Queens Urban Farm @ PS1

PS1 gallery in Queens, New York City has opened an urban farm installation. 50 types of vegetables in 280 cardboard tubes filled with soil are installed on the roof of the gallery.

An irrigation system that makes use of collected rainwater waters the plants and is heated by 16 solar panels. It is estimated that there is enough surplus power to run a mobile-phone charging station and a sound and video column.

People on the ground can look through a periscope over the growing plants, which are lifted 12m in the air.

Hooray for urban agriculture.

+images courtesy of iconeye

High Line is open!

Ten years in the making, New York city's High Line is finally open and providing New Yorkers with yet another green space, ready for summer!

The City of New York is full of parks - in fact, there are 1700! There are the enormous parks (Central, Prospect, Flushing) with medium-sized offerings (Bryant, Madison Square), and not forgetting little pocket parks everywhere like Stuyvesant and Washington Market. People such as Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl would be the first to advocate green spaces for great cities.

On a newly renovated stretch of an elevated promenade that was once a railway line for delivering cattle — surrounded by the community activists, elected officials and architects who made the transformation happen — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cut a red ribbon on Monday morning to signify that the first phase of the High Line is finished and ready for strolling.

As you can imagine with such an eagerly anticipated event such as this, there are plenty of online reports dedicated to its opening:

The New York Times has posted a great panoramic here.

Treehugger and the Daily Green have put up slideshows here and here.

The Huffington Post added some great aerial shots here.


+ main image courtesy of inhabitat.