Category: infrastructure
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Restoring the Garden of Eden
A great feature from Spiegel Online covers the work of Azzam Alwash, a US/Iraqi hydraulic engineer aiming to restore what were once vibrant wetlands flourishing in the cradle of civilization through an organization called Nature Iraq. While most news coming from the region focuses on bricks and mortar rebuilding, it’s important to note the power…
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Working the Line
My current (re)fascination with the Center for Land Use Interpretation involves getting up to date on their latest events (as well as tearing through their bookstore and grabbing some gems to dig through – reviews/info coming soon). A recent announcement caught my eye. The ideas of margins and borders is constantly fascinating, along with the…
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Urban Topographies
From Urban Omnibus, Linda Pollak’s simple ‘Cuts & Patches’ explores remnant disturbances within the urban environment as ‘topographies’ (which more often than not tend to be coal chute covers from a long-gone infrastructure). Check out the great photos and interview. :: image via Urban Omnibus “As traces, these cuts and patches allow us to perceive…
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Alan Berger on Landscape Waste
Via World Landscape Architect a two-part video of Alan Berger: “CUSP Conference organisers recently posted a two part video of Alan Berger’s presentation at the 2009 CUSP Conference on Landscape Waste. An interesting look at landscapes waste resulting from industrial processes.” Check out part 2 here.
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3rd Coast Atlas
Having resided in Portland for over 13 years, I now consider myself solidly ‘West Coast’ and an adapted non-native (as opposed to invasive) resident of the Cascadia Megaregion. But 20+ years living literally near the middle and continued explorations of some midwestern cities has given me an appreciation for the third coast – a term…
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Ecological Urbanism: Introduction Part 2
Continuing the investigations of the introduction to the book ‘Ecological Urbanism‘ (read Part 1 here) – we pick up on the concepts of ecological urbanism in the explosion of interest in urban and local food production. Near and dear to my interests, the ability to transform such shrinking cities like Detroit, emulating the lessons and…
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Ecological Urbanism – Introduction Part 1
‘Ecological Urbanism‘ (640 pages, Lars Müller Publishers; 1 edition (May 1, 2010) edited by Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty) literally arrived with a thud last week, the 650 page brick like tome touching down on the front step of the house with much anticipation. Tempted as I was, a number of deadlines made me hold…
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Vertical Agriculture (Back to Earth)
Digging through the archives based on the last couple of posts, I was definitely struck by the myriad shapes and sizes that these vertical farming proposals take and the overall excitement that has grown in a short amount of time. This caused me to want to dissect them a bit further in terms of form…
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Vertical Agriculture (Modest Proposals)
While the flights of fancy that drive many of the concepts of vertical farming are quite breathtaking, there’s a subset of these projects that, while not quite ready for the pages of design magazines, have much more applicability for building-integrated agriculture in new construction and retrofits. A simple and much discussed example that has been…
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Green Engines
I stumbled upon the site for Green Engines, a project of StudioMEB, which is a “… research platform that explores the potentialities of productive landscapes to generate a self-sustainable territory.” I was immediately struck by their notion of productive landscapes and the focus of the research on landscape urbanism principles. The interest in defining productive…