David Belt is full of surprises. I first heard about him last summer, when the New York Times ran a story about pools in dumpsters, somewhere on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. The Collaborative tracked him down and asked him to give the opening talk at our recent Infill Philadelphia: Industrial Sites Interim Use Charrette. In the process, we discovered that David is a Philly native and a developer by trade. Huh? The man who created an urban swim club out of a riverside lot full of dumpsters is a commercial developer, not some architect gone rogue?

When this cheerful bearded man strolled into our office to give the “charge” for the design charrette, it just kept getting better. About the pools, those “intimate aqua living rooms,” David said offhand, “You know we all feel a little like garbage anyway, so swimming in a dumpster is kind of appealing.”

The mission statement of David’s firm, Macro Sea, is simple and cool: “Macro Sea is a company created to do projects that we find interesting.” And when he and I sat down to talk about his work he described himself – the company’s president – as “the crazy aunt who comes down from the attic every once in a while talking about things like swimming pools in dumpsters.”

David grew up moving around Philly constantly. At one point he worked in a tennis racket factory in Trenton, loading trucks.  In the early 90s he and his band went out on tour and he stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area, working construction. He moved up the ladder to project management and eventually to leadership. In 1999 he moved to New York City to build the Bear Stearns world headquarters on Madison Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets.  Formerly living in Park Slope, David recently moved his family from Park Slope into a former woodworking shop near the Gowanus Canal.

When David returned to the U.S. from working on the adaptive re-use of a building in central Rome, it hit him just how physically bad the environment made him feel. While driving through an area full of nearly empty strip malls he mentioned how it occurred to him that, “It’s easy to take a really beautiful building in Rome and turn it into a beautiful building. But what if I could turn these crappy strip malls into beautiful buildings? That would be something.” At that point he turned his focus to making this concept into built projects. “There’s an abundance of structures that could use a little love. Someone needs to fully embrace them, not to just look at them as functional, and realize that they’re temporary: they’ll only be there for 20 years.”

Fresh from creating dumpster pools in Brooklyn, and with his team still working full-time on reimagining the American strip mall, he took the time to encourage the Collaborative’s charrette teams to  make people think differently about gritty, unloved, but remarkable vacant spaces, which he loves for “the beauty you have to squint to see.” In his own words, “I think it’s really unpreposessing to build something temporary and see how it goes.”

The interim use charrette was a one-day design exploration led by KSK Architects Planners Historians, Inc. and developed by the Community Design Collaborative with Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations and the AIA Philadelphia Urban Design Committee. Stay tuned for a blog story on some of the ideas and designs that emerged from the charrette, as well as for news on the Infill Philadelphia: Industrial Sites initiative, presented in partnership with PIDC.