Category — Design

By Aaron Newton
Powering Down
March 11, 2010

Excerpt:

Today we’re designing an urban farm. This one will become real if we can get the funding necessary to start the program. The specific location of the farm will have to remain a secret for now but it’s in Charlotte, NC near uptown. Todd Serdula did most of the excellent graphic work on this proposal.

To start with we break down the design considerations into 4 categories.

Physical Components
Programing Elements
Transition and Construction
Marketing and Distribution

[Read more →]

The Kitchen Garden.

British artist, Richard Adams’s Kitchen Gardens

Richard Adams (b. 1960) received a BA Hons in Graphic Design at Leicester Polytechnic. He spent his childhood amidst the British countryside in the south Cotswolds. Its outstanding landscape has had a strong and lasting influence on his art work.

Richard Adams creates a dream world often adding ‘odd’ people that seem to float above the ground and seldom stand upright. Full of humour Richard Adams paintings are beautifully drawn and highly imaginative.

[Read more →]

Sample Indicators from the map:

Local Foods

# Farms with direct sales
% Farms with direct sales
% Farm sales $ direct to consumer
$ Direct farm sales
$ Direct farm sales per capita
# Farmers’ markets
Farmers’ markets/1,000 pop
# Vegetable acres harvested
Vegetable acres harvested/1,000 pop
Farm to school program

Excerpt from the USDA Food Blog
Feb 12, 2010

USDA’s Your Food Environment Atlas is an online mapping tool that compares the food environment of U.S. counties—the mix of factors that together influence food choices, diet quality, and general fitness among residents.  The Atlas contains 90 food environment indicators—most at the county level—allowing Atlas users to visualize and compare on a map how counties fare on each of the indicators. This new online tool is designed to stimulate research and inform policymakers as they address the nexus between diet and public health.

[Read more →]

Airborne Vineyard by Soonil Kim

From the Architectural Association, School Of Architecture In London, Taught By Nannette Jackowski And Ricardo De Ostos.

From the blog Pruned, on Landscape Architecture and Related Fields. By Alexander Trevi.

Airborne Vineyard by Soonil Kim

Writes Kim:

Inspired by the urban grains especially the railway network from both St. Pancras and King’s Cross Station around the site, the design is a formal continuation of the topography while reinforcing the colonisation of air space by winery branches. The audacious structure, the winery and the vineyard for red wine grapes are connected by a suspended transport network enabling the use of ground space for a public park. With a capacity to produce 10,000 bottles of red wine annually the project re-articulates private and public space blending productive infrastructure with quality areas to Londoners and tourists.

[Read more →]

Urban Orchard

By Andrew Maynard Architects, a young Melbourne, Australian firm

Premise

A cities gardens can be more than a decorated landscape. Like the built environment, green spaces can work with us to make an integrated urban environment rather than isolated pockets of manicured greenery.
We propose a garden that contributes a SOCIAL space, creates a low impact and sustainable ECONOMIC model, beautifies the URBAN landscape and improves our urban areas impact on the ENVIRONMENT.

We propose that rather than only producing a beautiful, green rooftop space, we also create a greater, and achievable urban gesture. We propose a working garden that is wonderful to visit, great to have events at, while also producing food much like Cuba’s Market Gardens.

[Read more →]

See larger image of the plan here.

A project that will transform a vacant school building on Madison’s Southside into a state-of-the art urban agriculture and community center campus.

The exterior areas of the site will include the following components:

Community Gardens serving the local neighborhood

Education Gardens serving as an outdoor classroom for students from around Dane County

Edible Landscape including perennials such as nut and fruit trees and berries

Innovative Storm Water Management that views stormwater as a resource

Rain Gardens for infiltration of stormwater

[Read more →]

Blue Sea Developments and BrightFarm Systems

The Blue Sea Development Corporation has a reputation for integrating emerging environmental technologies into high quality, affordable housing developments across New York City.

Their new state of the art affordable housing complex planned for the South Bronx, NY, will feature a 10,000 square feet (930 sq meters) fully integrated rooftop farm, designed by BrightFarm Systems.

The greenhouse will use left-over heat from the residential portion of the building and water harvested from the greenhouse roof. The farm will be used to provide fresh, perishable vegetables to a local non-profit food cooperative.

[Read more →]

The Urban Terrace

By Ellen Depoorter
For The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Population growth is leading to an ever accelerating urbanization. Densely built cities are very effective in providing housing, transport, work and culture since they are shared by a large population. Concentrating population in cities leaves land open for nature: O2 creating and CO2 absorbing plants.

While providing numerous benefits, cities don’t provide food or energy for their population. Energy is mostly carbon based and needs to be transported into the city. Food production as well is based on carbon: chemical fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery, modern food processing, packaging and transportation. Processed food is also rich in fat and sugar and has less useful nutrients like vitamins and minerals, contributing to an obesity epidemic.

[Read more →]

2007 – Winner of the 2nd International Competition for Sustainable Housing by Knafo Klimor Architects and Town Planners, Israel

Excerpts from Living Steels’ competition design website.

Agro-housing, the winning design for construction in China, blends urban and rural living by creating vertical greenhouse space within high-rise apartments. Designed by Knafo Klimor Architects, the Agro-housing concept allows tenants to produce their own food, reducing commuting needs and providing a green neighbourhood.

Knafo Klimor Architects developed this concept with concern for predictions that 50% of China’s one billion people will live in its cities, a trend mirrored in many developing countries in the world. The architects observe that massive urbanisation displaces communities, dissipating existing traditions and heritage, as well as placing a strain on energy resources and infrastructure.

[Read more →]

Urban Agriculture Ideas Competition – Mowing to Growing

Non-Profit Design Group Terreform ONE Announces First Annual “One Prize” Award to Promote Green Design in Cities

Seeking architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds:

How can we break the American love affair with the suburban lawn?

Can green houses be incorporated in skyscrapers?

What are the urban design strategies for food production in cities?

Can food grow on rooftops, parking lots, building facades?

What is required to remove foreclosure signs on lawns and convert them to gardens?

[Read more →]

Public Farm 1 (PF1) was the winning entry for the 2008 MoMA/PS1 Young Architect Program. Built in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s courtyards, the temporary installation introduced a 1000m2 fully functioning urban farm in the form of a folded plane made of structural cardboard tubes. PF1 combines infrastructure with public space, engaging the visitor to re-imagine the city’s infinite possibilities.

Built entirely of biodegradable and recyclable materials, PF1 was powered by solar energy and irrigated by a rooftop rainwater collection system that kept the project off the city’s grid. Throughout the summer, the farm produced over 50 varieties of organic fruit, vegetables and herbs that were used by the museum’s café, at special events, and harvested by visitors.

[Read more →]

Millennials, who are generally considered to be a group of participatory, positive, technologically-savvy 18- to 30-year-olds

By Alissa Walker
Fast Company
Dec 8, 2009

Excerpt:

Waxman sought to have a group of students physically reclaim a strip of public land bordering the school’s street, which California College of the Arts (CCA) shares with homeless residents as well as day laborers. Waxman believed they could intervene agriculturally on the block–which was littered with hypodermic needles–by growing enough food for the neighbors. “We were three transient populations brought together by a piece of toxic land that held the potential for building community and for addressing a food issue,” she remembers. Dubbing the project FARM (Future Action Reclamation Mob) she encouraged students through posters and other campaign methods to rally behind the cause, using language she believed would appeal to the Millennials.

[Read more →]

The author’s pet rooster, 15-year-old Mr. X, checks out the cool veggie garden. Photo by Rosalind Creasy

The total value of the fresh vegetables author Rosalind Creasy grew in her 100-square-foot garden in 2008 was $683.43!

By Rosalind Creasy with Cathy Wilkinson Barash
December 2009/January 2010
Mother Earth News

In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. Then, while working on my new book, Edible Landscaping, I had an aha! moment. As I was assembling statistics to show the wastefulness of the American obsession with turf, I wondered what the productivity of just a small part of American lawns would be if they were planted with edibles instead of grass.

I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn’t turn up any data for home harvest amounts — only figures for commercial agriculture. From experience, I knew those commercial numbers were much too low compared with what home gardeners can get. For example, home gardeners don’t toss out misshapen cucumbers and sunburned tomatoes. They pick greens by the leaf rather than the head, and harvests aren’t limited to two or three times a season.

[Read more →]

PHOTO BY KAREN LANDMAN. In Milwaukee, the Growing Power organization offers tours of its urban farm to give people, especially children, a chance to see where their food comes from.

Yes in My Backyard

Landscape architecture professor Karen Landman hits the road to see how people in Canada and the United States are bringing farming to the city

BY TERESA PITMAN
University of Guelph

Prof. Karen Landman, Environmental Design and Rural Development, grew up on a dairy farm, but she says her father wouldn’t recognize as farmers the people she met this summer when she travelled more than 18,000 kilometres across the western United States and Canada to study urban agriculture. They were growing food commercially in the city.

“I met with academics, social advocates, people who train others in the techniques of urban farming and, of course, urban farmers themselves,” she says.

[Read more →]

Fungi and Rhubarb Garden – The north facing end of the site will be in shade most of the day and most of the year. Large logs would be impregnated with fungi spores, the rhubarb and mint would be grown beneath them providing interesting food and creating am exotic and educational lunch time destination.

Leadenhall City Farm
By Mitchell Taylor Workshop

“Parks, allotments and markets are set to spring up across Britain on the sites of building projects that have been mothballed in the recession.

“Piers Taylor, of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, one of the practices shortlisted for the Leadenhall site has proposed a city farm, populated with colour-coded chickens. He wants to create grassy banks to picnic on and plant blackberry bushes amid the surrounding steel, granite and glass.”
- from The Times Oct 30, 2009

[Read more →]

Larger image here.

A Flemish Kitchen Garden: La Coupeuse de Choux

By Henri De Braekeleer (1840-88)
ca. 1864 (painted)
oil on canvas
Place of origin:
Antwerp (possibly, painted)

The Antwerp artist Henri de Braekeleer belonged to a family of painters. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre paintings, he specialised in humble scenes of everyday life, as in this example, in which a woman in peasant dress bends over to cut a cabbage. These were popular in a period of increasing industrialisation.

[Read more →]

Eco Pod: Pre Cycled Modular Bioreactor For Downtown Crossing

Taking advantage of the stalled Filene’s construction site at Downtown Crossing, Eco Pod is a proposal to immediately stimulate the economy, and the ecology, of downtown Boston. Eco Pod (Gen1) is a temporary vertical algae bio reactor and new public Commons, built with custom prefabricated modules. The pods will serve as bio fuel sources and as micro incubators for flexible research and development programs. As an open and reconfigurable structure, the voids between pods form a network of vertical public parks/botanical gardens housing unique plant species a new Uncommon for the Commons.

[Read more →]

Potager du Roi

From Wikipedia

The Potager du Roi (fr: Kitchen Garden of the King), near the Palace of Versailles, produced fresh vegetables and fruits for the table of the court of Louis XIV. It was created between 1678 and 1783 by Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, the director of the royal fruit and vegetable gardens. Today it is run by the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage, the high state school in France for the training of landscape architects. It is listed by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Notable Gardens of France.

[Read more →]

“I’ll be grown up,” said Caraway,
“And out of school Thanksgiving Day;
And that’s a good thing, too, ’cause you see,
They can’t make cookies without me.”

100 beautiful illustrations! Highly recommended! (Mike)

By Elizabeth Gordon
Illustrations M.T Ross
P.F. Volland and Co. Chicago
1914

A seed, little friends, is really a plant or a tree all wrapped up in a little brown bundle. If you plant it in the ground it will grow, and when it is old enough it will bear fruit, because God has made it so.

[Read more →]

See larger image here.

by Clive van Heerden, August 6, 2009

Looking into the economics and politics of rising food prices and theories about impending food shortages led us to create the “food farm” to test peoples sensitivity to the issue. We wanted to develop something initially that would supplement the nutritional needs of a family living in high rise accommodation, without drawing electricity or gas.

[Read more →]