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Materiality: Concrete Solutions
Concrete is one of those amazingly malleable and adaptable materials. I’ve mentioned the concept of air purifying concrete, permable features, as well as interesting textures and board-forming techniques. Here’s a few new examples from around the globe. Starting off, I absolutely love the rough facade treatment (via Arch Daily), from Architect: Marcio Kogan in Sao…
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Ground to Sky Connection
The idea and concept of connecting landscape from ground to sky (from terra firma to veg.itecture, if you will)- offers some great possibilities in the integration of site and building. This offers access to open space (with the obvious safety precautions) as well as the potential for aesthetic opportunities, and habitat linkages. And similarly to…
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Ballard Library – Seattle
Recently, I stumbled upon a regional blog Pacific Northwest Regional Architecture, which, upon perusal, had a couple of pics of what I think is one of the finest examples of vegetated rooftops anywhere — The Ballard Library in Seattle, by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. A few photos, that pretty much speak for themselves… :: images via…
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Veg.itecture #36
Vegetated Architecture for the week… First a link, via I (heart) Public Space – check out a tour of South Bronx green roof projects – with some interesting examples of rooftop vegetation if you are in the vicinity. Not on the tour, but in the area, is the fantastic, this one has been shown before,…
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Details: Illuminated Paving
I’ve seen some examples of in-pavement lighting – and interesting idea for plazas and more subtle… from working on a competition, and doing a few streetscape projects at work, these alternative pavings (and recent post about new(er) forms of adaptated lighting) are some great tools in the designers arsenal. First, last year when in Seattle,…
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Details: Light up the Streets
I am working on a couple of streetscape/Main Street redevelopment projects and it’s definitely focused my attention on the ways in which trends of street furnishings get adopted and perpetuated through environments. I think we all know about the unfortunate ‘cobra head’ and the ubiquitous ‘acorn’ light fixture – meant to span the utilitarian and…
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Olympic Topiary Gone Wild
It’s not a secret that I’m a big fan and proponent of vegetation occupying the vertical spaces in our lives. Perhaps it’s the ubiquitousness of the natural surroundings, but the jarring use of landscape that confronts us the way great architectural materials does – makes my day. On the other hand, perhaps this can be…
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Plaza de España
Spotted via Dezain, a link to a series of Flickr images from Herzog & de Meuron’s Plaza de España in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands. :: image via Flickr – garbar53 As mentioned previously, there is definitely not a shortage of architects flexing their muscles in the public space realm – from the landscape…
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Veg.itecture #35
Sunday seems to be a prime time for summarizing the weeks Veg.itectural creations… as an aside, I had the opportunity to make a presentationon Veg.itecture to a diverse group of participants as part of the Summer Sustainability Series, which was a great success the past week… and it’s true – people respond to the concept…
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Unnatural Waters
This post stems from a fascinating post I spotted a while back on Treehugger. The topic was the Foreclosure Fish… a resultant reaction from the abandonment of homes, and more specifically swimming pools. “The mortgage crisis is not only wrecking peoples’ lives, it’s not doing much good for the environment, either. The swimming pools of…