La Cocina

Larkin Street Youth Services provides a range of services to homeless and at-risk youth in San Francisco and has been particularly critical to the young LGBTQ community here. We developed this community project, called the Guerrilla Street Museum, through a design studio at the California College of the Arts. We worked with Larkin Street’s arts programs to develop a ‘museum of the street’ kiosk to collect and display creative expressions of young people’s lives on the streets and serve as a touchstone for outreach. The Market Street Prototyping Festival displayed the work on the street during a 3-day outdoor festival, with many of the homeless youth stopping by to see themselves reflected in the Guerrilla Street Museum.

Given the intensity of our work in the studio, we are lucky to enjoy the company of each other so thoroughly. Outside the studio, our Fine Wine Fridays (FWF) have a no-work discussion policy. Our Summer Fest and S^A Holiday Party are epic cooking throwdowns –competitive sushi rolling to cookie bake-offs, cassoulet to fried chicken.

In the studio, at our monthly Culture of Design (COD) workshops, we find images using randomly selected prompts that combine a building element, a quality of space, and a sensation ­–stair, open, moist– that then spawn often-rollicking conversations about our design and process. Even our Culture of Practice (COP) sessions evoke passionate and hysterical debates about office standards and technical detailing. Of course, there is also Beyoncé, true-crime dramas, the Warriors, and reality TV to banter about every day at 4:00 pm.