background preloader

503

Facebook Twitter

ReBurbia. MAP. Food and the Shape of Cities. Food issues make headlines.

Food and the Shape of Cities

Note Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity, the White House vegetable garden, chef Jamie Oliver’s 2010 Ted Prize for his work to counteract the culture of junk food, and Michael Pollan’s appearances on Oprah and The Daily Show to discuss his motto “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But how often do we talk about food systems and the staggering, complex infrastructure that supplies, processes, distributes, stores, and removes the waste of what we eat? Flooded London 2030. [Image: From "Floating City 2030: Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism" by Anthony Lau].

Flooded London 2030

Continuing with a look at some noteworthy student projects—which kicked off this week with thesis work by Taylor Medlin—we now look at a proposal by Anthony Lau, submitted back in 2008 at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. For that project, Lau designed a "floating city" for the Thames Estuary, ca. 2030 A.D. This "Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism," as Lau refers to it, "gives new life to decommissioned ships and oil platforms by converting them into hybrid homes adapted for aquatic living. " Foodprint Toronto. [Image: The Ontario Food Terminal; image via Pruned].

Foodprint Toronto

Foodprint Toronto is coming up fast—the afternoon of Saturday, July 31—and it will be well worth attending. Pruned has just posted an interview with the event's curators, Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, who explain the origins and purpose of the Foodprint series. As Nicola describes it: "The Foodprint Project is basically an exploration of the ways cities and food shape each other. So far, it's taken the form of panel discussions, one city at a time, but Sarah and I are imagining that it will gradually evolve and expand beyond that format as we go along. " Pruned: Many aspects of urban food systems are inextricably linked to a much wider system within an even wider system, from the regional to the national to the continental and then further on up to the inter-continental scale. Another part of our reasoning is that most people—and more of them everyday—live in cities.

Main : Tom Noonan. The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary. [Image: "The Dormant Workshop" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect].

The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

While studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, recent graduate Tom Noonan produced a series of variably-sized hand-drawings to illustrate a fictional reforestation of the Thames estuary. [Image: "Log Harvest 2041" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect]. Stewarding, but also openly capitalizing on, this return of woodsy nature is the John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science, an imaginary trade organization (of which we will read more, below). [Image: "Reforestation of the Thames Estuary" by Tom Noonan, courtesy of the architect]. The urban scenario thus outlined—imagining a "future timber and plantation industry" stretching "throughout London, and beyond"—is like something out of Roger Deakin's extraordinary book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (previously described here) or even After London by Richard Jeffreys.

Tempelhof Ministry of Food : LIK SAN CHAN. Madeira Odorless Fish Market and the Tempelhof Ministry of Food. With just a few more hours left in GOOD's weeklong festival of food-writing, I thought I'd throw one more post out there: two projects by Lik San Chan.

Madeira Odorless Fish Market and the Tempelhof Ministry of Food

[Image: From the Madeira Odorless Fish Market by Lik San Chan]. The first is the Madeira Odorless Fish Market, from 2006. Camara de Lobos, Madeira, Chan explains, "is a fishing village located 10km west of the capital, Funchal. The fishing community is quickly dwindling into poverty as Funchal provides its own facilities for fish vending businesses. Camara de Lobos remains the only place in the world where the Black Scabbard fish industry can be self sustained, yet the fishermen still receive second hand pay for their catch as most of it is sold in Funchal. " [Image: Two more sections from the Madeira Odorless Fish Market by Lik San Chan]. Accordingly, the Odorless Fish Market "provides a place where their catch can be sold directly. It is a spatially self-deodorizing architecture of thermal air control. ReBurbia. MAP. Food and the Shape of Cities. Flooded London 2030. Foodprint Toronto. Main : Tom Noonan. The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary. Tempelhof Ministry of Food : LIK SAN CHAN.

Madeira Odorless Fish Market and the Tempelhof Ministry of Food. Architectural Potential Energy. [Image: From the forthcoming Pamphlet Architecture #32 by Stasus].

Architectural Potential Energy

The forthcoming Pamphlet Architecture #32, on the theme of "resilience," will be authored by Matt Ozga-Lawn and James A. Craig of Stasus, a young design firm based in Edinburgh and London. [Images: From the forthcoming Pamphlet Architecture #32 by Stasus]. The pamphlet, which will explore a series of post-industrial sites in the city of Warsaw—"a desolate area of disused freight rail tracks, commercial lots, gasometer buildings and other industrial apparatus," as the architects describe it—is more explicitly narrative than the other pamphlets that have been most recently published.

"The scope and intent of our book," Stasus writes, citing such influences as Piranesi and Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, "is to highlight the importance of forgotten landscapes in our cities and the potentialities that can be extracted from them. "