Garden all year long

Last weeks lecturers were both from the faculty of Landscape Architecture and all their discussion about the preservation of natural landscapes and German garden's has had me wondering how we can enjoy the benefits of landscapes in spite of our cold winters and our urban context. Amin Taha Architects have come up with a solution. Their vertical gardens bring 'outdoor' landscapes into the urban setting with their community garden towers. We have had a lot of discussion within this blog group about vertical farming so I was pleased to stumble on this article about vertical gardens. I like the idea of bringing the natural environment indoors not necessarily to farm, but merely for people to enjoy. Within these towers the benefits of a garden can be enjoyed year round. How refreshing it would be to stroll through a sky garden, to see plants growing and flowers blooming in the heart of the winter chill (as Madi would say).

Slow Design

Recently, the idea of time has provoked much thought and discussion between myself and other students in my classes, specifically the concept of slowness and how it can be adapted to our cities and to our overall way of living. Our lives are driven by speed and the need to fulfill as much as we possibly can in a small amount of time, which makes me question the value society places on such fastness. Is it healthy for our physical, emotional and spiritual well being to exist at such a fast pace? How can we bring aspects of slowness and the opportunity for full experience back into our lives at a personal and global scale, and how can the integration of design help refocus our off-centered perception of time? As my interest in this subject grew, I realized that a movement towards slow design had already been in the works for quite some time now.
The concept of slow design is one that has already evolved in the design world. It is a design philosophy and process that integrates slowness into our current understanding of modernity and speed. The term “continuous present”, coined by the architect Bruce Goff back in the 1950s, emphasizes living in the present and allowing the future to unfold as a result of being involved, focused and reflective in the present moment. This, I think is so profound. Read more on this here.

Ur an 8

The crafty folks at NASA have once again out done themselves. Although they haven't been able to turn water into wine (which I'm sure it's just because they haven't tried) they're pretty close: NASA has the technology to turn pee into drinking water. According to NASA, the new Water Recovery System will be able to support more people in the International Space Station with "water so pure it rivals the cleanest on Earth". The emergence of this technology is so important to the current water crisis. Imagine the possibilities, this machine could hydrate millions who walk miles for a few buckets of water that is often unclean. We already try to recycle as much as possible, why not add pee to the list?

I understand that most people are opposed to drinking urine, but we must admit it seems like a very sustainable idea. In a world quenched for every drop of potable water, shouldn't we be keeping our options open? I mean I'd rather drink purified pee than nothing at all. I'm sure most of the people who live in countries that don't have drinking water wouldn't mind drinking clean, safe water even if it is purified from urine. Anyways, the point isn't about who would drink pee and who wouldn't, but more so that we are currently facing a HUGE water crisis. With a resource so necessary for us to live approaching dangerously low levels, it is imperative we seek new, sometimes unconventional solutions.

"Discovering" what we once already knew?

Kaleigh has mentionned the idea of the built environment itself being out of sync with nature simply in it's very existence. This is absolutely true, and I believe that it is up to us to learn how to encorporate our designs into the existing ecosystems around us, just as we make the effort to encorporate surrounding buildings into the one we may be designing. One thing that struck me recently was something I read in a fiction novel, oddly enough. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a novel set hundreds of years ago in South America. Long story short, a family rebuilds their home, and it speaks of their use of certain trees and bushes planted for insulation and protection from wind, along the most exposed side of their home. They weren't fighting nature, so much as working with it.I think that we have lost some instinctive knowledge in using what is around us to enhance our way of life. How many homes incorporate their landscape into the efficiency of their home? Provided there is some accuracy in the depiction of this family's method, I think that this way of thinking is valuable. In our cold/windy climate it is obvious that trees as windbreaks are a natural "insulator". In fact Madi and I recently commented on how the Wolseley area is warmer than other parts of the city. I truly believe it is all about the shelter from the trees. So instead of turning to new technologies, maybe we need to encorpoate what we naturally already have. Why cant we employ this "Wolseley" logic on a smaller scale (our homes!) and enhance not only our way of life, but give back to the natural environment while we're at it?

excuse me mr. but is that a 10,000 sq foot mushroom i see?

The coolhunter usually features fairly amazing buildings and I have been subscribing to their website for quite some time now. Never have they shown such a unique building as Shuhei Endo’s Bubbletecture H. Made entirely of steel, wood and glass the structure is planned in three sections that function as a theater/lecture hall, bookshop/gallery and a workshop.

As not to reiterate the entire article please read it for yourself. If you do… you will read that the entire structure is created with the earth in mind. I think that this notion of going beyond environmental sustainability and really appreciating the earth itself is very important as designers. Endo’s structure truly becomes one with it’s surroundings allowing little distinction between it’s surrounding natural environment and the structure itself.

meet me at the mall

Much like many blondes before me I have always felt some sort of a magnetic pull towards the mall. When I read this article I was in one word, jealous. Adriana Yoto and Michael Townsend awoke one morning to find their street re-named and a multi-million dollar mall being built down the street. Adamantly opposing it’s creation they decided that if they couldn’t beat it, they may as well join it. So they built an apartment in a 750 sq foot storage space that had been abandoned. Their one-week experiment turned into a four year project and what came of it was an extremely interesting first hand view of the mall.

Adriana Yoto has done a significant amount of research into malls and their new incarnation: lifestyle centers. As I mentioned in my previous post, lifestyle centers have become the new buzz word and Yoto paints an excellently satirical portrait of what these centre’s truly represent

Yoto’s website colincantread.com provides information about an eco-lifestyle mall in India and how each one of us can help the vision become a reality.