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Bad Idea of the Week
This interesting product appeared last week from Inhabitat, consisting of small squares of grass for your desk or home. “These grass squares were designed at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel, in 2009 as a way to combine nature and architecture.” While a laudable concept in theory, the idea of bring in grass…
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Speaking Dequindre
Detroit is still on my mind often as I see the duality of ongoing issues and inspirational stories of rebirth. It was great to see news of the recent opening of the Dequindre Cut, a section of abandoned rail line connecting the waterfront to areas of the Central City. I remember the Dequindre fondly, as…
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Salad Days
Not the first version of this, but another cool living edible wall, via Core77 – for a product called Reviwall from an Italian group called ReviPlant. :: image via Core77 :: images via ReviPlant Another cool idea of this is from Green Living Technologies (GLT) which has sponsored, along with Campbells soup, a series of…
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Portland City Hall Garden
Portland definitely has a bug for urban agriculture. Wherever you look there are community gardens, victory plots in street rights-of-way, rooftop and balcony planters, and farmer’s markets. The dichotomy of urban living and productive rural ag space is being redefined as more people grow and raise their own food within the City, cutting down on…
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London Bridge, Updated
The idea of habitable or living bridges keeps popping up in proposals, and the idea has a lot of merit in our desire to provide density, connectivity and ultimately, increased livability of urban areas. Another recent proposal uses the old/new idea in London to build a bridge including retail and residential uses and is being…
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Bad Timing? Pig City
MVRDV’s proposal from a few years back (2001) for ‘Pig City’, a set of towers with pigs raised in the ultimate high density strikes a more recent chord with our current fascination with all things urban gardening and vertical farming – and perhaps a dischord in the recent Swine Flu pandemic. While the tongue-in-cheek nature…
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3 New Blogs
A few interesting new blogs that have either been pointed out to me or I’ve stumbled upon in the last weeks… do you have a blog that would be worth a cross-link? Let me know.Fitting nicely into the Veg.itectural, I got an email from blogger Will Gorman about his blog ‘Cleaner Air through Green Roofs’…
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Models, Now and Then
Spotted on Places and Spaces, this ‘lifelike’ 3-D model of Portland posted in Digital Urban offers a glimpse into the new wave of modeling, cobbled together from a variety of sources and punctuated by some visual fly-throughs that are quite stunning. This model was created by local firm Newlands & Company (aka NC3D), the cream…
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Crown, King of the Streets
A comment from Desmond to the post on SEA streets led me to a great ‘country lane’ prototype in Vancouver, BC – located on Crown Street. :: image via City of Vancouver From the site: “This stormwater management and traffic calming project was completed in February 2006. Instead of the standard curb and gutter, this…
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SEAing Green Streets
Probably a case of green streets on the brain – but a current pro-bono project has inspired me do some looking back at a range of innovative stormwater projects using the street rights-of-way. One of the best is Seattle’s SEA Street project. SEA stands for ‘Street Edge Alternatives’ and is part of the Natural Drainage…