Category: projects
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Feral Green Streets
On E. Burnside Street in Portland, the construction of the Burnside-Couch Couplet, a project aimed at ‘humanizing’ the wide arterial that slices through Portland and provides the dividing line between North and South. Construction is ongoing, and as part of the design, the streets on both sides of the couplet have a number of green…
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Elizabeth Caruthers Park
One on the more recent additions to the park inventory in Portland is the neighborhood park for the South Waterfront Area. (see here and here for more on SoWa). The park is named Elizabeth Caruthers Park (after one of the pioneering founders of Portland – on whose original land claim the park now lies) this…
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Animurbanism
I thought this was pretty funny (and ridiculous) when first heard on NPR, then seen in multiple locations. The story centers on the layouts of these planned Sudanese cities, shaped like indigenous animals and even fruit from the region. This has been all over the place lately in media snippets, with a reaction of surprise,…
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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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Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Installations
Examples of ephemeral productive agricultural landscapes give an indication of the possibilities of occupation of urban sites for education and growing food. LAND GRAB CITYA recent installation called Landgrab City as part of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. Designers Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and José Esparza have created a farm in…
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Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Temporality + Mobility
The last remnants of ephemera sitting around the archives is under the auspices of terrestrially based gardens within the foodsheds of our cities, and – and the need to address the issues of permanence (both the pros and cons). One option is to incorporate food production within our permanent landscaping by using the principles of…
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Rooftop Agriculture
I’ve purposely steered away from the pure rooftop farms in discussions of vertical farming solutions recently featured (here, here, here, and here). This isn’t due to any particular reason other than I think that rooftop farms area a separate typology in it’s own right – as it is focusing on a separate area of emphasis…
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Vertical Agriculture (From Outer Space)
While I continue this impromptu study of the current state of Vertical Agriculture – it’s important to realize that the ingenuity of humans is always a factor. Industrialization of growing food is a long-standing feature of agriculture – which has probably simultaneously done the most good for productivity and the most harm in severing our…
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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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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…