Category — Design

Urban Farm Urban Barn – Return Farming to the City

Holcim Awards Silver 2011 Asia Pacific
Isavaret Tamonut, TTH Trading Co., Ltd, Thailand
March 2012

Project description
Located in a mixed use urban zone in central Bangkok, the Urban Farm Urban Barn aims to return green areas to the booming city. A former textile factory and abandoned farmland on an adjacent block shall be transformed into a 1.4ha agricultural production site and retail outlet. The atrophying rural economy is reactivated in the context of modern urbanity, and elaborated in a remarkable way. The factory building is converted into an eco-supermarket, additional buildings, such as a restaurant and marketplace are integrated into the crop production by becoming agricultural structures themselves.

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L’agence IND nous propose un nouvel outil de développement urbain pour Casablanca

By Mohamed Achraf Sehnoun
aMush
Nov 22, 2011

Excerpt:

Par le biais d’un concept original “Agriculture urbaine”, les architectes tentent de doter les habitants des douars de Casablanca ( population mixte issue de la campagne) d’une boîte à outils leurs permettant de diminuer leurs dépenses, d’améliorer leurs train de vie et de les responsabiliser vis à vis de leurs devoirs de citoyen.

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Atlanta Artist and Arts Educator’s Design Selected As Semifinalist In Mayor’s Trinity Avenue Farm Design Competition

Press Release
By Meisha Card
Team Elevate

Atlanta, GA – On August 24, 2011 Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed along with City of Atlanta Officials, the University of Georgia and Wal-Mart Representatives announced an Urban Farm Design Competition to transform 0.8 acres of land located directly across from City Hall into a thriving demonstration farm. The farm would be a key component in the City of Atlanta’s Power to Change sustainability plan. Visual Artist Lillian Blades and Arts Educator Meisha Card responded to the call in designing an elevated urban farm they hope will serve as a center for sustainable farm education and a source of inspiration for individuals from all walks of life. They enlisted the help of The Epsten Group and Breedlove Land Planning to bring their design to life and collectively entered the competition as Team Elevate.

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Almost 30 years ago Karin created our ‘Urban Gardens’ poster

How thrilling — to meet for the first time Karin Yager, whose beautiful poster has graced our office walls for three decades. Over the years, we’ve mailed this colourful rooftop vision out to hundreds of gardeners around the world. Many of them have told us how much they love it.

Karin was hired by Environment Canada in the early 1980’s to create a poster for us soon after she graduated from design school. Some years later she was hired by the United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) to design their logo, a masterpiece in my view, depicting a hand holding rice, maize and wheat. The idea that our tiny non-profit society is somehow related to the massive WFP is wonderful, – both organizations aiming to make food accessible to those in need.

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Farmland World – a chain of agro-tourist resorts

By Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer of Design With Company, with Katharine Bayer and Hugh Swiatek

Farmland World is a chain of agro-tourist resorts sprinkled across the American Midwestern countryside. Part theme park and part working farm, guests arrive to the resort via train and stay as part of 1-day, 3-day or 5-day experience packages. Capitalizing on both recent investments in high-speed rail infrastructure and the plentiful subsidies for farming, the network of resorts combines crowd-sourced farm labor with eco-tainment.

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Your Street Cape Town Winners – Let Us Grow from Design Indaba on Vimeo.

Growing and greening the city – “Let Us Grow”

World Design Capital Bid 2014
Nov 1, 2011

Excerpt:

“Let Us Grow” is a project to beautify Cape Town and drive interest in urban agriculture as part of growing hyper-local produce on unused or derelict plots in the city,” explains Andrea. “We also plan to drive community interaction and create employment opportunities with the initiative. The inspiration for Let Us Grow comes from various urban greening initiatives around the world and the team’s interest in promoting sustainable living.”

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Harlem Community Farm.

Grow Studio is a diverse team of professionals and consultants with combined experience in architecture, planning, graphics, engineering, agriculture and landscape architecture.

Grow Studio is a design consultancy specializing in urban agriculture. We offer the talent and expertise of EOA / Elmslie Osler Architect to forward-thinking clients who want to bring the many benefits of growing fresh food into their communities. Using extensive research, we create agricultural systems whose various parts are connected through a BIG design idea. These systems are fully integrated into new or existing commercial, residential, community and civic projects. We believe that the benefits of growing fresh, healthy food combined with extraordinary design creates more livable and sustainable communities.

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Photo by Ari Nuzzo.

“Milk crates are a ubiquitous element in every restaurant kitchen and it’s one of those things – they are always around, piles of them. So, to have another use for them, it’s perfect.”

By Sara Jacobson
Core 77
Oct 17, 2011

Excerpt:

No one knows when the economy, and construction, will kick back in. So, the key element of the Riverpark Farm is to be quickly adaptable for tearing down and rebuilding at anytime.

“When we were first talking, I envisioned traditional, big wooden raised beds. I didn’t even actually think about the need to for mobility,” Ortuzar said, talking about the process. “How do you move a big wooden planter when you need to…well you don’t. So that’s why, this.”

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Poster:
Green Our Communities – 2009
$12, Signed by the Artist

Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated printmaker and digital artist based in Oakland, California. Using high-contrast colors and vivid figures, her composites reflect literal and imaginative migration, global community, and interdependence. Whether her subjects are immigrant day laborers in the U.S., mothers of disappeared women in Juárez, Mexico, or her own abstract self portraits, Rodriguez brings new audiences into the art world by refocusing the cultural lens. Through her work we witness the changing U.S. metropolis and a new diaspora in the arts.

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Fin’s Labyrinth.

Brooklyn New York

Fin’s Labyrinth
First Place – $1200

Stewart HICKS, Allison NEWMEYER of DESIGN WITH COMPANY with Joseph ALTSHULER: Fin’s Labyrinth is an architecture and urban strategy that encourages you to play with your food. Both a working fish farm and a new form of public (civic) amenity, this project uses the infrastructure for raising fish as a backdrop to a wide range of activities designed to entertain you while getting you acquainted with your next meal.

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Mayor Kasim Reed, Wal-Mart and Sustainable Atlanta Announce Urban Farm Design Competition

Aug 24, 2011
Press Release

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Wal-Mart representatives and officials from the Office of Sustainability and Sustainable Atlanta announced today a competition to design an urban farm on a vacant lot across from City Hall. The Trinity Avenue Urban Farm Design Competition was launched to support the city’s effort in establishing an effective and inspirational model for urban agriculture and furthering the city’s pursuit of becoming a Top 10 sustainable city. In addition, as part of Wal-Mart’s initial funding, there is a $25,000 award to the winning submission.

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Artist Sharon Kallis does some plant weaving at Vancouver’s Means of Production garden. Photo by David Gowman.

The organizations and individuals behind them are making a new genre of public art that focuses on community, utility, sustainability, and reclaiming marginal urban areas for cultivation.

By Robin Laurence
Georgia Straight
August 22, 2011

Excerpt:

In collaboration with other groups and individuals, Grow cultivates a wide array of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers in reclaimed and repurposed containers, all sitting on recycled wooden shipping pallets. At the same time, it sponsors walks and workshops, and—against a backdrop of high-end condos and the nonconsultative hideosity that is B.C. Place—promotes dialogue around issues of “sustainability, food security, and collective initiatives in urban areas,” Schmidt says.

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Antique Map Of Barth By Braun and Hogenberg. From: Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Part 5. Köln, 1598. See a larger image here.

Town and country, rich in agriculture

Commentary By Braun: “Barth has a large market at which one can buy all the necessities of daily life at a fair price, thanks to its fertile land and its favourable location by the sea. For since there are fertile soils not only all around the city but in the whole duchy, it has an abundance of salt water and other fish, game, cattle, grain, butter, honey, wax and other such things. The wealth of the citizens comes from livestock farming and from trade, which they conduct very profitably with the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and other distant lands far across the ocean. They brew a tasty beer, which they also trade in.”

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Image from Final Design Presentation Boards by R. Hedlof.

Master in Architecture Thesis

By Rachel Hedlof
June 9, 2011
Master in Architecture
Portland Graduate School of Architecture
University of Oregon

Abstract:

Local food and agriculture in the Portland Metro Region has a strong cultural presence due to its support by chef- farmer collaborations, local food marketing promotion, and community supported farmer’s markets. The number of small farms on the periphery of Portland is increasing, supported by their close contact with the city due to the urban growth boundary. Agriculture within city boundaries has also shown continuous growth through support by community and civic organizations.

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Photo by Nicole Dextras. Nicole Dextras is an environmental artist whose artworks follow the seasons, working with ice in the winter and plant materials in the summer.

Weedrobes: The Mobile Garden Dress

By Nicole Dextras
Soiled and Seeded
August 2011, Issue 4

Excerpt:

On her head Madame Jardin wears a coif of edible plants made from roses, carnations, alums, rosemary, thyme, lime leaves, pea, eggplants and chrysanthemums. The bustier is decorated with orange dried aji amarillo peppers, red hot chili peppers, corn husks, sprigs of thyme and fresh parsley. The hoop skirt is constructed from raw flax canvas, willow branches, seagrass rope, basketry reed and wood. The plants include vegetables such as lettuce, beans and brussels sprouts and the herbs range from sweet basil to rue and sage.

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A T-Shirt of Fairey’s Urban Roots image – 100% of profits will go to putting farms in schools

“I created this poster for the documentary Urban Roots. It’s a great film and I know from working with these same folks on the 11th Hour that they are great grassroots activists. A portion of the proceeds from this poster go to Urban Roots Action.”

Urban Roots and it’s action to put farms in schools is getting a big push from Shepard Fairey who has generously created a poster to support the action and will donate proceeds from his artwork.

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New Book

By Andrés Duany
The Prince’s Foundation/DPZ
2011

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment is proud to present: Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism by renowned US urbanist Andrés Duany, the fifth in its series of Senior Fellow Books.

Agrarian urbanism refers to settlements where the society is involved with food in all its aspects: organizing, growing, processing, distributing, cooking and eating it. A primary distinction of Agricultural Urbanism is that the physical pattern of the settlement supports an intentional agrarian society.

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©Ana Fisyak, Laura Stinger, Lacey Tauber vie The Pratt Institute

Expect an adaptation of codes and zoning regulations, and an explosion of urban crops in New York City.

By Leonel Ponce
Inhabit New York City
07/07/11

Excerpts:

Architecture schools are beginning to incorporate urban rooftop farms into their curriculum. Under the direction of Elliott Maltby and Gita Nandan of Thread Collective and recent graduate Tyler Caruso, students at Pratt’s Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development are undertaking a summer Design-Build Studio in Rooftop Agriculture.

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Wright’s Sketches for Broadacre City.

“We will spread out, and in so doing will transform our human habitation sites into those allowing beauty of design and landscaping, sanitation and fresh air, privacy and playgrounds, and a plot whereon to raise things.” Frank Lloyd Wright

By Joëlle Payet
Pop-Up City
June 28, 2011

Excerpt:

In 1932 Frank Lloyd Wright presented the so-called Broadacre City in his book ‘The Disappearing City’.

Often referred to as a Utopia, The Broadacre City is now celebrated through landscape urbanism projects all around the world. Often considered as the main ecological threat, the city can now play in addressing the environmental challenges and part of its regeneration will take the form of urban agriculture.

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Design student’s idea for community gardeners on the go

By Olli Hirvonen (With Mirko Ihrig), third year industrial design student from Lahti Institute of Fine arts and Design, currently studying abroad in the Lund University’s Master Programme in Industrial Design.

Urban farming makes sense in many ways: It is good for your health, fitness, the environment and, since you grow your own food locally even for your budget. The five-piece “Urban Farming Tools”-set comes with a backpack in which all the tools find their place. The detachable handle of the bigger tools can be strapped to the outside of the backpack, so you can easily transport everything on the way to your plot.

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