Just a reminder about the lecture at Charles Johanson Gallery near Eastern Market tomorrow night at 6:30pm. Delivering the lecture is Lars Gräbner who practices architecture in the city of Detroit after four years as head designer at Studio Libeskind in Berlin, Germany, and then teaching at the ETH in Zürich. He is a professor at the University of Michigan, teaching architectural design, construction and urbanism. Intrigued by Detroit, he has decided to contribute to the development of the city and will talk about a city rich with possibility tomorrow. All details regarding the event are located here.

Hamilton Anderson Associated hosts ongoing lectures at the Johanson Charles Gallery near Eastern Market. The lectures most frequently dance around the topic of design, urbanism, art and architecture related to Detroit. The next lecture in the series is titled “THE CITY OF DESIRE, CITY OF POSSIBILITIES” by Lars Graebner– an architect and lecturer at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From the website, “Gräbner believes Detroit has valuable unrecognized assets and possibilities for a new urban environment we may not realize. In this lecture he will present realized examples, which could create a desire for a socially, economically, culturally and environmentally sustainable city – a city, which will look quite different from the one we anticipate.” The talk is taking place October 13, 2009 at 6pm. Yep, pencil that one on in. More info here. No excuses.

That’s right. The Sunday PAINTIN’ AND PICNIC event is on. There’s tons of space around the wall, so come on out to paint or just bring a blanket to relax and hang out. Join DL! at the wall on Sunday, August 23 from 3-5pm to help us paint martians all over the place. No experience? Never painted before? No problem. Everythign is cut in and we just need help filling in stuff. So it’s an easy task, it’s fun, we can all meet and hang out. Here’s a map of the location. See you soon!

Jim Griffioen, the fellow behind the wheel at Sweet Juniper, a local blog about being a stay-at-home Dad, Detroit and contemporary social issues, will be giving a lecture at The Johanson Charles Gallery in Eastern Market (map) on the regeneration of urbanism in Detroit. According to his website, he’ll be talking about “Detroit’s ruins, urban farming, Henry Ford, historic preservation, blogging, photography, tourism, the suburbs, the picturesque, Rosa Parks, Greenfield Village, and the aesthetics of abandoned places.” Check it out tomorrow evening, 6 to 7pm.

Update (8/18/09): The lecture went off well, with a casual Jim Griffioen leading the discussion. The general thematic delivery was aimed at encouraging local Detroiters to embrace and take ownership of the “ruins” around town. Instead of seeing them as indications of peril and demise, we should embrace the beauty that is contained within the social and historical compenents of the site. Ruins can be intriguing to some extent because at some point everything dissolves. So, watching and understanding the natural process unfold can be enthralling. The talk lasted about an hour and was well attended by people of all ages.

The Dequindre Cut, a recently re-developed greenway from the east riverfront to the Eastern Market, has its grand opening on Thursday, May 14. Get out that old Schwinn cruiser, maybe throw on a fancy cap for the opening ceremony starting at 10 AM. Make a day of it. Sure.

More here!