Bosco Verticale Boeri Studio (Stefano Boeri, Gianandrea Barreca, Giovanni La Varra)
Italian architect Stefano Boeri designed this high-rise apartment buildings using trees and vegetation for its façade. ‘Bosco Verticale’ uses this design structure in two towers in Milan, Italy, which house 900 mature trees.
urban farming
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Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles.
Master plan by Thomas DeVoss.
Lincoln Heights is an emerging neighborhood at the confluence of the Arroyo Seco and Los Angeles Rivers.
This master plan builds off the Cleantech corridor plan, the Perkins and Will plan, the Cornfields plan, and the LA Riverworks plans for river revitalization. This new plan aims to position Lincoln Heights for self-sustainability and enhanced connectivity to the rest of the city. Primary goals: Unify the North and South sides of the river, create new pedestrian and bike paths, mend the break in the LA River bike path, add urban agriculture and leisure, and provide for healthy wetland habitat…
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Blogger Evan Bromfield Questions the Sustainability of Vertical Farms /
Evan Bromfield is a research assistant at the Centre For Food Safety in Washington D.C. and a vertical farming enthusiast and blogger. Read this recent article from his blog that considers what most don’t consider when thinking about vertical farming.
Designers love to…
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Hats off to The GreenHouse vertical farm! In a 48’x48’ greenhouse, the farm grows 135,000 plants a year in Tower Gardens, using 5% of the water used by outdoor farming. The farm supplies Walt Disney World resorts, along with Emeril’s Orlando, Ritz Carlton, Marriott World Center & the Hilton with fresh greens and herbs year round. “We also have incredibly small losses, and the consistency of growing allows us to be able to deliver the same quantities weekly to our restaurants, making us a lot more reliable than “traditional” farms.”… Katherine Grandey, Co-Founder & Owner of The GreenHouse
READ: http://futuregrowing.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/thegreenhouse/
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roppongi urban farm, tokyo/on design
via: chrisbarré
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Man replaces lawn with vegetable garden, holds no regrets
During the summer, nothing is better than the smell of freshly cut grass. That is, unless, you have a giant vegetable garden growing in the place of your lawn. Instead of turf, this awesome homeowner, user locolukas on Reddit, opted for tomatoes. The results are absolutely epic.
Instead of mowing grass, one man decided to say “screw the lawn” and plant vegetables. He filled his yard’s grid with compost that the city gave away. Seeds began growing quickly and he had to keep up by planting support systems around them. He even developed an irrigation system, which is much more difficult than it looks. He lined his garden with cinder blocks, covered the ground with wood chips and filled the cinder blocks with compost as well. The man even began giving out the veggies he couldn’t possibly eat, helping to spread the wealth.
I need this in my life.
My mom would kill me but I would love to do this
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Steve Cordova created this small, self-contained fish tank and aquaponic planter with the hopes that it will get people interested in urban farming and growing their own produce. Read more here.
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This film tells the story of a South Los Angeles edible garden planted in a surprising spot. Ron Finley, its planter, constructed the garden the way he wishes his neighborhood could be. And his vision of repurposing unused open space, like that of many others working together on urban agriculture in our city, should inspire us all, and remind us of how, with a little creativity of vision, and willingness to get our hands dirty, we can remake spaces defined by asphalt and dead grass into productive places of beauty.
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Olla Irrigation (or as one site calls it “the original drip irrigation”)
We’ve been inspired by Fan Sheng-chih Shu. His writings from the first century BC describe a method of irrigation where a unglazed clay pot is buried in the soil. When filled with water, the clay pot turns into an amazing high-tech device. The micro-pores of the clay pot allows water to seep into the surrounding soil. A key characteristic is that the water seepage is regulated by the water needs of any nearby plant. When the plant’s water demands have been fulfilled and the soil is moist, the water seepage from the clay pot will stop. When the soil becomes dry, water seepage will begin again. This seepage is controlled by soil moisture tension. It’s automatic irrigation without timers or electronic sensors!
The link above give instructions to build an Olla Irrigator out of two clay pots. They also provide some notes on how to automatically fill the Ollas using a gravity feed.
The rest of their site is also quite interesting. They have a number of ideas for making self-watering planters out of buckets and other readily available materials, including methods to automate filling of the self-watering planter reservoirs.
I have seen the buried clay pot idea mentioned in a Bill Mollison video of permaculture in dry lands on Youtube (it could be this one).
Here is a pdf discussing buried clay pot irrigation in Africa.
via decodeencode
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Urban farming in Lido, Italy.
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SelgasCano Al Aire
“By using technology Al Aire attemps to re-use existing technology so that nature can sprawl. We are using technologies coming from the world of agriculture as architecture tends to be, out of its own nature, a slow field in terms of innovation.”
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See Mumbai’s take on urban gardening and sustainability in this great short.
Critique of the Vertical Farm /
Important points raised.
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Cairo, Egypt
This, I love. I want to see this everywhere!
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Save the Farm - LA Community Gardeners exploited and screwed over by the red-tape joke privatized-democracy system we kind of need to change somehow