns, who number around 100, work a six-hour week and are paid a regular salary. Sometimes they profit from sales or rentals of their work, which AFH markets to corporations and other clients. Besides the interns, many other teens participate on a less regular basis. This is an impressive operation.
Not so much has been written about the EpiCenter, a building which, in its way, is as remarkable as the program. Built on a tight budget -- construction cost was $183 per square foot -- it has won architectural awards for both good design and sustainability, the latter being a buzzword for architecture that minimizes the use of the earth's resources. A week after the EpiCenter opened, Mayor Menino and his Green Building Task Force arrived on the premises to plug a city program for sustainable buildings.

Sustainable it is. The entire roof wears an umbrella of photovoltaic collectors, which transform sunlight into electricity. They are angled to receive maximum sunlight and also, because they float a couple of feet above the roof, simultaneously function as sunshades. Rainwater is collected and sent -- via a glass tube, so everyone can see it -- to an underground storage tank, which furnishes water for washing and flushing.

The architects were from Arrowstreet of Somerville, a large firm better known for commercial projects such as the Cambridgeside Galleria. In the EpiCenter, they've designed a building that is beautiful partly because it's so simple: just steel framing painted white, white walls, and front and rear facades of glass and corrugated stainless steel. Plus lots of art everywhere, much of it big, bold, and colorful.

The ground floor, with its windshield mezzanine, is one big gallery space for art or partying (for which it can be rented). The second floor is divided into studios for metalwork, woodwork, silkscreen, and photography. The third floor is for painting. Practical support spaces like offices, toilet rooms, and fire stairs are lined up neatly along one side of each floor.

Simple as it is, there are charming subtleties. Those second-floor studios are divided from each other by translucent partitions made of ribbed acrylic. They let natural light come through and, equally important, they let you see the moving ghosts of fellow interns in other studios, so you don't feel isolated. The partitions can be moved as needed. And there are touches of idiosyncrasy. In the bathrooms, stall partitions and sink enclosures were designed and built by teens and mentors. So were the windshield railings. In a front courtyard stands a sculpture made from railroad tracks that once crossed nearby.

A third of the financing, says Rodgerson, came from the profits of the art program. The rest was from private donors, mostly family foundations, plus a small amount from the city. The program is gaining recognition, even internationally; mentors have been invited to lecture in Britain and France. Similar programs are starting in Rhode Island and Kansas City.

Long ago, at the beginning of the modern movement, architects dreamed of a new day. Instead of palaces for the powerful, instead of costly architecture that seeks to impress as art, they would apply their skills to solving the problems of ordinary society. They would make a new world that would be logical, economical, practical, and beautiful. Many of those ambitions were overblown, and the results were often disappointing. But occasional works like the EpiCenter remind us that this was an ideal worth pursuing.

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.