Neighborhood

A facade without a street

Neighborhood arranges rectangles as windows, grilles and masonry. Blue panes sit behind heavier black outlines; thin internal bars subdivide them without opening a view into any room. There are no people, vehicles or receding streets. The urban subject emerges from the proportions and repetitions of a single flat facade.¹²

Jeff Davis describes the project as an urban abstraction inspired by his early career in Chicago. Released through Art Blocks Playground on September 1, 2021, it contains 312 minted works. Its exact identity is Ethereum project 146 on contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270.³⁴ The AB5D artist dossier places it within his continuing study of colour, structure and generative composition.

The title invites an architectural reading, but the images do not document identifiable buildings. Their shared grammar makes each facade a variation within an imagined district. A broad frontage and a narrow tower can use closely related components while producing quite different rhythms. That movement between recognisable construction and abstract arrangement is more consequential than the suggestion of any particular address.

Chicago remembered through a system

Davis's account of his practice describes painting and printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by a turn to design software in 1999. He identifies precision in structure and colour as an attraction of digital tools, and subsequently describes creative coding as a way to define parameters for unforeseen outcomes.⁵ His curriculum vitae dates the Chicago MFA to 1994–1996.⁶ These sources establish a substantial pre-NFT history for the project's formal concerns.

The artist's 2021 portfolio calls Neighborhood a series of 312 digital images with variable aspect ratios and adaptive resolution. It also records the exhibition at imnotArt in Chicago.⁷ In an October 16, 2021 forum submission, imnotArt cofounder Chase McCaskill described collaborating with Davis on an exhibition created specifically for the gallery.⁸ This first-person institutional account makes the physical exhibition part of the work's early context, rather than a later use inferred from photographs.

Those accounts support a relationship between the Chicago setting, the artist's biography and the exhibition. They do not identify the actual buildings he studied, date the first code experiments or explain successive changes to the parameter ranges. The source code supplies the released mechanism; it cannot retrospectively supply that missing development narrative.

The official statement also pledges half of minting proceeds to Habitat for Humanity.³ Housing therefore enters the project in two distinct ways: as a vocabulary of architectural surfaces and as the announced beneficiary of its sale. The latter is documented intention, while any claim that the facade design itself represents a particular housing policy would go beyond the available evidence.

Building from a small vocabulary

The complete artist script comprises 9,059 characters and names p5.js 1.0.0 as its runtime. It was retrieved from the official Art Blocks index, read end to end and recorded with a SHA-256 digest. This is an indexed-source inspection, not a block-pinned retrieval from Ethereum.⁴

Neighborhood does not use a pseudorandom generator to unfold a sequence of decisions. It parses the hash into thirty-two bytes, then reads particular byte positions directly. Bytes choose structural patterns, window subdivisions, drawing order, initial day or night state, orientation, density and colours. The token's invocation number separately controls special behaviour in the earliest works. Parsing the whole hash does not mean every byte affects the picture: the drawing parameters consult positions one through nineteen.⁴

The structural vocabulary is compact. Arrays identify selected positions within a sixteen-unit span, and other arrays divide that span into window intervals. Horizontal and vertical structures have different available choices. The program selects compatible subdivision patterns, then repeats the chosen module at one of three densities. This gives a facade regularity without making every token use the same proportions.⁴

Three orientations are possible: square, wide and tall. Wide and tall canvases have 16:9 and 9:16 proportions, respectively. Their image fields are assembled across two neighbouring square regions, while some structural elements run continuously across the combined field. A white margin surrounds the construction. For the first twelve invocations, orientation is assigned by number: #0–2 are wide, #3–6 square and #7–11 tall. Later orientations follow the hash.⁴

The drawing begins with a coloured window field. Fine rectangular grilles are laid over it, followed by thicker masonry rectangles with black outlines. A byte determines which structural direction is drawn over the other. That ordering matters at intersections: one set of bars can read as uninterrupted while the crossing set appears segmented. The architecture is produced by layering flat shapes, with no three-dimensional camera or lighting simulation.⁴

Colour is similarly constrained. Two principal masonry colours are selected from warm hue ranges, with branches that can make them pale, equal or white. The window hue is derived from their relationship rather than chosen independently from an unrelated palette. Grilles can be dark, grey or blue-toned. The night branch shifts the masonry towards cooler, darker colours and makes the panes pale. It creates the impression of illumination through colour relations, without calculating light spreading through space.⁴

The script calls noLoop after drawing. It contains no animated clock, audio function, keyboard control or resize handler. Although the artist's portfolio describes the series as interactive, the released source restricts its mouse-click switch to invocations below twelve. Clicking toggles their night variable and redraws the same geometry.⁴⁷ In direct tests, #0 changed to night and back, and #10 changed to night. The held #234 remained unchanged after a click.¹⁹¹⁰ Interaction is therefore an edition-specific property, not a universal behaviour of Neighborhood.

The release and the charitable pledge

The first indexed token, #0, was minted on August 23, 2021 at 05:00:23+00:00. The second token followed on August 26 at 02:06:23, and sampled #10 at 03:00:40 that day. Activation is recorded later, on August 27 at 05:37:50. These early mints precede both activation and the September 1 release shown on the collection page.⁴³ Their allocation and payment conditions have not been established.

The index gives September 1 at 16:00:00 as the start and 16:47:58 as completion. The latter matches final invocation #311. Sampled #20 was minted at 16:16:55, while #234 arrived at 16:47:35. The start-to-completion interval is forty-seven minutes and fifty-eight seconds, but that arithmetic does not independently verify the public opening transaction or a complete sale history.⁴

Current indexed supply and maximum are both 312. The price field now reads 1.75 ETH. Neither the current maximum nor this price field alone establishes the original announced cap, starting price, auction decrements or price paid by every minter. No complete contemporary sale schedule was recovered.

Druid's September 9, 2021 charity update for The Link lists $1,054,578 against Neighborhood and Habitat for Humanity. The report explains that its broader totals include completed donations, ETH set aside and pledges awaiting conversion.¹¹ It is useful contemporary reporting of the project's charitable contribution, but it is not a project-specific receipt proving when Habitat received that exact dollar amount. The artist's fifty-percent pledge and the report's dollar figure should remain separate forms of evidence.

What the licence permits

The current project record reports CC BY-NC 4.0. That licence permits sharing and adaptation for noncommercial purposes, subject to attribution, a licence link, indication of modifications and the other applicable conditions. It prohibits additional restrictions that prevent recipients from exercising the licensed rights. It does not transfer copyright to an NFT holder or grant an unrestricted commercial licence.⁴¹²

The index supplies the label but no separate licence URL. The corresponding Creative Commons legal code establishes the named terms; it does not resolve every possible question about which associated materials the artist intended to include. No separate grant covering the artist's source code was identified. The p5.js 1.0.0 dependency carries GNU LGPL 2.1 terms, which do not automatically license Davis's script or images.¹³

Neighborhood #234 is currently indexed to a wallet in the freshly checked AB5D profile's linked wallet set.⁴¹⁴ That establishes the collection relationship used for the featured work. Its reproduction basis remains the reported artwork licence, including the noncommercial limitation and attribution requirements, rather than token ownership alone.

Five windows onto the edition

These observations concern verified tokens on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270: #0, token 146000000; #1, 146000001; #10, 146000010; #20, 146000020; and #234, 146000234. All five original generators were viewed. The selection compares early controlled orientations and interactions with two later works; it is not a statistical sample.⁴

In #0, four columns and four rows of broad blue windows form a wide frontage. Brown vertical masonry continues through the height, while pale horizontal pairs divide the floors. Grey grille lines are quieter than the black structural outlines, so the eye can alternate between the sixteen large openings and their smaller internal divisions. The columns feel weightier than the horizontal strips without introducing perspective or depth shading.¹

Clicking changes the interpretation of that same geometry. The masonry becomes dark purple-grey, the panes pale cream and the grilles black. The panes now resemble internally illuminated windows rather than blue reflections of daylight. Nothing moves across the facade; its proportions remain fixed. A second click restores the original colours. This small reversible action is enough to change the implied conditions of looking, showing how much architectural recognition depends on colour relationships rather than modeled space.¹

In #1, eight narrower columns of blue windows extend across the wide frame. Warm brown masonry appears on both axes, and light blue internal lines sit close to the pane edges. Compared with #0, the smaller openings create a quicker lateral rhythm. The regular divisions suggest a longer run of repeated units, even though both works occupy the same canvas format.¹⁵

The tall #10 reverses the dominant movement. Broad brown horizontal bands cross a narrow upright field, dividing it into eight stacked rows. Within each row, pale vertical supports separate slender blue panes. The result reads as a sequence of floors before it reads as continuous columns. Its tested night state replaces the blue with cream and turns the horizontal bands dark, preserving that stacked emphasis.⁹

The later #20 is markedly simpler. Two columns of ungrilled blue windows occupy a tall panel, six openings on each side. Brown vertical strips frame the outside and form a doubled central support; pale grey horizontal strips separate the openings. The absence of fine grille lines makes each blue rectangle feel larger and more uninterrupted than its counterpart in #10. This is a change in visual scale produced by removing internal divisions, not by zooming a camera.²

Held #234 offers a denser counterpoint. Four columns and twelve rows compress a large number of blue windows into a similarly tall frame. Tan vertical supports and grey horizontal strips establish the larger grid, while blue grilles add a second, finer rhythm. Its repeated small openings make the facade seem more distant or extensive than #20, although that is a visual interpretation rather than a depicted viewpoint. Clicking left the image unchanged, consistent with its invocation lying outside the first twelve.¹⁰

A district made through comparison

Neighborhood's strength lies in how little it needs to suggest a built environment. Repeated rectangles, intersecting bars and related colours can imply different scales, materials and times of day. The close readings show that a modest set of structural choices produces distinct experiences of breadth, height and density without abandoning a recognisable common grammar.

The Chicago exhibition and the Habitat pledge place that abstract grammar alongside actual institutions and social purposes. Neither context should be inflated into a comprehensive explanation of the forms. The available evidence supports a project that connects Davis's established digital practice, a specifically commissioned exhibition and a generative edition through the persistent motif of the facade.⁵⁸³

Several substantive research questions remain:

• Which Chicago buildings, drawings or earlier paintings informed the selected structural patterns?
• How did the gallery exhibition shape the three formats and the first twelve tokens' special controls?
• What were the original sale schedule and allocation conditions of the pre-release tokens?
• What project-specific records establish the timing and final value of the Habitat payment?
• Did the artwork licence expressly include the artist's source code?