And, in case, just like I did, you’ve relegated Rick to the “social- activist- artist- in- residence- experimental- housing- neighborhood- activist- of- socialness” category . . . I just found this from the Heinz Awards website:
This year he is a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University School of Design, and he is currently working as the chief arts planner with Rem Koolhaas.
Koolhaas?! as in ‘Junkspace’ and ‘F–k the context’ koolhaas?? Whoa! I’m not quite sure what a ‘chief arts planner’ actually does or is responsible for design-wise, but I’d be willing to take it on for a day. Fun stuff!
His work was initially influenced by John Biggers, an artist who studied the social impacts fo the shot gun house. Lowe’s social variation on this, he calls 
In all, his initial building project, sponsored with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, encompassed twenty two homes over the first few years. Ten housing arts programs, five with educational programming, and seven for single mothers getting back on their feet. All of the houses are for rent, none for sale. Lowe and his team believed that market-rate, for sale housing would eventually come to the area, but renters stood a higher chance of being gentrified out. The project is still growing, in the next year 56 homes will be built by what is now called the Project Row House Community Development Corporation, creating pockets of close-knit neighborhoods with traditional front porches.
An unfortunately fuzzy photo, this is gallery director Cathy Byrd, Rick Lowe, and I at the exhibit after the lecture. We chatted for a bit, mostly about NPU-V, and its possibilities. The next week’s lecture was about the long term disinvestment, speculative development and displacement experienced by residents of neighborhood planning unit V, the Summerhill/Mechanicsville stadium-area neighborhoods. Some residents of the area joined in our conversation as well. And I’d have to say, Rick knows his stuff.
