Growroom is a prototype for food-producing architecture in our cities - Treehugger

Growroom is a prototype for food-producing architecture in our cities - Treehugger - Knowing that our current food production system is largely unsustainable thanks to its dependence on fossil fuels, affordable, abundant and locally grown food is something that we will surely need in the future as major cities around the world continue to grow. But urban land comes at a premium, and unless you're starting up large-scale rooftop urban farms, what can the little guy do to start growing some food?

One could put up some window farms, or get into some plug-and-play hydroponics kits. Or, as Danish group Space10 and architects Mads-Ulrik Husum & Sine Lindholm suggest, we could build some food-producing architecture for our cities. Growroom is their prototype for such an urban agricultural intervention, recently showcased at the CHART ART FAIR in Copenhagen.

© Rasmus Hjortshøj

The spherical structure consists of a metal framework that holds wooden planter boxes full of herbs and other edible plants. The interior of the Growroom also conveniently doubles as a cozy outdoor lounge, allowing it to blend in usefully in a private garden, or installing a series of them in a public space.

© Rasmus Hjortshøj

© Rasmus Hjortshøj

© Rasmus Hjortshøj

Space10 notes that we live in a time of technological advancements that makes it ripe for a revolution in small-scale urban farming:

Urban farming is one of much great food producing architecture initiatives that tackle some of the above problems in today’s food production. With advances in accessible equipment, it enables the many people to become small-scale farmers and grow food that tastes better, is healthier, more nutritional and doesn’t put massive pressure on our dwindling supplies of fresh water nor our environment.

© Rasmus Hjortshøj

There's no information on what's the potential annual yield of one Growroom, but the team says that the point of urban-ag architecture like this is to bring nature back into our cities, provide extra food that is nutritious and locally grown, as well as inspiring people to grow their own food. While one or two of these food-growing interventions may not make a huge difference, if deployed on a massive scale, it may very well make a positive impact. Moreover at Space10.

[Via: Inhabitat]

The Stones of Syria

A young Syrian architect looks to the future of her war-torn homeland.

Architect and author Marwa al-Sabouni in her hometown of Homs, Syria. Once considered the capital of the revolution, Homs fell to government forces in late 2015. Much of the city lies in ruins.

Since civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, some 500,000 people have died, 6.6 million have been internally displaced, and 4.8 million have fled the country. Ancient monuments, vital infrastructure, and entire cities have been destroyed. Living amid all of this, Marwa al-Sabouni’s response was to write The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria, which was published in May by Thames & Hudson. Part history, part memoir, and part treatise, the book makes tragically clear how misguided policies toward the built environment abet the collapse of social order.

Al-Sabouni was born and still lives in Homs, Syria’s third largest city. She earned her Ph.D. in architecture at the local university in 2014 and now teaches at a university in a nearby town. With the moral fervor of a John Ruskin—albeit a 21st-century, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and female incarnation—al-Sabouni bemoans the loss of values that once gave coherence to Homs’ historically diverse population, among them an altruistic sense of faith, pride in craft labor, and love of place. In her telling, Syria’s built environment has been devolving for the better part of a century, and has dragged the populace down with it.

The French, who ran the country between the world wars, tried to impose Cartesian order on a seemingly chaotic indigenous urbanism, demolishing tightly knit old neighborhoods to establish regular street grids. The Ba’ath Party, which has held power since 1963, has proven equally insensitive, appropriating private land to build residential blocks of abysmal quality and limited quantity. As of 2010, nearly 50 percent of the country’s population lived in “informal communities”—the government-preferred euphemism for shanty towns.

“At first sight, the savaging of the built environment may not convey a clear connection to civil conflict, but the truth is that each of those acts left open wounds in the hearts of the people,” al-Sabouni writes. “The official vandalism spoke to them of the government corruption that squandered their money, stole their memories, ruined their settlements, and rubbed out the marks of their shared culture.” What the Syrian government began, the civil war and the Islamic State are now finishing.

Author Marwa al Sabouni and Khaled Komee's proposal for Homs, which was the top entry for Syria in UN-Habitat's 2014-2015 Mass Housing Competition.

Will it be possible to rebuild? And if so, how? Al-Sabouni exhibits little confidence in the current standard of architecture in the region, dismissing contemporary riffs on old Islamic design motifs and construction methods as superficial manifestations of identity politics. The Dubai skyline she describes as “a shelf of perfume bottles.”

Al-Sabouni is not entirely certain what form the reborn cities of Syria should take, but she knows precisely what the process of reconstruction must achieve: “Our need is for a shared home, and this home must be ours, built from our sense of who we are as citizens of this place, and from our wish to restore it, to embellish it, to make it our own, and to hand it on as a gift,” she writes. “If we do not take responsibility for this place, or try to understand how meaning, beauty and a sense of the sacred can be inscribed once again on our land, then we will not build a home for our descendants. And they will be doomed to destroy what they find, and to destroy themselves along with it, all over again.”

How Today’s Young Architects Are Building the Future

The best architecture entails more than just designing pretty spaces.

The 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Selgascano. PHOTO: IWAN BAAN

Enthusiasm for large-scale statement architecture may have reached a breaking point. And the timing couldn’t be better for the rising young architects who have already moved away from the idea of architecture as big shapes and spaces.

In Japan, a controversial $2 billion stadium designed by the world-famous architect Zaha Hadid for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo was recently canceled with harsh words about its spaceship, or turtle-like, appearance from prominent local architects and about its ballooning costs from the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

In Manhattan, the $4 billion spike-crowned transit station designed by Santiago Calatrava at the World Trade Center has been attracting more criticism than praise for what was intended to be an emblematic capstone. On a site nearby, the performing-arts center—once touted as a major Frank Gehry project—has been drastically scaled back in size and cost.

Meanwhile, in Queens, thousands of well-wishers are turning up to celebrate Cosmo (and also the Warm Up summer music series) by Spanish-born architect Andrés Jaque, winner of the Young Architects Program sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. Cosmo—a two-story canopy of looping tubes flowing with nitrate-gobbling algae draped over a pair of turquoise-colored crop irrigator chassis—is designed to purify 3,000 gallons of waste water in four to nine days. It was inspired by a United Nations report estimating that by 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in places without enough clean water.

In acknowledging that his project is more network than architecture, Mr. Jaque is anticipating, he has said, that in the future architecture “will not be that much about space but how we interact with resources.” The name of the 12-year-old firm reveals its aims: Office for Political Innovation. Cosmo is on view through Sept. 7.

MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, now in its 16th iteration with spinoffs in Italy, Turkey, Chile and Korea, is one of a handful of programs in the U.S. and abroad funding small-scale building and exhibitions that encourage designs drawing from related and far-flung disciplines. These efforts serve as bellwethers, showing how decisively a new generation of architects departs from traditional notions of what it means to design.

Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s Cosmo at MoMA PS1. PHOTO: MIGUEL DE GUZMAN

The Architectural League of New York has fostered the most adventuresome ideas from young architects for longer than anyone else. Since 1981, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers has each year awarded emerging architectural practices with the chance to exhibit and lecture on what they believe architecture should be.

One of this year’s six winners—the firm Landing Studio, founded by Dan Adams and Marie Adams in Somerville, Mass.—has added port facilities, industrial park reclamation, demolition plans and research into mining operations to the more standard architect’s slate of designing headquarters and cultural institutions. A primary focus of the firm is rehabilitating the terrible-looking leftovers of global industries by turning the brownfields cluttered with rusting derricks and abandoned oil tanks into community parks. The dank underworld beneath I-93, the architects propose, could easily be recast as parking and green spaces for storm-water management.

The work of all six winners of the League Prize was featured this summer at the “Authenticity” exhibition at Parsons School of Design and a sold-out lecture series in June. Among the atypical projects were two by architects based in Ann Arbor, Mich.: models for irrigation infrastructure to improve village-scale food production by Clark Thenhaus, and some aluminum tree stumps with tiny gesticulating arms by Thom Moran, who argues that there needs to be a place for humor in architecture.

In London for the past 15 years, the construction of a new Serpentine Pavilion has been a major midsummer event. Each year a different architect is selected to design a pavilion set in the rolling lawns of Kensington Gardens. The compact structure is not only meant to be a public tea house and party space for fundraising by the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, but also a statement about the art of architecture. In the past, the commission has gone to high-profile talents such as Mr. Gehry, Ms. Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. More recently, less familiar names have been invited into the fold; last year, Chilean architect Smiljan Radic’s ovoid pavilion, inspired by an Oscar Wilde fairy tale, was visited by some 200,000 people. This year, Spanish architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano of the firm Selgascano stretched iridescent-colored beach-chair webbing and the plastic sheeting material ETFE over a wormhole-shaped steel armature. The pavilion, open through Oct. 18, suggests a many-headed caterpillar by children’s illustrator Eric Carle. The response to it has been tepid, with critics questioning the continuing relevance of architecture as an art folly. There were calls for future commissions to aim for something more useful—such as a bus shelter, classroom or even housing for communities in need. The Serpentine Gallery, not to mention its chairman Michael Bloomberg, is excellent at knowing which way the wind blows. And late in June, the gallery director announced that a rethink was in fact in the works. It’s a small change, but a welcome one, which shows that the best architecture entails far more than simply designing pretty spaces—it can solve pressing social problems.

The signs of a seismic generational shift may be subtle and, for now, escape the notice of the larger public. But they are there and they herald a move away from architecture as expensive visual statements that are unsustainably large and challenging to maintain. Perhaps, change is not really so far off: Standing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 and looking past Cosmo, it is impossible not to notice that a new condominium across the street is already equipped with wind turbines.

The National Building Museum—on Ice

In the sweltering heat of a Washington, D.C. summer, cool down in James Corner Field Operations' icy refuge.

Photo -Timothy Schenk

Outside, D.C.’s notorious 90-degree average highs make the the nation’s capital feel like it’s melting. A recent architectural intervention at the National Building Museum, however, offers a rock-solid respite from the heat.