Ryan Lingard

At 65 mph, a solid 5 minutes of Oregon’s I-84 freeway travel is spent adjacent a hybrid-poplar farm.  A  wall of green lines the interstate’s southern edge between the sleepy town of Boardman and its nearest neighbor, Hermiston.

Under most circumstances, this event would go largely unnoticed to the vehicular passerby. The rigorous cadence and uniform order of typical farms leave travelers to find more exciting or less predictable stimulus than the repetitive rows of plants.  But rising at a vertical height upwards of 100 feet, standing proudly amongst the rolling sage-brushed plains that tumble into the Columbia River Gorge, and spanning nearly 6 miles in each direction, this hybrid-poplar farm evokes mystery and astonishment.

Those who take the time to look deeper will find a unique human relationship to land and crop.

CTRLZ   Francesco Cingolani Massimo Lombardi

In order to supply the needs of the landowner (a funny, strictly vegetarian, environmentally engaged young lady)  this house is located in a highly protected regional park area in the middle of the italian east coast, in the heart of the charming Mediterranean maquis. The project deals with the sustainable developpement in housing, not just using techno-ecological solutions and renewable energies but suggesting a radical different way of living: minimizing consumption and wastes but first and foremost developing a self production cycle in a sort of self sufficiency. The main condition for that is a mature relationship of symbiosis and exchange with nature. Multi-storey balcony rings would optimize cultivation’s control concerning earth, water, insulation and wind, just like a greenhouse. The columns and other structural element could act as shelters, housing small mammals and also several species of birds living in the area, as well as the park shelter the house. That’s how architecture becomes something more than construction and get being like a contemporary Noah’s ark, an organism exchanging and growing with nature.

Moira Wilson

Aquaculture Seascape re-envisions a new, inclusive culture of aquatic food production. An experimental production park typology is generated through a synthesis of function (food production, data collection, environmental monitoring and restoration, the public park system) and process-based design. Tidal pool nurseries and polyculture production gardens are designed to delight the public. They also provide the space for commercial research to develop healthy, economically viable food production. The park’s mobile infrastructure sets up the conditions for detailed mapping of oceanic territory. This new kind of public space acts as an interface to mediate the sometimes complementary, but often conflicting points of view among private industry, public interest groups, community members, researchers, tourism, and government in relation to aquatic food production.

Beyond Disney: The vanishing Florida Family Farm culture and the decline of Florida's last cash crop, the housing market

Daniel Kariko
John Raulerson

The aim of this research is to capture the elements of a vanishing subculture, the Florida Family Farm, in the face of a changing Florida landscape. Over the years Florida’s farmlands have been bought out by developers. In light of the current financial crisis, land developers have not been able to secure financing to complete their sprawling subdivisions and commercial properties, rendering much of what were fertile farmlands useless.

CROWD-SOURCING BUILDING ENERGY PERFORMANCE

CASE with Arup Sustainability, IDEO, New Buildings Institute, and SHoP Architects

Buildings are the largest contributor to greenhouse emissions, and three-quarters of U.S. energy goes to building operations. Yet, there is no way to accurately predict building performance. There is a need for simple tools and protocols to provide meaningful and actionable feedback on building performance to designers, owners and occupants. BLDG 2.0 seeks to fill the void between design intent and building performance. Built upon principles of mass collaboration and collective intelligence, BLDG 2.0 is an open-source interface to building performance databases, a collaborative community of experts, and an online marketplace for ideas emphasizing building energy performance and open innovation.

Szu-Han Ho and Jesse Vogler

Beginning in 1914 the Post Office Department of the United States initiated a little known and short-lived program to ship farm produce directly from rural producers to urban consumers through the mechanisms of the postal system. Promoted as the Farm-to-Table (FTT) Plan, this program sought to enmesh the protocols of agricultural production with the convenience of a daily delivery system. At once a plan to manage excess within the economy of farming and an effort to spark rural commerce, the FTT fundamentally relied on a system of equivalences which was at the core of postal maneuverings. As every household was formatted within a grid of equal addressability, it was a short leap to conceptualize producers and consumers as mere variables in the postal matrix—with each as near-at-hand as the corner store. With the local postmaster soliciting information on goods and pricing from farmers along rural delivery routes and disseminating this information through posted advertisements, published brochures, or bulk mailings, all that remained was for shoppers to mail their order through the local post office and await delivery of farm-fresh foodstuffs at their doorstep. The promise of this schema was that farming, infrastructure, and communication could be collapsed into a seamless system of exchange. What resulted was the nascent promise of an epistolary economy, where agricultural protocols and delivery infrastructures were married through the logistics of the postal system.

speculation, generation, + transmission in texas

Jason Sowell

A leading producer and consumer of electricity in the United States, Texas is poised to initiate some of the largest energy projects in the world. Overlaid onto traditional agricultural land, these new energy landscapes conflate crop production, livestock grazing, and wind harvesting, with the land set up as a source of, if not a support for, energy stores. This transition to a renewable fuel, however, occurs simultaneous to the continued extraction of nonrenewable resources, chiefly natural gas and sweet light crude, such that the planning, construction, and management of both wind farms and gas fields remain inextricably linked to, if not accelerated by, concurrent shifts in energy costs, eminent domain, development rights, or recovery technologies.

FROM MALLS TO MESAS: THE REPURPOSING OF THE STRIP MALL BECOMES THE REBRANDING OF PHOENIX

Roger Sherman Architecture + Urban Design and cityLAB

CHIA MESA transforms the strip mall into a prototype and a recovery strategy for Phoenix. Rapid urbanization of the metro area—its unbridled horizontal expansion into the outlying landscape---has destroyed not only its potential agricultural productivity, but its civic identity as well. With CHIA MESA, a new image-ability emerges for the city as a whole---one whose morphology ironically recollects that of the landscape it is rapidly consuming. Instead of being anonymously absorbed into the endless and undifferentiated urban fabric (Phoenix’s own version of Banham’s Plains of Id), the scenario we propose envisions the next generation of strip malls as climactically and socially “cool hotspots” in an arid field.

Studio Lindfors
Project Team: Ostap Rudakevych, Gretchen Stump

Cloud Skipping is about harvesting the resources of earth’s atmosphere. By harnessing the tremendous energy of the jet stream, Cloud Skippers imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the surface to drift amongst the clouds in machine-like dwellings designed for gliding.

Adjacent to The University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Medical Center is an acre of land known as The Body Farm. The Body Farm belongs to university’s Forensic Anthropology Center and was established in 1981 by Dr. William Bass. Bass who had arrived ten years earlier to lead the Anthropology Department founded The Body Farm to study the postmortem changes that occur to a human body. Since its inception Bass’ brainchild has become an invaluable source for Forensic Scientists, Crime Scene Investigators and Law Enforcement. Bodies, usually numbering around fifty at a time, are placed in various locations around the site. Some rest in water while others are buried under poured concrete slabs. Some are placed in the trunks of cars while others are left exposed to the elements. Throughout the decomposition process the changes of each corpse are painstakingly documented by the researchers and added to the lexicon of forensic science.

Jacques Abelman

One of the remarkable characteristics of The Netherlands, especially from the foreigner’s point of view, is the amount of carefully protected open green space surrounding densely populated urban centers. The Dutch are extremely keen on verdant fields with placidly grazing cows and sheep always being within a bike ride away from the city, and this is true in most cases. However, as space becomes an ever more precious commodity, the preserved status of these green zones is being called into question.

In many cases these peri-urban areas are carefully managed by several partners in order to preserve their rural appearance, yet they no longer function as viable agricultural spaces for a variety reasons. In some areas soil has been too contaminated by dioxins, pcb’s, and other pollutants to allow food production. In other areas it is no longer economically viable. An enormous amount of energy and coordination is necessary for the maintenance of these spaces which appear to be agricultural but are in fact a kind of park landscape reminding inhabitants of their farming origins. As urban populations increase and diversify what future role will these once vital farmlands play?

Commissioned by Bureau Venhuizen in Rotterdam 

You are how you eat

Edward Dodington

We build the way we farm. We factory produce our homes and we factory farm our food. The way we build reflects the way we view ourselves in relationship to the beings that we farm and consume. We build walls, delineate one species’ space from anothers’, give preference to some domesticated species (canine and feline) and reject the majority of others -- we house ourselves in private homes down long cul-de-sac and keep to ourselves. Currently the two trends, farming and living, appear to mutually reinforce the other. Might a change in one practice influence a corresponding change in the other?

Farm Logic has exerted a continual pressure on barn design for centuries, leading to creative and subtle evolutionary changes driven by pragmatic necessity and the desire to achieve a maximum effect through minimum means. While rarely inventing new technology, barn design embraces current technology, runs it through an ascetic filter and pares it down to its minimum condition. The new sheep barn continues this lineage, utilizing minimum material and energy to provide column free space, performative enclosure and functional apertures for daylight and ventilation. This pragmatic mandate resonates with the current call for sustainability, without the hype.

Ellen Burke

Suggesting that our food be produced where it is consumed, in cities and suburbs, seems somehow romantic, foolish and utopian. While we may never be able to produce all the food we need at our back steps, there is room for insertions, acts of radical agriculture, cooperative partnerships that supplement the industrial system while questioning its wisdom. One strategy is to foster partnerships between landholders and farmers, creating hybrid agricultural landscapes. These sorts of cooperative ventures can be found across the country - farms inserted in housing and parks, bordering playgrounds and wetlands, producing food for their immediate communities. This study examines some of the precedents, establishing a working framework for landscape architects and planners to create and preserve agriculture in the built environment.

Craig England

Food Matrix is a quick-reference guide for the small-scale producer. At a glance compare energy input/output ratios, average yields, water or land requirements. Plan for the seasons with typical farming cycles and practices. A fast and convenient method to contrast the benefits or disadvantages of many common crops and livestock.

The 2006 Crops of the Americas stamp depicts a cornucopia of imagined pure native vegetables – fruits of a pre-industrial landscape in “Five Different Designs.” This Edenic fi ction resurrects the rhetoric of bounty that legitimized the founding of the nation. A self-adhesive image of produce, the stamp bears comparison to the advisory label affixed to produce. The privilege of circulation purchased vis-à-vis the stamp is impure, subject to the same police technologies as the fruit body – x-ray, irradiation, and customs. At a larger scale, the familiar USDA food pyramid circumscribes desire and proscribes ethical consumption based in nutritional science through posters in schools and medical offi ces, as a PDF on the internet, and in occasional media coverage. Harmonized bodies and diets effect a national subjectivity, wherein caloric and nutrient values extend beyond shelf life into the arena of political capital. The security of the national food supply is transparent to the American way of life.

Thom Faulders

GEOtube is a proposal for a new 170 meter tall tower for the city of Dubai. With an open structure and an exposed membrane skin, the vertical planes of the GEOtube tower are continually misted with local salt water via an internal vascular water system.
The result is a continual uniform growth of salt crystal deposits upon its vertically expansive surfaces, providing a highly identifiable architectural icon for the city, a specialized habitat for wildlife that thrives is this specialized environment, and an accessible skin for the harvesting of salt.

atelier eem  [ Marc Blume, Estelle Nicod, Francesca Liggieri]

Globalgaelisation is a consideration on the delicate balance of a social organization based on the exploitation of a sole resource.

Algae could be an extraordinary source of energy which could satisfy multiple needs: alimentation, gas and electricity production, thermoplastic and textile manufacturing.
The multiple functionalities of this resource allow us to easily transfer all the mechanisms of our contemporary society, entirely based on oil, towards an all-algae future.
Could the intelligence of these organisms, which make photosynthesis and the ozone layer possible, sustain on its own such a vast complexity and mass consumption?
And what if it was precisely today's main advantage offered by algae- its capacity of creating energy and oxygen from Carbon dioxide- that would create a new unbalance in the ecosystem?
Will there be a day when we need to artificially re-inject carbon dioxide in our atmosphere?

Stephen Becker
Rob Holmes

Luanda, the fastest growing city in the world, is desperately short of clean water. Only one in six Luandan households has running water, forcing most of the inhabitants of the musseques (the vast slums that constitute the majority of Luanda's land area) to depend on contaminated water brought by truck from rivers hours north and south of the city. The price of water in the musseques can be as high as 12 cents a gallon, a huge burden on a populace which lives on an average of $2 per person per day. In 2006, the worst African cholera epidemic in a decade devastated the musseques, killing 1600, spread by contaminated drinking water as well as contact with sewage.

What if water, already inextricable from agricultural farming processes, was itself farmed? Beyond the direct benefits a renewable source of fresh, clean water would provide Luanda, farming water seeds the city with potential. By establishing an infrastructure to effect the farming of water, one may farm landscapes, societies, production: a city.

Paul Schuette

Modern hydroponic techniques were pioneered at the University of California Berkeley by William Frederick Gericke in the 1930s and continue to be used heavily in California both in industrial agriculture, as well as the legal gray zone of marijuana production. Hydroponic stores have multiplied across the California landscape in the past ten years selling scalable systems for both home gardeners and larger industrial productions. These systems served as a point of departure for the Hydroloops project, a series of hydroponics mechanisms that illustrate three typical forms of hydroponic cultivation. These hydro-mechanisms function as drawing machines, a type of automata originally described by André Masson and the Surrealists. Each hydro-mechanism has a simple drawing program associated with it, written in the Processing programming language and connected to the computer via an Arduino interface. The development of the plants and the operation of the hydro-mechanisms allow these drawing programs to run creating informal metrics of plants growth.

In 1862, Justus von Liebig, the pre-eminent German chemist of his time, set pen to paper and drafted a new introduction for the seventh edition of his bestselling treatise, Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology. Liebig was perturbed by the methods employed by the British in the newly-developed sector of intensive farming, which necessitated the importation of natural fertilizers (including bones) from all across Europe to feed the growing industrial-agricultural apparatus that sustained Britain’s cities. Not only were whole countries were being robbed, Liebig argued, of the nutrients of their soil, but these substances ended up contributing to urban pollution in the form of human and animal wastes.

Bryan Boyer

Driving north on highway 101 though the Salinas valley, one of America’s most fertile regions, you will find Dennis Caprara kneeling in his field with a wide grin as he holds a head of lettuce freshly plucked from the soil of his farm. You’re free to drive by on any day and at any time, Dennis will be there proud as can be. This is because Caprara happens to be 12 feet tall and 3/4” thick: he’s a scroll-cut billboard painted by John Cerney erected with minimal structure on the edge of a field. What business does a farmer have putting a billboard in his field?

Adrian Blackwell and Moving Cities (Bert de Muynck, Monica Carrico)

Students: Gary Chien, Maya Desai, Hayley Imerman, Holly Jordan, Safora Khoylou, Esmond Lee, Timothy Lee, Antoine Morris, Matthew Spremulli, Sando Thordarson, Sandy Wong, Joseph Yau.

Beijing’s Line13 was built in the late 1990s as a speculative infrastructure in order to stimulate the development of the countryside north of the city. At the time it was built, only line 1 and line 2 existed. So Line 13, as unlikely a route as its number suggests, sat as an anomalous form, designed to irrigate the periphery for real estate speculation. This process has allowed strange new cities like Huilongguan, a commuter suburb of monotonous slabs, to grow up surrounding the line, creating zones of uneven development, where the messy vitality of existing uses meets the overbearing coherence of new subdivisions. Despite its urban character as infrastructure, the areas that line 13 traverses are in between sites; housing blocks, universities, office and business parks, share space with golf courses, farms, villages and desolate wastelands.

However the unevenness of the line opens up potentials, in the gaps between overdeveloped space. This workshop examined the northern leg of Line 13; the area between Longze and Beiyuan, studying three systems to see how each might be redesigned to create opportunities within this socially polarized, ecologically degraded, and culturally empty landscape. These interventions work to render the peripheral system more complex, breaking the linear system and uni-directional system of line 13 into a superlinear system that creates multiple connections between its parts.

EMERGENT ARCHITECTURE: A VERTICAL HORSE STABLE FOR LUXOR

Dimitris Argyros

As a means of alleviating Luxor from its fast growing problems of congestion and pollution, a public econ-transport system using horses and carriages is proposed for the city central. A transport union is proposed to accommodate the horses, drivers, carriages, food and waste needed for the operation, as well as taking on the form of a modern public park. As a means of addressing Luxor’s problem of available cultivatable land, a network of living towers is proposed, connected via undulating landscapes and elevated circulation rings. As a beacon of sustainability, the towers are constructed via a sustainable hybridisation of imported new technologies and re-invented vernacular cladding materials, built over time by the locals.

Austin Nicholas Tragni 

All too often we see land being taken away for parking and at the same time the reclamation of abandoned parking lots to turn into viable land, specifically farms in urban environments. The project, which is a park and ride facility and urban agricultural farm attempts to combine these two typologies to co-exist on one site, bringing the process of food production and consumption in contact with a major multi-modal transfer point between the car and NYC’s existing public transportation network. The project will provide an alternative option for those accessing NYC by car and also challenge the conventional function of a park and ride facility to provide a greater good for those users and the surrounding neighborhoods; connecting Long Island City and Sunnyside Queens with a much needed public green space.

Bittertang, Antonio Torres and Michael Loverich

We imagine a future where the vast and deep expanses of the ocean will teem with overabundant floating gelatinous reefs. Humans will be nourished physically and aesthetically be encouraging new floating worlds of reefs that sustain large quantities of harvestable wild and captive fish. Farming in this project is not viewed as a monoculture but the creation of a new ecology where wild and captive wildlife are ’raised’ and their aesthetic potential is enjoyed by future divers and fisherman.

FARMING & THE CHINESE URBAN VILLAGE

Neeraj Bhatia, Marissa Cheng, Liz Nguyen, Jiang Yang, and Liu Peng

The hukou system was implemented by the Chinese Government as a means to register each citizen as either Rural or Urban, effectively polarizing the populace into lower-class farmers and upper-class urban citizens, and resulting in the formation of an Urban Village.  Urban Villages are rural villages that were enveloped by sprawling metropolises, detaching villagers from their agrarian source of the income.  A census taken in 2000 revealed that 3.8 million rural-urban migrants were living in over 300 urban villages within Beijing.  Unregulated and untouched by centralized urban planning and policy, these urban villages have become de facto independent enclaves of informality.  As such, many now function as proletariat sponges, soaking up a ‘floating’ populace of rural workers (liudong renkou) to provide cheap labor in urban agglomerations.  The proposed urban design project attempts to foster a symbiotic relationship between Urban and Rural citizens by using a productive landscape as an interface for exchange.

Strategizing a Man-Made Geology

David W. Newton

Performative Landscapes examines and strategizes the production of artificial wetlands, port facilities, and recreational/commercial fishing areas by utilizing the excess dredge material generated by the Houston Ship Channel. 

 Jeffrey L. Day, AIA; Min | Day + FACT

This project enacts the complex interrelationship of art, landscape, architecture and history in the rural context of Art Farm, a rural art residency, exhibition site, and laboratory for explorations of creative inhabitation of the land. The ongoing project demonstrates alternatives to the predominant land uses found in the Great Plains and it asks several questions: Can art form the basis of a post-agricultural landscape? Can contemporary design practice engage the multiple histories of rural settlement? Can art engage history, land, and global culture with the same gesture? Can creativity be farmed?

Art Farm and the design proposal for its expansion offer an alternative mode of resistance to the erasure of history found in the Plains. Opposed to nostalgic and sentimental attempts to preserve a lost narrative of inhabitation, Art Farm is a framework for new histories to be written on the land.

A Renewed Company Model

Anthony Acciavatti

Within the last half of the twentieth century, technology and print media made it possible for designers to vividly imagine the instantaneous propagation of urban environments that previously took centuries to produce. The campus community potentially remains one of the few defensible vestiges of the desire to immediately construct context and community as a whole. The need for people, governments, and corporations to ascribe meaning to the landscape as well as space is paramount to understanding the countryside through the lens of the corporate campus model.

thenorthroom

Project :: Farm is an ongoing investigation into the procedural and cultural economies of farming in the high plains of West Texas. Ranging from tactical maneuvers to playful experiments, these projects are more weed than crop, more dust-storm than soil, more uncertainty than efficiency. Embedded in the everyday practices of farming, these projects exploit the temporalities of cultivation, the contingencies of weather, and the astonishing beauty of productive landscapes.

Creative Team: Szu-Han Ho, John Houser, Tina Larkin, Louis Schalk, Emily Vogler, Jesse Vogler

Kyle Reynolds

This project investigates the creation of a new “green” logo made from waste management for Chicago, “The Green City.” A network of five facilities shaped from the processes of waste management are spread across the city and linked by existing light rail infrastructure. The shape of each facility is unique yet together they are part of a family that form a collective singularity or identity for a green Chicago. In establishing this identity, the family of buildings is at once public art, institution, infrastructure, architectural monument, public park, and green building.

An Emergent Landscape and Intervention

The Reforestation at Greenwood Farm Project recognizes the plantings of 20,000 trees, of varying native species in varying soil conditions, as a ‘man made landscape’ within the historic traditions of agriculture.
As designers, we saw an opportunity to make a system for organizing species and for implementing that system over many acres. The design incorporates the variations in leaf colors, tree heights and branch densities.

Through a 16-tree module with alternate placeholders, the location of a single tree could be established within the weave of tree species. Hand cards with the module were used by individuals while planting in the field. Reference points established through counting notation provided enough organization for the adaptable plan to develop and spread. Alternate positions in the modules allowed for tree species to be exchanged as required by local soil conditions.

The system oscillates between the establishment of a global view of the landscape and the specific conditions of each planted region.

Carey Clouse

New Orleans is a ragged city. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this metropolis has rebounded in fits and starts, with the gap-toothed development of new housing flanking broken buildings, and swaths of activity ringing large vacant sections of the city. While Frederick Jackson Turner asserted in the 1890’s that the “frontier has gone,” and Joel Garreau declared Edge Cities “the final frontier,” the shrinking city of New Orleans offers up a fresh model of untested territory. In New Orleans, the last frontier may actually be found in the resurrection of urban wilderness.

Talking to an ecologist or a food system specialist and they’ll tell you how intensive the beef industry is on the American landscape. However, when taking a closer look at the problem, it becomes clear, in many cases, there is no simple solution.

Joyce Hwang

In January of 2008, a rumor spread quickly through internet sources, claiming that Las Vegas would be the first city to construct a 30-story Vertical Farm. While this pairing may initially seem to be impossibly incongruous, an examination of the logics of Vertical Farming will reveal that it fits opportunistically into the context of Las Vegas. The city’s abundance of consumer activity – particularly food-driven activity (think: mega-buffets) – could certainly stand to benefit from the environmental, economic and social consequences promised by vertical farms concepts. The aim of localizing the food industry could not be more appropriate for a city like Las Vegas, given its’ location in the middle of a drought-ridden desert landscape.

Alexandros Avlonitis
(critic: Kate Orff, GSAPP summer studio 2008)

It is estimated that in the next 50 years 80% of the world population will be gathered in urbanized cities, abandoning the rural and adopting new habits and ways of life. This urbanization will have a direct impact on our agricultural production and food quality. Nutritious racism is becoming more and more evident in the urbanized cities. Low social layers that cannot afford organic, nutritious goods are forced to consume second class products with unknown origin and impact on health. Food production is becoming industrialized while its transportation is getting more and more complex with crucial environmental impact. This project is dealing with these issues and tries to propose ways in which architecture can have an active role and explore solutions to these and upcoming ones as well. Its main aim is to try and create the basis for starting educating people around food culture through a collective and communal character. It is not about big vertical farming buildings. It is about building food communities and a resistance movement to combat junk food, malnutrition and the loss of food culture.

Photography: Corine Vermeulen-Smith
Text: Matt Casadonte

It has been over three hundred years since Count Ponchartrain sent word back to Paris describing Detroit’s landscape as “...so temperate, so fertile and so beautiful that it may justly be called the earthly paradise of North America.” It was Ponchartrain’s countrymen who found this land so hospitable they lay out “ribbon farms” which bil¬lowed from the river in strips up to a mile inland. It was these farms which were paved over and built upon once the industrial age came; the age of Henry Ford and his automobile. But despite the concrete and the trampling of people, the land never went away; it simply lay dormant, and given the opportunity it shows itself again. It creeps through the crevices to again exert its dominance. And people once more see it’s beauty and find a need for it’s rich soil.