This being the age of Pinterest, you’ve no doubt seen the many, and sometimes miraculous, things people do with old shipping pallets. Those clunky grids of low-grade lumber, it turns out, are insanely versatile, as long as you know what you’re doing with them. You can build a bench, or maybe a dresser, or some wall art ….
Or, if you’re Peter Abrams, you can build homes out of them. Inspired by honeybees.
When you think about it, the link between material, form, function, and purpose in Abrams’ grand design makes perfect sense. See, it’s not that Abrams, a Princeton resident and Trenton-based artist and designer, is stripping hundreds of pallets at a time and using the wood to make McMansions for hipsters on the cheap (and ironic). He’s using a few mildly reconfigured pallets to build temporary shelters, aimed largely at people who don’t have any permanent shelter to call their own.
This lack of shelter could be due to an emergency, like Hurricane Katrina, or to homelessness. And when you consider the latter aspect of that last sentence, the connection between material, form, function, and purpose becomes more apparent — taking the discarded, forgotten and unappreciated and using it to give some safety and dignity to the discarded and forgotten and unappreciated.
There’s art involved, too, of course. And, as mentioned, the inspiration of honeybees. Abrams, after all, is not building boxes. As an artist, he says, he’s almost contractually compelled to not think in the rectilinear mindset that dominates what houses are designed and built to be.
In short, Abrams is thinking outside the box in a very literal way. He’s thinking instead of how bees design their abodes, in hexagons, and using his art and design skills to simplify how to reuse discarded pallets as shelters so that even someone with barely any building or carpentry skills could put one together in a day or so.
Abrams calls his hexagonal pallet shelters B Homes, and yes, that “B” is thick with multiple meanings. They looks like bee homes. You get to be home. It’s a place when Plan B is activated in an emergency. It’s a B-grade home — “It’s not a Grade-A living space, there’s a bit of transience to it,” Abrams says. It’s not meant to be permanent. And even if parts of it fritter away, parts could be taken from one B Home and used in another, a continuing recycling of material.
B also stands for billion, the number of people worldwide who lack any type of shelter to call their own, Abrams says. And B makes him think of his favorite Little Pig — the second one, who built his home out of sticks. Only Abrams’ shelters are intended to stand a good deal more environmental distress than a mere huff and puff from a wolf on the hunt for a ham sandwich.
Abrams is using the capital city as his testing grounds and hopes to work through a deal with the city to allow him to start providing the means for Trenton’s homeless to craft their own shelters. Materials can be acquired cheaply, and in some cases freely, as old pallets are abundant and generally openly dismissed.
The specifics and logistics about exactly how to enact Abrams’ plan are still being worked out. Right now, Abrams is still in the development phase, honing and refining the construction process for B Homes in order to make the ultimate building of any one structure easier, and still talking with Trenton about how to allow people to construct these shelters on city ground. That last part is proving tough, as may be expected.
Abrams is also looking at ways to rent out pre-built shelters, maybe for $5 a night. Or, if you don’t have $5, maybe you could work off your rent by helping to build another B Home.
More tangible is the exhibit of B Homes the Arts Council of Princeton is displaying through September 15 at its Graves Terrace. The Arts Council was drawn to the idea of “low-cost shelters with applications ranging from disaster relief to ecotourism to alternative dwellings for under-served populations” and wanted to help Abrams and his B Homes partner, Graham Apgar of Trenton’s S.A.G.E. Coalition (for beautification projects in the capital), pollinate the idea in hopes of inspiring civic-minded residents to help the poor and troubled.
“The B Homes are a perfect blend of community-oriented art-making and environmentally conscious design,” says Jeff Nathanson, executive director of the Arts Council. “In keeping with our mission to support local artists, we wanted to share his project with the public.”
The placement of a B Home in front of Small World Coffee last fall “was the catalyst for the Arts Council to launch a new public art ‘Parklet’ project” with Princeton, Nathanson says. And the council was impressed by Abrams’ use of recycled pallets and his structures inspired by bee colonies.
According to the Arts Council, B Homes will be temporarily stationed throughout Princeton and installed at the Robeson Center. Plans also include putting B Homes at Witherspoon Hall and Monument Drive.
So why hexagons, you may ask? Well, for one thing, they look really cool. But more importantly, hexagons make for strong cells, like in a honeycomb, Abrams says. They’re easy to build onto and “have a greater usable space, a more comfortable space,” he says. They don’t give people the feeling they’re trapped in a box, like a cubicle at work. Or a jail cell.
In other words, it’s an ideal form with a lot of function, and one that clearly has worked well for one of the smartest and most industrious critters on the planet.
“I stole the whole idea from bees,” Abrams says. “I realized, if you spend your whole day chewing up wax, you’re going to find the most efficient design for it.”
Abrams’ first foray into B Homes was a mobile bread truck. He and a graduate student from the Parsons School of Design were commissioned by Nadezhda Savova, a cultural anthropologist at Princeton University, to bring bread-making houses to neighborhoods, as she had seen in the Middle East. Abrams’ response was the B Bakery, which made its first appearance around Trenton last year. From there the idea blossomed into a more social-project concept that Abrams hopes will find surer footing and wide acceptance.
Abrams had once worked in the fabrication department at Johnson Atelier at Hamilton’s Grounds For Sculpture. That means that he made other artists’ work from their designs. But after being fired, he opened a shop on North Olden Avenue in Trenton, where he made fire bowls out of the city’s once-lifeblood, wire rope. He also started making things out of found objects like couches, chairs, and coffee tables.
That enterprise soon led to Abrams founding the Trenton Atelier in 2005, an artist community enterprise that lasted about a year before Abrams bought space at 307 North Clinton Avenue in Trenton and opened The Hive Community of Art & Design. The Hive is an arts co-op, similar to a business incubator, where artists and creatives can rent space for projects ranging from sculpture to gardening.
Abrams has opted for Trenton because, he says, the city has great potential and “great bones.” Especially for a project like B Homes, as there are so many people in Trenton who could use a small place to shut out the outside world for a little while and maybe have a place to lay their heads.
If only the city can break away from its long-entrenched fear and anger and sense of isolation. “Fear and anger are the overriding emotions in Trenton,” Abrams says. “Kids grow up with it. It’s cyclical.”
How do you break that? “One way to do it is to think outside the box,” he says. “Some kids you can reach through the arts.”
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