Walhattan

An amazing if somewhat shocking graphic spotted on A Daily Dose of Architecture, "The above is from Jesse LeCavalier's essay "All Those Numbers" at Places: Design Observer. In it, the architect investigates "the design possibilities latent not only in Walmart’s building types but also in the organizational practices — especially its unparalleled expertise in logistics." LeCavalier's essay is recommended for clearly explaining how Walmart works, its number-centric approach that makes it so BIG but also so fiercely loathed by supporters of the local, especially in cities."

Two words: holy crap.


:: image via Archidose

This brings to mind a quote I read just last night from a fantastic book I'm currently engrossed in - 'Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives' by Carolyn Steel - (review upcoming) - on page 95:

"Reading statistics about Wal-Mart is rather like reading about outer space: the numbers are so huge they don't really sink in. In 2000, The UN reckoned that the company's sales were bigger than the gross domestic product of three quarters of the world's economies. Six years later, those figures had all but doubled."

Vertical Agriculture + Solar Access

It's been a bit since I've posted on Vertical Agriculture - but an architecture studio I'm helping with at Portland State has a number of students pursuing food production as part of their buildings relating to urban ecology - and has me again thinking of the practicality of these building-based growth modules. While intrigued by the concept, I want to see a more holistic concept of food production through cities - and also better information on these concepts and how they work.


:: Design by Greg Chung Whan Park - image via Yanko Design

It is no surprise have been somewhat critical of the implementation of these solutions - as they tend to be more style over substance - and many are not thinking about the practicalities of growing food in buildings. Mostly, they are impractical because we still have a lot of vacant and underused land, rooftops, and walls that make more sense to grow food before investing in these expensive installations. Case in point is this Fortune rendering from Detroit of a virtual amusement park of agriculture... in a city that has literally square miles of contiguous terrestrial land ready for cultivation.


:: Detroit Visions - image via Treehugger

All the practicality aside - as a thought exercise the implementation of vertical farming is a fascinating architectural problem - as just the ability to maximize solar access is key to providing the most growing surface area with access to quality light. This is typically accomplished with a series of terraced landings stepped back as the height grows, often augmented by glass enclosure to create a greenhouse like interior rooms on multiple levels.


:: Growing Power, Milwaukee - image via City Farmer

A lot of the solutions lack a simple understanding of solar access - something that at least should have been drummed into architects related to daylighting practices for passive solar design. While allowing access and bouncing diffuse light within building for people is one thing - the integration of quality solar access. How does the following building work in terms of maximizing productivity? As mentioned about 30% of the building space is taken with productivity through a combination of thin terraces and living walls - enough to feed 200 people for a year. Is it worth the investment?


:: Urban Farmway - image via City Farmer

Again back to solar access - it is a fundamental tenet of vertical farming to do extensive solar access studies - starting with the. Back to the proposal by Greg Chung Whan Park , a couple of simple diagrams show seasonal and daily movement of sun.



:: images via Yanko Design

One idea is the spiral, which takes advantage of the circular nature of solar access through a spherical form with spiraling layers of greenery. Overall An image here of the installation, along with a video showing off some of the key elements inside - which gives it a feeling of more machine than garden.



:: Plantagon Greenhouse - image via City Farmer



A more sectional view gives an indication of the amount of solar gain. Again, I think weighted towards the visual and less about the overall efficiency - as the single-purpose building is a lot of expense for what amounts to very little productive space.


:: image via Plantagon Blog

The machinic aspect of many of these proposals is evident in the design - sort of a form follows form approach that makes for striking (if somewhat ridiculous) architectural solutions, and names to boot. For a full survey of many of these check out the Vertical Farm Project website. Most notable in the wild solutions is Dragonfly by Vincent Callebaut is one of those examples, for instance derived from a thin form to maximize surface area - but somewhat dubious thinking as to the viability of the project. In this case, I'd say that the fact that the land area is spread thinly over a surface would mean that it would be difficult from a 'farming' standpoint to maintain this on a daily basis. Is it done by robots, as some concepts look at? Does it work? Can you build it? More important, what's the cost of produce grown in these, and does the energy required to build and maintain these structures outweigh the cost of more traditional agriculture?


:: image via Spiegel Online

All of these questions permeate my thinking as I see proposal after proposal. Even some of the proposals with diagrammatic study leave questions, like the Eco-Laboratory sections by Weber Thompson. The ability of orientation - in this case the entire facade for production, gives maximum potential solar gain. The shading mechanism seem to reduce the effectiveness, by limiting solar access at steep sun angles during summer, when the production potential is greatest. Perhaps a way to limit the amount of solar gain, it seems as if this would reduce overall productivity - or at least shift the building to more winter based, season extending work. While laudable to extend the season, shouldn't the configuration work on a 365 day basis?


:: image via Vertical Farm Project

The other variety is those cylindrical towers that give the idea of maximum access. In the case of the Living Skycraper by Blake Kuresek - the tower is wrapped in spiraling layers (similar to the Plantagon greenhouse). On one facade - let's say 1/2 of the cylinder, the solar gain will be great - it's unclear what's happening on the sides and back that is getting north light and less intense east and west light (I'm assuming Northern Hemisphere). The other aspect not mentioned specifically is what is grown in these various spaces - as the levels of light and amount of exposure - along with intensity and heat - will determine a continuum of what is more appropriate in different parts of the building.


:: image via Vertical Farm Project

This is but a cursory view of some ideas, but a good chance to take stock of the myriad solutions and evaluate them on their building-specific merits. Often information isn't available to have a true discussion, but when looking at these ideas (or designing them) a few trends emerge:

1. How does the building configuration work with maximizing solar access, and how is this explained?
2. Are there beneficial synergies utilized with growing food in building such as capture of waste heat, rainwater collection and storage, or tapping into waste water sources for irrigation?
3. Is there specificity in form tied to the types of vegetables grown, and how does this fit the overall food needs of the location the project is planned? Is it generic or specific based on high-value foods or ones that benefit from the added cost of production?
4. Is the building agricultural only or woven into another use?
5. What is percentage of renderings to diagrams in the solution? (An informal indication of rigor)
6. How is maintenance addressed in location, access, and size of growing plots?
   

Look forward to some additional posts on this, as I've got a lot of source material I'm sifting through, and will be able to tease out many more ideas based on the explosion of solutions in the past couple of years.

you hold the gun!

A call from submissions for a student-run architecture journal KTISMA from the University of Oregon,with a focus on the temporal, changing, and dynamic nature of architecture, landscape and urbanism.



ktisma
κτίσμα
ktis’-mah: thing founded; thing created

a publication edited by graduate students at the university of oregon’s department of architecture. a focused forum of discussion about environments; how they are created, imagined, interpreted, presented, and questioned.

each issue of KTISMA is a platform for the conversations within the school to provoke a discourse at large.

issue #1: “you hold the gun!”

” . . . he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight, the mechanism of which had eluded all observers until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations . . . ” -Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva

motivated by Bruno Latour’s 2008 article “Give me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’S View Of Architecture.” KTISMA asks for projects, of any printable media, that:

• approach the environment as a “moving project”–beyond its imaging as something fixed and static
• expand notions of communication (drawing, writing, photography, etc…) as an instrument of demonstration rather than representation
• resolve the breach between linear representation to complex manifestation
• demonstrate the multi-faceted and dynamic culture of architectural proposals
• anticipate time-based properties of the built environment: decay, growth, modification, transformation, durations, and intervals

submissions date:
6/2010

publication date:
9/2010

ktismajournal.com
ktismajournal@gmail.com

Hollywood un-der-lined

An interesting proposal from a team comprised of Bart de Lege, Jan Bloemen, Frederique Hermans, Joep verheijen, Steven van Esser organized as Save the Sign. A brief description of the project is found below, with an eye towards merging of cultural heritage - the Hollywood Sign- and a valuable project area by tucking the installation below the iconic landmark.



"Why not do an exercise in which we make the holy Hollywood Sign more accessible to the big public, without changing the image. Why not do an exercise where a mild architectural addition honors the symbolic value without changing the wording? Why not do an exercise that safeguards the existence of the wording, but still generates an economical and touristic added value for the region. The term 'Hollywood' grasps the mental landscape and the realm of the film industry."



Why not literally draw an outline underneath the Hollywood Sign that does justice to this historical spot and symbol. Why not create a program that provides for various activities on a specific theme: a location for the Oscar Ceremony in a polyvalent theater, a hotel, a film museum, a scenographic park with a panoramic view at the city (for reference: Park Guell by Gaudi in Barcelona), a trendy bar & restaurant, a conference room, a casino, etc...



The design - that emphasizes the word Hollywood - not only contributes to the region as a whole, but at the same time provides added value to the American film industry. We take that in the most literal sense: the design underlines the word 'Hollywood'. In this strip, mostly embedded in the mountain, all kinds of functions can be integrated.



The space that emerges on top of this strip will serve as a public area like a square or park. ‘The place to be’ - in between, around and in front of the ‘holy’ letters. At this square, stairs, patio's and gardens stretch out which create a link between all functions and provide them with sunlight and air. The strip is designed in such a way that the existing letters will remain visible from all viewpoints in their original form and presence. The proposed design will generate a financial return on investment and simultaneously rescues the symbolic heart and soul of Hollywood."

Earth Day Humor

As a staunch advocate of Earth Day Every Day - the actual date of the big historic 40th anniversary is somewhat unimportant. Much like volunteers rushing to soup kitchens on Thanksgiving - then leaving them abandoned the remainder of the year - the day (or week) offers myriad opportunities for getting out to do service projects, which is great, but isn't just a one-off activity.


:: image via Treehugger

Alas Earth Day is a reminder of how we should live all the time, so as special as the day is, the actual spirit should live on much longer. Treehugger linked to a great site SomeeCards - that offers up a wonderful slice of tongue-in-cheek references to this fine Earth Day worthy of a chuckle or two.


:: image via Treehugger

Garden to Go

An interesting proposal from Marie Hermansson entitled Garden to Go takes the concept of small-scale vertical farming and vending as a method of providing fresh food in cities: "G.T.G. is a self-contained mini hydroponic greenhouse the size of a vending machine; in fact that’s exactly what G.T.G. is—a very green vending machine. The purpose behind the project is partly to provide fresh produce on-site as well as provide education about a healthy diet. G.T.G. would showcase how to grow and provide great food in places where there is poor soil or no soil. On the accompanying web site community members would have an active role in deciding what their G.T.G. system would grow.

:: image via Marie Hermansson

More: "There would be various vegetable and fruit varieties available depending on the needs of that particular community. Due to problems with obesity and limited access to local produce G.T.G. could be a vital tool for non-profit organizations and government organizations in promoting and enabling a healthier society."


:: image via Marie Hermansson

PICA Coop Design Competition

Based on the work from last year to create the Chicken Cube - I was recently asked to serve on a design competition jury put on by SERA Architects to design the perfect chicken coop. The competition was aimed at benefitting the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) for their upcoming TADA 2010 Annual Gala by creating an auction item. SERA donated the design time and $500 for materials and Bremik Construction agreed to donate the construction of the coop at the home of the winner of the auction.

The brief was relatively simple - consisting of either a fixed coop or a tractor (movable coop) that had the capacity to house 3 hens. The remainder of the competition was open-ended, with obviously a subtext of a marketable coop design that offered architectural aesthetics and fit within the construction budget ($500 for materials). The winning coop design 'Hen Hedge' by Gary Gola and Jeanie Lai is shown here in a refined format after being chosen as the preferred concept.

Winning Design: Hen Hedge (by Gary Gola + Jeanie Lai)

The modern box offers elegant housing for the chickens, along with a style that blends into the discerning homeowner's exterior decor. The green roof and green wall provide shading along with blending into the landscape, and the design featured the option of either tractor or fixed coop, depending on the needs of the owners. As a blend of inventive and stylistic design, this concept was the best encapsulation of concept that would meet the needs of the auction - to generate interest, and bids, for the item. In short, it was the one people would want to take home.

The coop design went through a bit of refinement after being chosen as the winner, to allow for easier constructability... seen in the images below - which will be the auction item, along with a kit of feeders, watering trough, and yes, even three little pullets to move in immediately.

The full roster of entrants ran the gamut of design concepts from the practical to the architectural - giving a range of options and ideas for housing urban flocks. A short description of the three additional entries is found below:

The Chicken Tractor (Ray Chirgwin)

An elegantly simple tractor using reclaimed materials, this small scale coop design allows for easy movement around the yard. My favorite detail was the use of small galvanized trash receptacles for nest boxes.

Lil' Deuce (Nathan Burton)

The most fully architectural of all the entries, this concept bordered more on folly than coop functionality, making for a beautiful object in the landscape. While beautiful, we felt this would have a specific stylistic appeal but require some work for functionality as a coop.

Chicken Coop de PICA Auction (Andrew Stohner)
A very real coop design, this is something you that many folks would die for in their backyards - fit, functional, and complete, with attention to many of the details of construction and function.

Thanks to Eric Phillips from SERA for the invite to the coop preliminary meetings and jury - as well as my fellow jurors Logan Cravens and Audrey Craig from SERA. For those dying for any of these designs, definitely attend TADA 2010 Annual Gala and bid high and bid often - for the design and support the regional arts community in the process.

Transparent Cells

Arch Daily offers some great imagery from a project by Aristide Antonas, along with collaborators Katerina Koutsogianni & Yannikos Vassiloulis called 'Transparent Cells' which shows a proposal for proposal for a the Architecture School at Delft featuring pixelated spatial arrangements that can be reconfigured as necessary to accomodate new programs. The Hundertwasser-esque vegetal compartments are an interesting addition to a project that seems quite technology driven.

:: image via Arch Daily

A bit of explanation via Arch Daily: "The “buildings” that are supporting the computer cells are formed with the use of new glass technology and they include parts planted with specific light trees sometimes hanging in suspended pots. These living towers offer an immediate populated view, an emblematic image and in the same time an elevation for an architecture school of today....The new common space of such an institution for architecture is configured as a necessarily fragmented school, as a space where everybody uses his small personal “computer cell” in order to contribute in a community."

:: image via Arch Daily

FLOW: A Competition

Winners of the international competition „FLOW“ arrived via an email today. The european competition is: "... for students in the last two years of architecture, engineer, art, landscape, town planning, sociology and young architects were born after December 31st, 1975 in Europe."



The subject area of the competition is the City of Brussels, covering the port area and the canal in the center of the City: "This competition of ideas aims to enable participants to propose an innovative and daring architectural project which simultaneously envisages the environmental, social, technical and economic dimensions involved. The objective of the contest is to reflect on future new lifestyles and organisations, to prefigure them and to overturn mentalities, which will make it possible to provoke reflections between the private and public sector."

Student First prize: S1 Mutations
School : UNIFE (Italy) Alessandro Bellini, Jacopo Casolai

"The complexity of the problems encountered facing the competition and the dimensional matter of the canal in Brussels, encouraged us to seek out a programmatic approach. This will provide some guidelines disregarding, for the first time, the real architectural intervention.

A lot of documents and open questions involve the European Capital and specifically its 14 km canal: starting from that amount of informations and from the specific FLOW competition's requests we draw up a critical MANIFESTO in ten points. This document underline the canal's points of weakness and possible courses of actions, and suggest a method, called induced mutations, which is able to generate more and more well-framed urban transformations."

VIDEO 1 MANIFESTO from alessandro bellini on Vimeo.

Young Professional First prize: P7 The line
(Deutschland) Marine Miroux, Christoph Hager, Ingo Hüller, Demian Rudaz

La Ligne from Marine Miroux on Vimeo.

Check out all of the entries on the website. I think the idea of the videos as part of competition deliverables are a great idea - as it allows the static imagery to coalesce into a more complete narrative which aids in understanding the specifics.

Smart Wayfinding

A very interesting project spotted on Designboom: "....as part of the lighting plan in montreal, the quartier des spectacles explores the possibilities of light for creating signage and expressing identity. lead by designers ruedi baur and jean beaudoin from montreal architectural design studio intégral, this recent pilot project experiments with projecting light onto the pavement to mark the urban landscape. this intervention, realized as part of the montreal all-nighter, brings together light and graphic design"


:: image via Designboom

The implications of this type of installation in cities is interesting, as it moves away from the static insertion of 'lines and signs' for safety and wayfinding and utilizes the range of urban surfaces for these purposes. Ideas of being able to adjust crossings during peak periods, or announcements of upcoming events with directions on how to get to them. The ideas of constantly changing the surface treatment also aids in keeping drivers on their toes, in effect slowing traffic and giving a significant portion of the streets back to the pedestrians.


:: image via Designboom

The opportunities to continue this onto sidewalks and integrating into the facade treatments, creating a new integrated, smart system of urban wayfinding with a range of possibilities.


:: images via Designboom

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

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