Urban Crossings - Los Angeles

Picking up on the threads of the Vegitecture post on 'Crossings', a post on The Dirt made mention of the plans to cap a number of freeways throughout Southern California. "According to The Architect’s Newspaper, there are four separate projects being considered across L.A.: one in Hollywood, one in downtown LA, and two in Santa Monica. “Hollywood Central Park would be built atop the 101 Freeway on a proposed 44-acre site between Santa Monica Boulevard and Bronson Avenue. Park 101 would be built atop the ‘Big Trench’ over the 101 Freeway downtown. Santa Monica is hoping to cap portions of the 10 Freeway between Ocean Avenue and 4th Street, and between 14th and 17th streets, creating five- and seven-acre parks.”


:: image via Architect's Newspaper

One project in this mix with some real traction is the Hollywood Freeway Central Park - which in 2008 developed a initial feasibility study with AECOM as the consultant. The report goes through a mix of analysis and exploration, along with a public involvement process. The idea of knitting the fabric of two severed neighborhoods with elevated park space drives the significant cost for capping projects - aiming to fix some of the damage done in the initial freeway routing.


:: image via AECOM

A range of graphics include some typical analysis - as I'm always interested in seeing the old chestnuts like figure-ground analysis in urban design studies. I'm a fan of the figure ground as a tool, and this case in point reinforces the power of this tool to 'detach' from a system and make key connections.

:: image via AECOM

In this case, most of these retain some of the key crossings... but take advantage of the ability to reorient circulation to create interesting spaces and maximize connectivity.


:: image via AECOM

A range of precedent studies included notable capping projects like Millennium Park (Chicago), Big Dig Park (Boston), Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle), and others showing examples of spanning roadways to connect disparate portions of the urban fabric.


:: image via AECOM

Another graphic that seems to be in vogue (drawing from some of the scalar diagrams of the book Large Parks) - giving a sense of size and proportion to other established large urban park spaces.


:: image via AECOM

The final concept creates somewhat of a linear park corridor, which is really a series of medium sized park periodically bisected with crossroads. The programs run the gamut from passive spaces to sports fields, sculpture gardens to plazas offering a range of uses - connected by pathways and crossings. There seems to be a range of possible options to use this new space that have been explored in many project proposals - from agriculture to mixed use infill - meaning a park is merely one option.

:: image via AECOM

The simple photo-montage graphics show some dramatic before and after shots of the reclaimed space atop what was essentially a dead zone below.



:: images via AECOM

Obviously time and economics will tell if this is a viable strategy to implement in our cities. The experience with the costly and issue-prone Big Dig has soured some on the idea, although the spaces that are emerging atop the depressed roadway is starting to pay dividends for a new public realm. Burying is one thing - spanning and capping is another, taking advantage of the existing configuration of roadway 'canyons' to reconnect spaces. My thought is that it is not the silver bullet, (more like a really expensive band-aid) but necessary (in lieu of freeway removal altogether) to strategically reconnect areas of the urban fabric that have been severed to a degree where health and livability are forever degraded. The expense means a surgical analysis is necessary to determine where to locate these for maximum impact, as well as how to program the spaces appropriately to make use of the space. There has been much renewed talk about this, so I imagine we will see more of these in the not-so-distant-future. And I think that's a good sign.

Download the entire report here for the full story.

Packaged Vertical Garden

The 'Garden for a not too distant future' is an installation that is part vertical garden, part statement about the lack of green space in cities and the preponderance of overpriced, difficult to maintain vertical walls.


:: image via luzininterruptus

Via luzininterruptus: " With the installation Packaged vertical garden, we wanted to promote the preservation of urban greenery, because if we continue to eradicate it from public spaces or reducing it to inaccessible vertical faces, the only form of contact with nature will be in supermarket refrigerators, packaged with expiry dates. This is our last intervention “Packaged vertical garden”.




:: images via luzininterruptus

Check out additional photos and text at luzininterruptus.

Telectroscopic Connections

A post by Varnelis mentioned a couple of interesting ideas of crossing space, both virtually and physically through various modern forms of communication. Three items come from his post:

1. Chatroulette—a site that pairs you with a random person somewhere on the Internet so that you have a webcam conversation... which to me just seems weird...

2. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's 'Hole in Space,', in which: "the artists turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way audiovisual portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions." [video below]



3. AUDC's unrealized installation 'Windows on the World' : "...a formulary for a new urbanism that alleviates boredom with the city and encourages communication in public, rather than private settings. It facilitates open, spontaneous, and democratic exchanges between groups while requiring no special skills to operate. Participants share both their differences and similarities through direct interaction, replacing the myth of global hegemony and projected stereotypes with personal experience."


:: image via AUDC

This brought to mind a fourth, the Telectroscope, a modern version of a 'steampunk' art installation by Paul St. George in 2009, based on historical idea that 'connected' NYC to London through a underground transatlantic 'tunnel' that offers the ability for "...people can simultaneously interact with others who are many miles and hours away." More info is also found via the Telectroscope Blog along with a bevy of press that accompanied the installation.


:: image via The Fire Wire

The instantaneous communication, as shown in these proposals with a bit of artistic license in the storyline, may have seemed outlandish in 1890, or even 1980, but is relatively commonplace now - through the increasing quality and reach of web-based communications aided with fiber-optic infrastructure that literally 'flattens' the world by allowing for instantaneous communication in many forms across the globe.




:: image via Telepresence Options

The locations in major centers of New York and London, across the Atlantic reminds one of the previous infrastructures and outlandish proposals in place to connect these areas through seemingly impossible physical barriers, which has now been augmented with a more direct (if not equally as problematic) form of satellite linkages.


:: London - image via Oddity Central


:: New York - images via Telepresence Options

The beauty of these installation is the public-ness and interactivity of the media - versus our typically private personal communications. The image view of offers the view, with no sound, of people on the other side, and stories abound in the ability of family members to connect across the ocean (with the aid of some visual aids). Years after the initial 'Hole in Space' it seems the novelty is still present.


:: image via Orbiter Forum

Piggy-back Big-Box

An interesting hybrid assemblage of big box behemoths in Baltimore, shows a trend away from the sprawling power centers to a more . Via the Baltimore Sun, the development will place a Walmart atop a Lowes store in a piggy-back move: "The new location will be unusual for Walmart because it will be built on top of the Lowe's store - much of which will be below ground - and will be 93,000 square feet, about half the size of Walmart super centers... Walmart has been working to burnish its image - most recently with its environmentally friendly initiatives. The planned Baltimore store is emblematic of those efforts. It will be the first to open in this area since executives launched a campaign to retool stores with new graphics and merchandise as well as eco-friendly construction and operating practices. The new store will have a vegetated "green roof" covering more than an acre."




:: images via Baltimore Sun

There are still some questions about such items as traffic and overall form - or maybe the impacts of local businesses - but in the comparison to the normal sprawling model of big-box stores, this seems to take a step in the right directon.

Thickened Waterfront from AALU

An email from Jorge Ayala from the AALU shows off some recent Landscape Urbanism work, in this case an academic workshop with a focus on designing a Contemporary Garden in Xi'an, China. I've included the full text from Jorge, and some of the images of the project that were sent.

Thickened Waterfront
AA Landscape Urbanism Garden Design
Xi’an, China



The parcel has a distinct character but a series of strategies will be applied in order to integrate the Thickened Waterfront into the general design.

WATERSCAPE STRATEGY
Along these lines, artificial topographies, rippled organizations of diverse water features and multiplicity of floating structures will be considered to turn the linear character of the parcel into a multi layered spatial domain. The diagrammatic approach towards the work with the material structures of the mini piers, retaining structures and engineering techniques will help to define a rich spatial condition which will help to add layers of experience to the arrival through the park to the waterfront.





THICKENED WATERFRONT
Spatial and three dimensional experiences: The arrival sequence into the Thickened Waterfront augments the sensations of the pedestrians or focalises the attention into strategically treated micro environments.

Several bands structure the proposal to create the different habitats and will be flexible to adjust to other proposals.



EDGE CONDITION
The work is based on an expanded idea of the edge, turning into a field of distributed spatial experience what otherwise is defined as a line or a rigid boundary of the water edge. The main idea would be to blur the contact of land-water seeking to encroach earth structures into the lagoon while bringing it inland in other areas.



MULTIPLYING EXPERIENCES
The pedestrian should be able to read and perceive a wide variety of material and spatial qualities in a compressed setting.


A series of individual ponds will host a diverse catalogue of conditions of light reflection, water depth, colour, planting, fauna and potentially human interaction (bathing, pudding pool).



These mosaics of water features will provide the medium for further interactions and enriched version of the ecologies within the park, incorporating expanded ideas of performance, spatial experience and environmental qualities.



Credits:
Thickened Waterfront
AA Landscape Urbanism Garden Design
Xi’an, China

Lead by:
AALU Tutors Eduardo Rico, Alfredo Ramirez
AALU Director Eva Castro

Design Team: Jorge Ayala, Hossein Kachabi

Take Back the Streets 2

A follow up to the story from Korea and the daylighted stream that was realized upon the removal of a highway, this ephemeral project from San Francisco (via Streetsblog SF) takes the same idea of remnant roadway and thinks of it in terms of gardening: "A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of urban farmers opened a gate in a chain-link fence at Laguna Street, between Oak and Fell Streets, and entered an overgrown lot that has been unused for nearly two decades. The farmers brought with them steaming piles of mulch, which they cast over the edge of the ramps formerly used by cars to enter and exit the elevated Central Freeway spur above Octavia Street, arranging the soil in rows for planting vegetables and filler crops."


:: image via Streetsblog SF

"The new Hayes Valley Farm (HVF) inverts the paradigm and reclaims the space for city dwellers, if only temporarily. "We call it 'freeway to food forest,'" explained Chris Burley, Project Director for HVF and former organizer of My Farm. Burley was joined by nearly fifty volunteers at a HVF work party Sunday. "We're trying to create a successful, sustainable urban farm in the heart of San Francisco."




:: images via Streetsblog SF

The model is definitely transferable to a range of locales (both figuratively and literally). The temporary nature of the site makes it prudent to keep the process efficient, but that doesn't mean the site cannot become productive for a short period of time, then transform to a different use (the city-owned parcel will be developed to provide market-rate and affordable housing). See a Google Earth image of the site showing the large un-utilized space:



The ephemeral nature doesn't mean the plants won't have a shortened lifespan, but may travel to a different locale after the project is complete. More from Streetsblog SF: "Because the project is temporary, Burley said they are not planning to rip up the existing asphalt, which would cost thousands of dollars. Rather, the farmers will plant up to 150 fruit trees in pots that can be moved to other gardens or planted in back yards. Burley also said that in honor of the old Highway 101, they will be planting 101 beneficial plants among the fruit trees to help with pest control."

Field Ops is Hot (Still)

In addition to being named on the top 10 list in Fast Company's Most Innovative Architecture Companies (the only LA on the list) and the major success of the High Line, a couple of recent wins have pushed James Corner Field Operations fully from the realm of the theoretical provocateur, to competition all-star to full-fledged big name landscape architecture project powerhouse.


:: image via LA Times

The Fast Company article included the likes of DS+R, MVRDV, Kieran Timberlake, and Santiago Caltrava, and mentioned the firms most visible work to date: "James Corner's New York-based landscape architecture firm led the design team that transformed the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway track on Manhattan's west side, into a wildly successful public park. Up next: revitalizing Philadelphia's Race Street Pier."


:: Race Street Pier - 'The Slice' - image via Plan Philly

In addition, there has been copious press related to Field Operations' design proposals for Cleveland's Public Square. As mentioned on Design Under Sky: "James Corner, of Field Operations and High Line Park fame have worked directly with two nonprofit organizations, Parkworks and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance. Corner offers three radically different designs to the square. Deemed, The Frame, The Forest, and The Thread, the concepts address traffic and circulation matters to different extremes, while all providing elements of urban park goodiness."




:: images via Design Under Sky

Two recent additions to the portfolio, spotted via World Landscape Architect, announce some more high-profile commissions for Atlanta and Santa Monica. The first includes design for the 22-mile Atlanta Beltway, which, according to The Dirt, Field Operations and "...Perkins+Will have been selected as the lead designers of the Atlanta Beltline, a 22-mile green beltway of park networks, multi-use trails and light rail, which will also reuse and revitalize old rail tracks and restore local ecosystems. "


:: image via The Dirt

The last is annoucement from the LA Times that Field Operations "...has prevailed in a high-powered design competition for a 7-acre park in the heart of the Santa Monica Civic Center". An interesting addition is the makeup of some of the teams, which included some big name architecture firms. "Of the six competitors for the park job, Field Operations was the only one without an architecture firm attached. It beat out entrants including Frank Gehry and a team made up of landscape architect Peter Walker and architect Frederick Fisher."

The trend towards high-profile park design featuring architects may begin to change as some high-profile LA firms gain the credibility to go it alone. And to show that the firm isn't doing quite everything in the US, and are maybe a bit busy with the current workload - Field Operations was conspicuously absent from the list of finalists for the St. Louis Gateway Arch Design competition, leaving room for a number of other high-profile LAs as team leads or team members.

This who's who of designers in St. Louis should produce some interesting ideas and inevitably a great concept, but I really think competitions that don't rely on great ideas submitted in anonymity - such as this one with an open qualifications process that made it easy to pick the big names - limit opportunities for any new faces to appear. It's less a competition than a high-profile RFQ.

Isn't the competition a chance for the new rising stars to shine? Instead of reinforcing the current roster of stars that get visible and notable work worldwide, how about using the competition for tapping into potential. If big firms when - they do so on merit of ideas, not just reputation. Just look what that model did for Field Operations in the first place?

Green Street Video

Via Causecast, a video about Green Streets in Portland: "Net Green News reports on how Portland Oregon handles their rainfall in a more natural, sustainable way. Portland receives an annual 37 inches of rain per year... and one way to help prevent overflooding of streets and rivers is to build curbside “green streets,” which are vegetative islands between roads and sidewalks. They plants absorb the water and the soil breaks down the chemical runoff from cars. Net Green News adds that Portland has budgeted $1.4 Billion by the end of 2011 to manage the stormwater, and plans to create an additional 150 green streets in that time, totaling 900 citywide."

Elements of Urban Agriculture

I had the opportunity today to see a presentation by local urban agriculture guru Marc Boucher-Colbert (the man behind the Rocket Restaurant rooftop garden here in Portland). Instead of focusing directly on rooftops, he outlined a broad version of urban agriculture through an investigation of a range of possible strategies for our cities. This is all information investigated at length at times here on L+U and Veg.itecture, but I thought it apt to summarize the ideas from the lecture, as they provide a great overview and were a really inspiring collection of ideas woven together into a strategy.

1. Guerilla Gardening
The starting point of the discussion took a look at the thriving guerrilla gardening movement worldwide as a quick response to the bland and life-less environment we exist within in our urban areas. Both safe anarchy and also, via Wikipedia... "political gardening, a form of direct action, primarily practiced by environmentalists. It is related to land rights, land reform, and permaculture. Activists take over ("squat") an abandoned piece of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. Guerrilla gardeners believe in re-considering land ownership in order to reclaim land from perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it."


:: image via Wikipedia


:: seed bombs - image via itwasme

A side-note of the discussion dealt with the production of seed bombs (or the less provocative 'seed balls') as a way of simply and efficiently distributing plant life to our streets, vacant lots, and other left-over spaces. Again via Wikipedia: "A seed bomb is a compressed clod of soil containing live vegetation that may be thrown or dropped onto a terrain to be modified. The term "seed grenade" was first used by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerillas". The first seed grenades were made from condoms filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer." As a fledgling guerrilla gardener myself, it's pretty damn cool and quite liberating. Give it a try.

2. Front & Backyard Gardening
The idea of front and backyard gardens isn't a new idea (don't tell Fritz Haeg) but have become a cause celebre for re-occupation of our urban and suburban spaces. Call them Victory Gardens, or Edible Estates, or hell, call them 'this is the only place I can find good sun in my yard' - this isn't a new idea come back, but rather something that has always existed and has now re-emerged as a vibrant movement. Growing vegetables at your home is the ultimate in local food, and also engages people in exercise, meditation, and a range of other benefits - making it both a productive activity and a hobby worthy of your time.


:: image via The Blue Marble

Marc explained that while the idea of taking back the lawn is laudable, there is a grim reality to the concept of agri-buisiness, summed up in the following fact: of 'food' grown in the US, 1.5% is fruits and vegetables, while the other 98.5% consists of grain and oilseed, which any reader of Michael Pollan will know goes to meat production, biofuels, various corn products and other detached food we consume in many ways. This led to another new figure in the story - of Stan Cox, who works with one of my heroes, Wes Jackson at The Land Institute, reinventing corporate agriculture through a new model of perennial production based on the tallgrass prairie ecosystems.


:: Perennial Agriculture - image via The Land Institute

The other models beyond reoccupying the land you have is the sub-economy that include yard sharing or other means that leverage open land with the energy and desire of those to garden. By taking the land of folks that have surplus, or don't have the time to garden places like Your Backyard Farmer or Hyperlocavore offer a range of options to use land in cities for productive uses. Again this trend can also go beyond just gardening to include other trends such as backyard chickens, pygmy goats (great for blackberries) or other trends suitable for urban locales.


:: Backyard Chickens - image via Flicker (zbar)

3. Community Gardens
Another vital aspect of both food production and urban life is the community garden, where the interactions between people are just as important as the growing of vegetables. The idea of a range of programs, including those run by the city (such as in Portland), cooperatives, and other models. While a large part of the eventual urban agriculture puzzle, many communities are currently dealing with huge demand and a lack of funding to provide more supply. While the need to fund these programs will continue, there is also a need to look beyond the plots to a larger picture of gardening in cities.


:: image via The Daily Green

The overall conceptual framework of community gardening can be found at the resource-rich site for the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) which provides information on starting and maintaining community gardens throughout the country. As Marc pointed out, much of the training and education for the ACGA is focuses on engaging community resources and partnerships - taking the tack that is you build community, this is lead to a thriving garden - and you can figure out the training of food production and other added services later.


:: food preservation - image via Eat. Drink. Better

Finally, the idea of subsistence and market farms, or a combination of the two, offers a range of opportunities to offer gardening, community, and the ability to make money through the use of these sites in cities - offering for green job creation. Also, included in the idea of community gardening and education is the value-added ideas of food preservation, chickens raising, small animals, beekeeping, and other more agriculturally related ideas to round out the potential for urban ag.

4. School Gardens
While encompassing a range of institutional gardens such as hospitals, prisons, and other urban uses, school gardens provide a unique opportunity to provide food and education, as well as utilizing large amounts of available land. Modeled after the ground-breaking Edible Schoolyards" program in Berkeley started by chef Alice Waters "...to create and sustain an organic garden and landscape that is wholly integrated into the school’s curriculum, culture, and food program." which has been copied around the country in many locations.


:: image via Edible Schoolyard

A local project that provides a bridge for schools and food in Portland has been taken on by the fantastic local non-profit Ecotrust called the Farm to School program, which: "...enable schools to feature healthy, locally sourced products in their cafeterias, incorporate nutrition-based curriculum in all academic disciplines, and provide students with experiential agriculture and food-based learning opportunities, from farm visits to gardening, cooking, composting, and recycling." These connections between food and school continue to offer many possibilities in cities throughout the world.

5. Rooftop Gardens
Covered in detail on the web, the idea of rooftop gardens is definitely a love of Boucher-Colbert, who installed the project on the Rocket (now the Noble Rot) which has become a model project that gets a lot of comments for the kiddie-pool planters, (an inspiration from Joe Ebenezer from Chicago - read about him here) as a low-cost planter alternative and using it as a test for production techniques which are used in the restaurant one floor below.


:: Boucher-Colbert atop the Noble Rot - image via City Farmer

Obviously there are some limitations to rooftops, and difficulties with gardening due to wind, temperatures and other issues. As we provide incentives for more eco- and green roofs atop buildings, growing vegetables will become a continually growing trend as urban land costs make terrestrial farming a less financially viable proposition.

6. Vacant Lands
The use of vacant lands for farming is definitely a hot topic in areas like Detroit, but even in a number of locations like Oakland, which recently identified 1200 sites available for farming - or Montreal, which has implemented permanent agricultural zones that are protected from development - consisting of almost 4% of the Cities total land.

The focus in Portland is on the much discussed and somewhat disappointing implementation of the Diggable City project in 2004-05 which looked at city-owned lands as possible opportunities for establishing: "... an inventory of vacant, publicly-owned land in the Portland area, and to start a conversation about how that land might be used to support urban agricultural activities." The large number of sites have over time been whittled down to a few - and little has been done on any of this pilot projects - even though hundreds of brownfields, vacant lands, and other opportunities still exist.


:: Portland Vacant Land - image via Diggable City

7. Green Building
The integration of agriculture in green building is definitely making strides, as certain points for LEED ND, and potentially other systems can be achieved through the addition of garden plots of agricultural land. This allows for more multi-functional landscaping that includes productivity and use, which was difficult at times to reconcile with green buildings due to added water use and lack of totally native and adapted plantings. Our next task is to develop more year-round, lower maintenance permaculture-based planting that meet aesthetic and functional goals long-term.

Another aspect which spans this category and the next is the concept of Building Integrated Sustainable Agriculture (BISA), which begins to work with walls, rooftops, and other spaces to integrate food production in buildings. This also begins to expand beyond this to using waste heat and water from buildings to heat greenhouses and extend growing seasons to increase productivity. Examples abound, including Mithun's concept urban agriculture project (using the Living Building principles) as well as older examples like Eli Zabar's rooftop garden in Manhattan, to name a few.


:: Mithun's Vertical Farm - image via Treehugger


:: Zabars Vinegar Factory - image via Vison for our Cities

The concept also begins to looks at other agriculture products like chickens, bees, aqua- and hydroponics to maximize space and maintenance as well as blend systems together into closed-loop systems that treat waste as food for other phases of the system.

8. Vertical Farming
Picking up on the threads popularized by Dickson Despommier et.al, the idea of the BISA mentioned in green building is now blown up into the full-fledged phenomenon of vertical farming, which is exciting but needs some serious thought as to the viability of how this actually works and what the economic and social implications are. Boucher-Colbert was interested but skeptical, as there seem much more obvious low-hanging fruit (pardon the pun) to look at first - but as density and food security become more important, all the options must be on the table.


:: Vertical Farming - image via Vertical Farm

In closing, the eight concepts here span a wide range of possible agricultural interventions in our urban environment for getting to the root of food in our cities. It goes beyond production to include community, interaction, and a range of benefits such as habitat, beauty, and cooling - making the mix as important as the individual ideas. Peak Oil will warrant a close look at cities and a re-thinking of what we eat, where it comes from, and how much transportation is used to get it from farm to fork. So, as we transform from city-dwellers that keep nature and farming outside of the city to those that integrating food production into our spaces and daily lives - these tools provide a valuable arsenal for making the 21st century city a vibrant, healthy, and productive environment for all.