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Color Theory
These images on MoCo Loco’s Art MoCo featuring the work of artist Denny McCoy’s simple yet somehow deep paintings of colored bands, jogged my memory of a couple of recent color-related resources that floated by recently. Part photoshop swatch, part Timbuk2 messenger bag – it’s not the composition, but the complement of shades and tones…
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Living Walls: Indoor Filtering
New Vegetated Architecture, moving to the indoors. This post was borne of images from the Cambridge Civic Administration Building in Toronto, featuring a large indoor living wall very reminiscent of the project at Guelph-Humber. This gives us the opportunity to get into depth regarding the function of indoor walls (and indoor vegetation by default) to…
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Veg.itecture: Queens Botanical Garden Visitors Center
It really amazes me the composition of buildings envisioned 5 years ago versus today, and the short time period that has elapsed between sporadic vegetated architecture examples and the explosion of current projects. Some days, it seems hard to keep up. Here’s a new, built example in NYC: :: image via NYT City Room A…
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Block Architectes: Veg.itect
We featured the rust/green complement in the Caixa Forum building, now to shift gears to another wonderful complementary palatte – concrete and greenery. Life Without Buildings featured work of French architecture firm Block Architectes – and while not all of it is using this dual material scheme exclusively it is all pretty integrated – with…
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One Single Tree
The story of the 150 year old Chestnut tree outside of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, and the heroic efforts to save it, makes one think of our careless disregard for trees and the benefits they bring to us. (Read more about this at Treehugger) It is inevitable that a tree will succumb to nature…
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Process Landscapes
I was compelled to dust off my copy of the Landscape Urbanism Reader (ok, really just my notes), and look at a few key positions regarding the idea of ‘process landscapes’. The following quotes stuck out as applicable to process, a major tenet of LU theory (all quotations from Waldheim, ed.): Corner’s (p.16) four processes:…
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Eco-Planning: Redux
A lot has been happening in the eco-village/community/neighborhood scale in sustainability. Picking up some loose threads of a recent post on Eco-Planned Communities a few more recent precedents to round out the mix. Sherwood Energy Village is a model UK development with the simple tagline: “Delivering practical regeneration that won’t cost the Earth – A…
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Veg.itecture: Caixa Forum Madrid
The Caixa Forum project in Madrid has been shown in brief on L+U before. It is, simply put, an amazing composition, using two complementary materials (red rusted metal panels and green vegetated panels) juxtaposed together with stunning results. Project is by Herzog & de Meuron. Vertical Garden by Patrick Blanc. Image links to Flickr pool…
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Four+Zero = Net-Zero
More case-study research for Net-Zero development, offering some modest examples to augment some previous developments. For starters, via Jetson Green is the High Street Philadelphia project is being developed by home(scale) in a former brownfield zone in downtown Philly. The most urbanized version, this was originally shown as a very vegetated facade in early renderings…
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Veg.itecture: Building Edges
It just keeps on coming, and I have to say I can’t get enough. Here’s a Vegetated Architecture post that spans all sides of the architectural envelope. It’s interesting to see the varieties of facade and rooftop articulation, building on an earlier post regarding definitions of typologies of VegArch. Starting from the top, we have…