FROM THE GROUND UP.
Community Rebirth Through Art & Education
Brownsville, Pennsylvania 15417
WE STARTED BY PLANTING FLOWERS.
Born in 2019, The Perennial Project was created with a simple goal in mind - to plant a few flowers among the ruins of blight and decline in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. We knew this simple act was something we could offer to positively impact our community.
What started as a handful of weekend volunteers has blossomed into hundreds of empowered citizens committed to improving our community through year-round beautification efforts.
While we have busy planting annual flowers, caring for vacant lots, polishing storefront windows, and tending to overgrown hillsides, we actually grew seeds of change.
WE GREW TO INSPIRe OUR LOCAL STUDENTS TO CREATE POP-UP PUBLIC ART.
As educators, entrepreneurs, and life-long learners, we understand that our greatest community assets are our students and teachers. We wanted to provide an opportunity for everyone to learn, grow, and volunteer in active and creative ways.
Through integrative classroom and field-oriented art and design workshops, we have engaged students in pop-up art initiatives that have transformed vacant lots, abandoned storefronts, and blank walls. We have emphasized found and reclaimed materials from defunct parking meters, historic artifacts and architectural salvage, painted disposable water bottles and yes, even tires that littered our signature waterways.
We challenge our teachers, students, and community leaders to think differently about how public art looks and feels. We also encourage everyone to get a little bit messy.
Together, we inspire each other to see limitless potential in vacant lots, abandoned storefronts, and blank walls. We also inspire our students to see the same limitless potential in themselves and that their efforts can actually change the world around them. Together we are creating a community that is ripe with opportunity for growth.
WE blossomed inTO a leader for digital preservation, Education & design.
Our architectural heritage is vital to our community. It is more than brick, mortar, wood, and stone. It is our home. The foundation of our community. It tells the story of who we are. The story of where we came from. It also tells the story of where we are going.
Our community, plagued with blight, became a symbol of a distant past filled with pride and streets of gold. Reflected in the present was an overwhelming sense of loss with a strong and immediate desire to preserve and repurpose what we could, as the ravages of time were to quickly overtake several key buildings in our downtown core.
In 2020, as the world was shuttering its doors against the pandemic, we seized the opportunity to introduce cutting-edge digital preservation and documentation technology to our nationally recognized - and rapidly declining - historic downtown streetscape. With the team’s international project work on hold, we were able to challenge local technologists and designers to create a new application for digital preservation - one that not just creates a 3D digital twin - but one that engages with local students, community leaders, and everyday citizens to preserve their past, tell their story, and to engage them in creating a new future.
What emerged is the first-of-its-kind preservation and planning effort. We not only created an exact digital replica of our downtown, but have expanded the project to include our most iconic historic structures including Nemacolin Castle, our drive-in movie theater, and our surviving beehive coke ovens.
We are using the digital model to create a one-of-a-kind high-school level design and technology course that instructs students on the use of these tools to ‘restore’ the buildings to like new condition. Most importantly, we are teaching our students to use the models as a foundation for telling the stories of our community through digital rendering, animation, and virtual reality.
We are also engaging the model lead community design workshops and create new public art.
This experiment in applied 3D technology has given us the opportunity to share our experience with the world. We have teamed with AutoDesk, the international leader in design and engineering software, to share our downtown model with industry professionals in a worldwide educational software release. We are not only educating our community and strengthening the workforce development of local high school and college students. We are now educating the world.
Oh, and those buildings that were scanned were ultimately demolished in an emergency effort a short time later. In their place, we created HOPE Park, an emerging outdoor movie theater and public gathering space that incorporates our passions for education, art, design, and community engagement.
together we rise.
We believe our community’s potential for growth is limitless. We also believe that the smallest actions can have the greatest impact. We also do not do it alone.
We invite you to join our team. We welcome everyone to our organized community clean-up events and public design workshops.
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