D center @ MAP announces H2OMG, its second exhibition in its storefront gallery at 218 Saratoga Street. H2OMG responds to and expands on the geographic and conceptual boundaries challenged by University of Virginia School of Architecture Professors Robin Dripps, Lucia Phinney, and Jorg Sieweke at Design Conversation #28: Re-envisioning Public Infrastructure. Sieweke’s work explores the future of the Jones Falls River that once shaped the city and has been neglected and buried in an underground culvert to make room for an inner city expressway, while Dripps and Phinney’s studies reveal the potential for a new form of local infrastructure including intersecting networks of rainwater harvesting, collection, and distribution; local agricultural production, processing and sales; and local material salvaging, repurposing, and commercial distribution. A portion of the work in the exhibition was created by students in Sieweke’s graduate design studio at UVA.

H2OMG highlights their research and discourse surrounding the Jones Falls River, past, present, and future, and introduces local voices to the conversation by inviting Baltimore projects that investigate water, urban resources, watersheds, and conceptual and participatory gestures. Biohabitats, whose company mission is to “restore the earth and inspire ecological stewardship” through innovative conservation and regenerative design, will install a living wetland, removed from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, in the gallery to accompany their research and action on behalf of the city’s water systems. 



Additional participants include but are not limited to Blue Water Baltimore. Curatorial/exhibition design assistance provided by Daphne Lasky, who received her M.Arch. from UVA in 2011.