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Braddock Tiles was one of a series of initiatives aimed at restoring a formerly abandoned church in ways that would engage and benefit its community at each stage of the process.

 

Braddock, Pennsylvania is one of a number of American cities in what is now known as "The Rust Belt": a collection of post-industrial towns that are facing serious crisis due to the collapse of their central industry. 

In 2007, Swoon and a group of friends were invited to purchase and restore one of Braddock's landmark buildings: an abandoned church. They saved this structure from a tide of demolitions that were ravaging the area, alongside economic blight and lack of job and educational opportunities.

Over the next 10 years, Swoon participated in a number of projects that focused on rehabilitating the structure in a way that would also engage and benefit the immediate surrounding community. These efforts included collaborating with local artist collective Transformazium on a deconstruction (as an alternative to demolition) initiative for fire-damaged sections of the building, creating a Super Adobe dome in the building’s disused parking lot, and, finally, the creation of Braddock Tiles. 

Braddock Tiles began as an effort to handmake the thousands of tiles that it would take to put a new roof on the church. It grew into a small artisanal tile workshop that provided job-readiness training to young people graduating from the Braddock Youth Program, focusing on community programming rather than on the building itself. 

The Braddock Tiles project ran for three years out of the Bathhouse ceramics studio in the Carnegie Library, hosting field trips and workshops, teaching local youth to make architectural tiles, interpreting local history into decorative murals for their community, and creating a supportive space for young people to learn the soft skills that would assist them in the next phase of their life. 

After a decade of work, and a great deal of learning, Swoon and the Heliotrope Foundation are currently working to pass the care of the building into new hands.  

 
 

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