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.

Lego Architecture

Brilliant...for all those of us growing up with Lego, the new edition for adults is out, with licensed Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO sets. Created in conjunction with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Brickstructures, Inc. and the LEGO Architecture brand, the first two sets in the series are The Guggenheim and Fallingwater.

Other structures soon to be Lego-ed are the Sears Tower, the Empire State Building, the Seattle Space Needle and the Burj Dubai Tower.

+ images courtesy of independent online

2009 Design Projects Submission

Project pdf's have been uploaded to scribd.com. These are both submissions for May 2008/9.

The Wey & Arun Re:Visit is as the name suggests; we revisted the site a season and a semester later with a brief to either continue and compliment our first proposal, or create something new since seeing it with fresh eyes. My proposal compliments the first, looking at transition towns as precident and proposing a site that is self-sustaining for the local community, with productive woodlands, coppiced woodlands and wildflower meadows to provide fuel. The second proposal addresses more the continuity and the issues relating to regenerating this section of canal, as well as focussing on creating a biodiverse 'hotspot'.

Wey & Arun Re:Visit - http://www.scribd.com/doc/15685947/13Wey-Arun-ReVisit-Final-Presentation

The PLAY Module was a live project in Richmond - Hampton Hill Junior School. The caretaker's house attached to the school was redesigned to incorporate an Adult Learning Centre, and the small garden area between the junior school and ALC was to be redesigned for 2-5 year olds. The project uploaded below is a new submission since I was unhappy with the first proposal and wanted to better the mark from the first submission.

Play: Hampton Hill Junior School Garden Project - http://www.scribd.com/doc/15686671/30PlayResubmissionMay09

Streetlife: Technical & Theoretical Reports

Part of our landscape module is to write a technical & theoretical report about a landscape project in London. The aim is to help us to engage in research, investigation and critical appraisal to support the technical and theoretical elements of the project.

In the first semester I selected the landscape project at More London by Townshend Landscape Architects. In the second sememster, various east London regeneration projects were selected for us, mine being Gillett Square just off Kingsland High Road in Dalston.

I have uploaded my recent submissions to scribd.com and both can be found here:

More London (semester 1): http://www.scribd.com/doc/16214574/Parklife-Module-More-London-TechnicalTheoretical-Report

Gillett Square (semester 2): http://www.scribd.com/doc/15683450/StreetLife-ModuleGillett-SquareTechnicalTheoretical-Report

Vancouver Vertical Farm

Paris has competition it seems, (as do many other world-wide cities) since The City of Vancouver has ambitious plans to become the most sustainable city in the world.

Vancouver based Romses Architects have designed a vertical urban farm, complete with a tower for growing fruits and vegetables, livestock grazing plane, boutique dairy farm, commercial space, transit lines, renewable energy and more. Entitled the Harvest Green Tower, Romses proposal is that it has the potential to be a food growing, energy producing, living, breathing sustainable transit hub.

The tower consists of interlocking tubes that grow various fruits and vegetables, house chickens and contain an aquaponic fish farm. A rainwater cistern is at the top of the tower to collect and water all the plants and animals. At the base of the tower is a livestock grazing plain, as well as a bird habitat and boutique sheep and goat dairy facility. At the ground level is a grocery store, farmer’s market and restaurant.

Renewable energy is produced from rooftop mounted wind turbines and photovoltaic glazing on the building with the additional help of geothermal heat pumps and also methane generation from composting.

This spring Vancouver held the FormShift Vancouver Competition to develop and improve the city’s livability through greener, denser developments. The Harvest Green Tower received an honorable mention in the Primary category for a mixed use primary (arterial) site along a major Vancouver street.


+images courtesy of Romses Architects
via inhabitat

Urban agriculture for NY

Still in keeping with the Extended essay topic choice for 2009/10, I may consider Urban agriculture as an option. There is a lot of precedent of current day urban farms found in cities such as central London and Cuba as well as historical models of urban farms such as Machu Picchu. As well as these, there are future models for urban farming that might be a little out of this world for now, but could be changing our skylines in the not too distant future.

One of these is the latest concept design from Vincent Callebaut Architects - The Dragonfly. It has been designed with the intention of easing the ever-increasing need for ecological and environmental self-sufficiency in the urban cityscape. The proposed development, designed around the Southern bank of Roosevelt Island in New York, follows a vertical farm design which, it is hoped, would cultivate food, agriculture, farming and renewable energy in an urban setting.

While urban farming has been quite a trendy move for some urban dwellers, there is without a doubt that in boroughs belonging to cities like NYC, what little space is left is disappearing fast. So new growth must come vertically.

The Dragonfly spans 132 floors and 600 vertical meters, and accommodates 28 different agricultural fields for the production of fruit, vegetables, grains, meat and dairy. The concept scheme outlines that it's inhabitants are responsible for cultivation and along with a combination of solar and wind power, it becomes %100 self sufficient.

Offices, research labs, housing, and communal areas are interspersed between orchards, farms, and production rooms. Plant and animal farming is arranged throughout the Dragonfly’s steel and glass set of wings so as to maintain proper soil nutrient levels and reuse of biowaste.

More beautiful CGI imagery is on the architect's website: vincent callebaut architects

+images courtesy of inhabitat

More Veg.itechture

Green your workspace with a grass mat! These grass squares were designed at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel, in 2009 as a way to combine nature and architecture. Who needs an S.A.D lamp...

And these mossy bath mats are beautiful....I think I have posted them before but they deserved to be dug up again! I love it...they would be great as shower wall tiles as well. La Chanh Nguyen is the creator.

+ images courtesy of inhabitat

The Green Door

I absolutely LOVED this entry at last year's Chelsea Flower Show!!

Entitled ‘Midori no Tobira’, which means ‘Green Door’, designer Kazuyuki Ishihara created it with the concept from his childhood, when he created secret bases on his rooftop garden, into which he could escape and enter a new and exciting world.Sedum and moss covers nearly every surface, including the walls and roof, giving it a hidden secret garden feel.

The garden’s green walls and water feature relax visitors and heal tired hearts. The garden is also attractive to, not only people, but also wildlife.

It is like something out of a dream world. So cute, so girly, so fairy tale....I want one.

+ images courtesy of cee

Meghna Residence:living in delta, Bangladesh

Constructed 2003 - 2005, this 1st cycle winner in the World Architecture Community Awards is a residential building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In a very densley populated city, this project with residential buildings and single storey houses must be like the garden of Eden.

In the photographs you can see the swimming pool, ghat and garden for big trees at level five. The foral green and sound of water away from the ground - the library & garden at level 3. The courtyard offers privacy & connectivity, while the water layering adds to the Deltaic ambience.

+ images courtesy of WA Com

Elok House - Chang Architects

'Concrete, glass, timber and steel meet space, light and nature'.

This house is any urban city dweller's dream: to live in a forest setting, at one with nature, and quite possibly an architect’s interpretations of this dream.

This Singaporean house was conceived as a three-dimensional landscape installation, whereby the spaces were then inserted. The space features interchangeable rooms floating in a bigger volume of space with a 2-storey high retaining wall at the rear, transformed into a pebbled waterfall that opens up to the sky. There is also a pond in the living area that collects rainwater.

The house also boasts a rich arrangement of garden types; a kitchen entrance grove of trees, a 2-storey internal enclosure of fern walls to the living spaces, moss pebble entrances to bedrooms. the inhabitants of this house will smell the wet soil in the air, pick and clear up dead leaves while the plants grow and mature. This is part of the design's living, organic quality.

The need for air-conditioning and artificial lighting are reduced thanks to the configurations of the spaces and luxuriant use of plants and water elements, which generate a cool microclimate within the house.

+ images courtesy of WAN

What initally caught my eye with this project was the image of the kitchen above with grove trees growing through the floor to ceiling. I recently travelled to the Yucatan province of Mexico which is reknowned for it's lime stone caves. I snorkled in one and what intrigued me were the roots of trees growing directly through the limestone roof and dangling into the fresh water (see below). I wondered if anyone had used this in a design before and I think this may be the closest I have found yet.

Roof maintenance

+ image courtesy of vi.sualize.us

Green Paris in 2030

Last year French President Nicholas Sarkozy called upon ten of Paris' top planning companies to imagine the city in 2030. His plans are to make Paris the most green and environmentally sustainable city in the world.

Urban planning & Architecture firm Castro Denisof Casi has selected a southeastern suburb of Paris with concept images of high-rises lush with greenhouses and rooftop gardens. The buildings would be powered in part by wind and solar energy and connected to the city center by elevated rapid transit.

There is currently an exhibition of the groups ideas and sketches entitled "Le Grand Paris" at the City of Architecture and Heritage (Citi de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine) museum.

+Images courtesy Atelier Castro Denisof Casi

Veg.itecture

I came across a website called madarchitect.org which had some interesting structural concept by Ken Yeang involving green buildings.

Entitled Veg.itecture it is based on vegetation as the primary component of a building. Ken is one of the most active promoters of this architecture and his designs are considered masterpieces. Most of his buildings are bioclimatic skyscrapers but the technique is not very simple because the structures need sun alignment, adjustment to the climate conditions throughout the year and to make use of lighting and ventilation.

+ images courtesy of madarchitect.org

Elements of a green Roof

They may be popular interventions of the 21st Century, but green roofs are in fact thousands of years old. The first recorded appearance of a green roof occurred in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon around 500 BC. The site is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

It was the Icelandics who came up with the original design, with constructed houses and sod ceilings and walls. With a lack of natural construction purposes, they made do with what resources were available. The ceilings were usually constructed of turf, but the walls were built up with stone and alternating strips of sod and turf. They realised the green roofs and walls provided extra insulation during weather extremes.

The 18th C Germans constructed green roofs as a sign of wealth and status. They were constructed on the manor houses and castles. The trend then spread across Europe in the 19th century and the first signs of green roofs in the United States occurred in the 20th century in New York City.

With that short introduction I attach an image courtesy of the American Wick Drain Corp showing the elements of Green roofing.

Extended Essay: Year 3 Dissertation

The summer probably wont be seeing too much of the word 'holiday'. At least not for me.

These coming months will see the preparations for the notorious Dissertation, or Extended Essay as Kingston is calling it, in an attempt to make it sound a little less scary.

I have a few topics in mind, all of which I believe will incite some enthusiasm, interest and most importantly motivation. ITs just chosing which one. I have my heart set on my 1st topic: Greening the Future: Living Walls & Green Roofs. The two others I proposed were: The importance of small/green spaces for urban inhabitants and Damage Control: The role of the landscape architect of the 21st Century.

As they all fit the required criteria of sustaining oneself whilst writing a dissertation, I think my interests lie chiefly in modern urban greening practices of living walls and green roofs.

My following articles over the next few months will find their focus here. I will be doing extensive research on the subject to get things going early.

The joys of being a nerd.

Future movements

The 4 week Easter break passed in a haze of 2 weeks mad work and 2 weeks lazing in the Mexican sun.

This break away from all things work and uni and more work, allowed me to cast my thoughts to which paths I might see myself following post graduation.

Year two has allowed me the opportunity to widen my vision of what a landscape architect could do. Particularly, the lectures I attended at eco build in March introduced to me some interesting professions. I am quite convinced at this stage that I would like to follow a horticultural and/or ecological path.....

The travels I have made to Madagascar over the last 3 years have enabled me to understand a little bit more about this incredible country and the ecological diversity it has managed to keep separate from the rest of the world for so many years. While there may be a lot of scientists and ecologists working and learning here, landscape architecture expertise is very much required here. There are various large scale mining projects taking place in the south east which are huge masterplanning projects as they are constructing new 'towns' almost, with 1000's of new homes for mine workers. As well as this, there is a huge agricultural farming issue all over the island: traditional practices of razing land to create farms which are killing fauna and flora, most importantly, the world's slowest growing tree - the baobab tree. (6 species of the world's 8 are found in Madagascar)

I found some writing online regarding the fires in Madagascar which was quite interesting -

http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/madagascar.htm

Once I have finished my Landscape architecture undergraduate degree, at this stage I feel I will be working outside the UK. There are some Landscape architects with good philosophies and practice that I would be interested working for, some in the UK and some based elsewhere, but at this stage, who knows.

Some of these practices are:

Grant Associates - Bath

Kinnear Landscape Architects - London

L.D.A - London, Oxford, Peterborough, Exeter

Field Operations - NYC

Gross Max - Edinburgh

Nicholas Pearson Associates - Bath, Tiverton

Hargreaves Associates - London, Cambridge, NYC, San Francisco

Other professional bodies:

Groundwork - UK based offices

Design for London - London

Royal Botanic Gardens Kew - London

Limestone caves - Tulum, Yucatan Province, Mexico