In the beginning there was wood from another empty warehouse that became the floor.
These are the people who moved that wood. Photo by Marino Colmano, taken circa 1971.

The live-works served some financial and political purposes since they kep the primarily young energetic hippies off the street and focused on realtively safe endeavors. The development of the liveworks eventaully peaked with the dotcoms, but more on that later.

Working on Jackhammer, 1973

 

 

 

Our Founder Joseph Krysiak named Project Artaud for one of his favorite authors.

The name Project Artaud came about because of Joe's intense interest in theater of the absurd and the author of the concept, Antonine Artaud. Project Artaud became the second such warehouse project in San Francisco that involved a number of artists "taking over" an abandoned building during the early seventies, dividing it up and building individual live-work studios. There were no codes to cover the live-works, and real rules or regulations in place since none exhisted or ever had been considered. San Francisco grappled with how to handle these ventures for well over 20 years, as the artists and others developed these white elephants into a viable use buildings.