Bioengineering + Design

Joanna Aizenberg via Harvard Magazine

Like tiny flowers, micro-florets created in Joanna Aizenberg’s lab open and close in response to changes in environmental moisture. These structures, their action controlled by a hydrogel “muscle,” can be used to catch and release tiny particles.

In the latest issue of Harvard Magazine there is an article about the exciting new field of bioengineering which is being explored in an incredible multidisciplinary directive at Harvard University. Bioengineering is “the application of engineering principles and techniques to address problems in biology and medicine” and is a synthetic practice bridging the fields of biology, medicine, engineering, physics, materials science, chemistry, and computer science. In the article’s intro bioengineering achievements include

constructing an artificial liver, altering bacteria to make hydrogen fuel directly from sunlight, [and] determining how the geometry of damaged heart cells leads to coronary disasters.

Notoriously absent from the list of schools and disciplines involved in these new pursuits is the Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning and design. I feel that this is a loss, particularly for architecture, but also for bioengineering. In this post I will offer some thoughts of why I think this.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION
Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the promises of attending the GSD, particularly among the three disciplines which operate under the school’s academic umbrella. Unfortunately this promise does not extend much beyond the walls of the school. This is not entirely the school’s fault—it is endemic to both the Harvard graduate system and of architecture and design schools in general I believe (in my eight years of design education at both Georgia Tech and the GSD I had only two classes which afforded opportunities for design collaboration outside the normative ‘design’ disciplines). But while I attended the GSD I had one opportunity for this type of collaboration between the GSD and the SEAS in a studio taught by Sheila Kennedy as part of her Portable Light Project. And it was great. The collaboration between architects and engineers from the SEAS forced us all out of our comfort zones into thinking about design and applied technologies in ways we had not before.
The article in Harvard Magazine discusses how combining biology and engineering it combines ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences; the former is focused on quantification and prediction while the latter is focused on description. Architecture can benefit from both of these approaches and provide something unique at the same time.
So from a pedagogical perspective it would be very exciting for the students. This new form of creative collaboration would offer a new approach to both emerging and already familiar problems. It also represents the increasing complexity and convergence of design, science, and engineering disciplines and the need to find new forms of practice to confront the full range of topics that architecture and urbanism must contend with today. So it prepares architects who are well equipped for the collaborative forms of practice required today.

BEYOND BIOMIMICRY
As I have mentioned before, architecture has always been a mimetic practice. Biomimicry has become a hot topic among architects (as well as engineers) and is represented by an attention to biological forms and processes, exhibited by such firms as Emergence and Biothing, among others. Getting involved in the new interdisciplinary field of bioengineering would place architects directly alongside other fields also exploring these interests. People like Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist developing new materials inspired by biology. One of her explorations is the development of a “nanofur” whose hair-like projections change properties in response to humidity. According to the Harvard Magazine article, “the ability to change in response to the environment is one of the properties that make biological materials more useful than artificial ones.”
Computer scientist Radhika Nagpal is also inspired by biology. She looks to “understand living processes and then looks for ways to apply those guiding principles to the design of computer systems and programmable structures that have the properties of living organisms.” In a similar vein, scientists like Edward O. Wilson demonstrate that there is a lot to learn about our own civilization and our cities by examining the social organization of other living organisms such as ants.
Both of these explorations could be invaluable to architecture, and in fact there are plenty of architects who are studying these same things. So why are we not being more proactive in working directly with these other disciplines exploring the same issues, developing applications for this work in architecture and urbanism?

At the same time, I think that teaming up with the emerging bioengineering field can inspire us to move beyond mere biomimicry into something even more interesting and productive. Rather than merely mimicking the forms of biology and nature, if we could synthesize architecture, biology, and engineering the possibilities are endless. Pamela Silver has been investigating ways to engineer organisms to produce useful elements, such as hydrogen fuel. “By redesigning bacteria to produce hydrogen or other useful elements from the sunlight, she would like to turn them into ‘living solar panels.’” Iwamoto Scott’s Jellyfish House is an architectural example of how we could use bioengineering technologies to rethink the relationship between architecture, engineering, and environmental/natural systems. The possibilities are endless.

Iwamoto Scott - Jellyfish House

CYBORG URBANISM
Moving beyond biomimicry might also bring us closer to the type of Cyborg Urbanisation proffered by Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer with the Royal Academy of Arts in the UK. Matthew Gandy states that “If a cyborg is a ‘hybrid of machine and organism’ then ‘urban infrastructures can be conceptualised as a series of inter-connecting life-support systems’. By blurring the boundary between body and machine, as well as nature and culture, the concept of cyborg offers insights into the ‘networks that enable bodies to function in the modern city’ and how we might understand wider processes of urbanisation.” In Gandy’s lecture last year at the GSD he described our progressive understandings of the metropolis—the organic metaphors we used in the late 19th Century to the mechanical metaphors we used in the early 20th Century, and claims that understanding the city as a cyborg offers a new vocabulary for understanding urbanization. The work of many bioengineers, fusing organic and technological sciences, could deepen our understanding of what Cyborg Urbanisation is and its potential.

CONCLUSION
In the end the question that would probably need to be answered for people to want to invest in this type of collaboration is why is it necessary, what is there to gain from the joining of design and bioengineering? Material science, social organization, transcalar engineering, biomimicry, these are but a few of the potential areas of research that designers could benefit from by joining the interdisciplinary field of bioengineering. Creative approaches to problem solving, the development of new areas for research and application of materials and processes, a history of combining ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences, the opportunity to think about bioengineering at larger scale of application and influence, and an invested interest in environmental and social concerns are things that architects could bring to the table. Most importantly, it is hard, in my opinion, to distinguish between the biological, social, and environmental influences on the world, on cities, and on individuals—they are all intricately interwoven. Doesn’t it behoove us to all work together?

PHREE_URB 02

Theory 101

While you can find a plethora of treatises regarding sustainable design, the more extreme form of PHRWEEU is an emerging phenomenon. Still, Post Humanist Rewilded Eco Ethical Urbanism is exhibited in many recent articles, projects, and competitions, which I am sure that you are all familiar with--probably much more so than me. There are two articles that I particularly want to discuss to provide a background of PHRWEEU: Stefano Boeri’s “Down From the Stand: Arguments in Favor of a Non-Anthropocentric Urban Ethics,” published in the first issue of New Geographies, which discusses a lot of the ideas floating around and the issues involved; and Owen Hatherly’s “Living Facades – Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting,” published in MONU’s Exotic Urbanism issue. In this post I will discuss Boeri’s article.

Boeri writes:

The support for a non-anthropocentric ethical outlook implies the application of a new idea of urbanity, seen as humanity located within a spatial context where cohabitation with the kaleidoscope of life is sought not a preordained hegemony of power. This implies an equal distribution of conditions linked to social mobility, experimentation with the cohabitation of different species, and building a different relationship with the components of the natural world. We need to think about an urban politics based on inclusion, which protects principles and values that affect the future of the whole planet and its ecosystems.

Boeri then goes on to describe three potential strategies for this new urban politics: re-naturalization of urban spaces, cohabitation with various animal species, and finally, to develop a new understanding of human relations which learn from these ideas of bio-diversity and bio-politics and deal with issues of globalization and increased diversity and social mobility. The first two strategies sum up what a lot of the projects that have inspired the idea of PHRWEEU—projects like Farmadelphia by Front Studio and City Zoo by Liam Young (Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today).

A key concept of Boeri’s article and these recent projects is the idea of rewilding, from the field of conservational biology. Wikipedia defines rewilding as “passive and active activities intended to result in the reintroduction of extirpated or once-native species back into natural landscapes.” A more extreme version of rewilding is called Pleistocene rewilding, the subject of a recent WIRED article. According to WIRED, “Today, the idea that you can use those same animals, or modern analogs like elephants and Przewalski's horses, to restore an ancient ecosystem is called rewilding, and it goes far beyond conservation. In theory, we could re-create conditions that last existed when mammoths walked the earth and the environment was healthier and more diverse.” Many PHRWEEU designs are looking to do just that—restore urban environments to their natural states by re-introducing flora and fauna to those ‘blighted’ areas.

Boeri’s last strategy is important to keep in mind—let’s make sure that the new PHRWEEU does not distract us from working to reduce the inequalities and injustices that still exist within the human race.

Public Images of Architecture (Archinect OP-ED)

I was recently asked by archinect editor Nam Handerson to write an op-ed piece. The op-ed, titled The Public Image(s) of Architecture, is now published on their website.

The argument is that one of the key ways for architects to become involved in politics is to create images that communicate potential scenarios for particular political, social, cultural, and/or environmental issues. It also argues that now is a great moment for designers to become involved in politics and help steer conversations regarding potential public works agendas that may come about as part of the economic recovery. How can we argue that economic recovery be more than just a bailout for those companies that are failing and that it can be an opportunity to re-invest in public needs such as infrastructure, affordable housing, education, sustainable practices, etc.?

Since people are looking for change, let's provide the images that can provoke the spirit of how that change can manifest itself in the physical environment.

The op-ed is purposely ambiguous on the nature of what the images can be, in content and form, because I think that they can be almost anything--utopian, dystopian (as a way of demonstrating what could happen if the status quo continues), and can operate at any scale--be it your street, your neighborhood, your city, your nation, or our world.

Stack City :: Ben Behin

Stack City, Ben Behin, via archinect

Archinect posts an interview with Ben Behin featuring some beautiful images of his amazing graduate thesis from the Harvard GSD which one the prize for best thesis this past spring.
The project, titled Stack City, is a proposal for a zero-carbon development in Ras al Khaimah in the UAE. It uses Jorg Schlaig's "solar chimney power generators" as a jumping off point for re-thinking the role of technology, nature, and utopia in contemporary urban development strategies.

Here are some choice quotes from the interview:

Behin: Here I would refer to Melvin Kranzberg's first law of technology: "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." My intent in this project is neither to celebrate technology, nor to demonize it, but merely to point out that it underlies an emerging form of urbanism, and that it will ultimately be only what we make of it. Technology presents us with a series of choices, with both pitfalls and opportunities. To address them, we require not additional technology, but rather its integration with culture and politics. It is precisely here that I think architecture has a role to play; it can provoke discourse about the ethics which will shape the nature of technology in our future environments. The "machinistic" in Stack City is intended to provide such a provocation.
...
On the other hand, faced with the futility of a positive social/cultural/ecological project for architecture, giving up and regressing to an empty cynicism or retreating into formal and stylistic navel-gazing seems to get us nowhere. I think the answer is to find new ways of being earnest which are, perhaps, more nuanced, and difficult to pin down.
...
Specifically, as you pointed out in a previous discussion, cities are an accumulation of technological infrastructure which enables all the experiences we have in them. I think this is especially true in the "zero-carbon" urban developments that are being proposed today. By articulating this infrastructure as a zone that can itself be occupied, I hope to bring it into the open, and to exploit it architecturally and urbanistically through its relation with the other strata.

Stack City, Ben Behin, via archinect

You should go check out the interview for more great images and thoughts from Mr. Ben Behin.

Big Ups for Mitchell Joachim and Sustainable Cities

Wired magazine ran an article on Mitchell Joachim and his collective Terreform yesterday. Additionally Joachim was placed on Wired’s “2008 Smart List” as being one of 15 people the next president should ‘listen to.’ Unfortunately he was placed after people whose ideas include using big robots and bigger guns, anthropology in warfare, and embracing the Post-American age. Shouldn’t Joachim et co. optimistic vision for our future cities be a little closer to the top? Oh well. Hopefully next time.

Here are some choice quotes from the first article:

And don't get him started on sustainability. "I don't like the term," he says. "It's not evocative enough. You don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning." Efficiency doesn't cut it, either: "It just means less bad." Even zero emissions falls short. "This table does zero damage," he says, thumping the one in his office. "No VOCs, no carbons. Whatever. It doesn't do anything positive."

Citing US Department of Energy statistics, he says that while 29 percent of the nation's energy expenditure--what he calls "the suck"--now goes toward getting around, "in 50 years that will double." Among the biggest sources of waste, he argues, is the automobile--not only in energy but in the space it occupies (cars, he notes, spend more than 90 percent of the day parked). For nearly a century, Joachim says, "cities have been designed around cars. Why not design a car around a city?"

For some visual delight, here are some YouTube videos I dug up on Joachim and Terreform:

ImaginURBanism

Walt Disney World - Magic Kingdom

In the past whenever I heard the term ‘Disneyfication’ I always assumed it was used to describe negative transformational processes—particularly when it comes to the city. It connotes such thoughts as triviality, immaturity, and the giving up of authenticity to the onslaught of pure market-driven city building. We all remember what happened to 42^nd Street, right? There used to be a darn good strip club where that Lion King theatre now stands!!

But I was reading Reyner Banham’s wonderful book on Los Angeles recently, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and his chapter on the architecture of the fantastic caused me to rethink my misgivings towards the process of Disneyfication. Banham makes the argument that Disneyland has created a ‘transportation fantasy’ in which almost every mode of transit known to man exists in a complex interwoven tapestry of mobility. Banham writes that

Ensconced in a sea of giant parking lots in a city devoted to the automobile, it provides transportation that does not exist outside – steam trains, monorails, people-movers, tram trains, travelators, ropeways, not to mention pure transport fantasies such as simulated space trips and submarine rides. Under-age children…enjoy the license of driving on their own freeway system and adults can step off the pavement and mingle with the buses and trams of Main Street in a manner that would lead to sudden death or prosecution outside.

'The Lake' from Reyner Banham's The Architecture of Four Ecologies

One photograph of Disneyland featured in the book shows a monorail, a rollercoaster, a funicular, and a submarine all within the space of one frame. Which leads me to wonder—what if Disney’s Imagineers – the group in charge of the planning, design, engineering, and implementation of all of the Disney corporation’s theme parks and the not-so-tiny cities of hotels, restaurants, and support areas which are developed on Disney properties – created a consulting agency to teach cities how to create better mass transit systems. For, as Banham pointed out back in 1971, “Walt Disney was the only man who could make rapid transit a success in Los Angeles.” How much more efficient and well-executed would our transit systems become? How much more fantastic would our daily commutes be?

What if…

…We took it one step further and suggest that the Imagineers create their own urban design firm and begin designing the future cities of the world. They could develop a theoretical framework for their design—it could be called ‘ImaginURBanism’—and it would be the latest fad of city design for UAE sheiks and prominent Asian businessmen to commission and endorse. ImaginURBanism would blend high-end technical wizardry with thematic kitsch in a way no other urbanist could keep up with. “But wait,” you find yourself asking, “isn’t that what they are already doing over there?” Umm…yeah…good point!

The first question an ImaginURBanist asks a new client is “What’s your pleasure—Wild Wild West, or FutureLand?” The adventurous type might go for a swashbuckling dose of Pirates of the Caribbean. The megastructuralist would wholeheartedly endorse the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse—never has Kenzo Tange’s metabolism metaphor been taken quite so literally!

Or maybe the imaginURBanists would get back to their roots. The term ‘imagineering’ was given birth in the research labs of WWII as a combination of the words imagination and engineering. Imagineering was originally defined as "the fine art of deciding where we go from here.” (Wiki) Urbanism is often described as the art of scenario making—in a way urban design can be thought of as designing a stage for the future play of life to be enacted upon. Koolhaas has described his efforts at urbanism as being a ‘scenario-ist’ and a ‘script writer’ (see this interview with Charlie Rose). When thought about in that way, Imagineering and urban design are not so different. The Imagineers could potentially represent the most capable group of multi-disciplinarians ever formulated, and therefore the ImaginURBanists would be in a unique and fertile position to imagine the future potential of cities.

Would it be so different…

Archigram's Instant City

...From some of the zany utopian projects so popular among the architecture avant-garde of the 1960’s? Two of Archigram’s projects, Ideal Circus and Instant City, for example, are essentially travelling amusement parks that would travel among small towns to create an ‘event’ that would resemble the spontaneity and choice that is a result of the polyprogrammatic city. Peter Cook writes that “the town would be a City for a week—a city in terms of Event, sophistry, and offering.” When I was growing up in a small suburb in Georgia, I fondly remember the recurring event of the McNair Fair. Once every year or so the fair would come to town greatly increasing the town’s potential. Mobility is another theme that connects Archigram to the Imagineers. Both Ideal Circus and Instant City are mobilized urbanisms intended to create a network out of previously unlinked townships. Instant City, the more ambitious of the two projects, was a complex assemblage of trucks, inflatable tents, and dirigibles—in fact the circuit itself is intended to be part of the event. Perhaps the Imagineers could bring some of these future visions from the past to fruition.

'Canal City', by Jon Jerde, Fukuoka Japan, from You Are Here

Or would a city designed by the Imagineers be so different from an entire city designed by someone like Jon Jerde, or even Frank Gehry? Most laymen would probably not be able to tell the difference between the resultant designs. All would be shiny, wonky, and look like some incredible village from the future. Maybe it’s telling that they are all from Los Angeles—there must be something in the water they drink, the air they breathe, and the dirt they play around in that makes them all turn out that way.

Collage of Frank Gehry Projects

Lest we forget…

“Disneyfication…not only provides a fictional and often nostalgiac identity, but…also is purposely designed to brek the contingency of public space that is characteristic of urban culture, replacing it with a domesticated family friendly scenography of—often commercially controlled—pseudo-public spaces.”

So says Martijn de Waal about the downside of the Disneyfication process. It can be read as a cautionary tale about one of the potential downfalls of the ImaginURBanist dogma. Every future imaginURBanist must therefore remain focused on the original conception of Imagineering and not allow it to become a mere tool of developers in their not-yet-proclaimed war on the public spaces of our urban areas. As a method of keeping themselves in check an additional tenet to the ImaginURBanists doctrine could be this quote from Koolhaas: “Cities accumulate everyone’s desires; therefore they form the richest accumulation of potential for every individual to be himself or herself.” When combined with the Imagineer’s orginal mandate--the fine art of deciding where we go from here—ImaginURBanism might become of the most fecund '–isms' of urban design’s recent history.

Bionic Urban Systems aka CyBURG

Two theoretical projects recently found on Archinect demonstrate the increased potential of bionic urban systems.

The first is an idea for a subway turnstile that generates electricity when people move through the turnstile through the rotation of the gear. It is designed by Chris Teeter and Chris Booth of Metamechanics. It is part of a broad movement of designers proposing to use the kinetic energy of everyday life as an alternative source of power. Many designs have been proposed, including public plazas with paving tiles that generate power as people walk over them, dance floors which transform the energy of people dancing into a usable form of power for the club, and human powered gyms in Hong Kongalready done in Hong Kong). The MIT Media Lab is producing tons of applications for this idea.

What I like about Metamechanics' proposal is both the brilliance in its simplicity, and the awesome illustration they produced to sell the idea. I love its use of the comic medium to make the idea more accessible. One scary thought: there is something very Matrix-like about using humans moving through a mechanical turnstile to generate electricity. Let's hope those turnstiles don't develop their own intelligence any time soon! Or one day we might find ourselves permanently trapped in the subway system.

To see the rest of the comic strip and an interesting discussion on the proposal click here.

The second project is more conceptual. It is the "Augmented Ecologies" project designed by Guido Maciocci, which is an installation which fully integrates multiple biological and technological systems into an interactive experience between man, machine, and nature. Utilizing computers connected to plants, users are able to modify their spatial environment through light and sound phenomena. A broader application was explored in his "Augmented Landscapes" project, which Maciocci himself describes here:

The deployment of biotechnological interfaces to mediate habitation of outdoor urban spaces is explored conceptually within the context of my thesis project situated on the Chatham Waterfront, Medway, UK. In this project spatial and ecological conditions emerge from the deployment of a modular surface that responds to the surrounding context in it’s variations of modular density, scale and intensity of folding. The surface is deployed so that the directionality of the modules attenuates surface flow (flood waters, precipitation, surface flow from the city) allowing diverse microhabitats to emerge between the modules. In time the landscape will gradually be populated by local species according to varying soil conditions created by the surface.

Strange Weather Part II - GeoenginURBanism

Fertilize the oceans with iron in order to sequester carbon dioxide; launch fleets of ships to whip up sea spray and enhance the solar reflectivity of marine stratocumulus clouds; use trillions of tiny spacecraft to form a sunshade a million miles from Earth in perfect solar orbit. (Mooney)

As an interesting follow up to the initial “Strange Weather” post from a few weeks ago, this month’s issue of Wired magazine features an article on Geoengineering, the branch of science which explores mega-scale modifications to our planet in order to reverse the detrimental environmental and meteorological damage we humans have subjected our planet to since the start of the industrial revolution. Entitled “Climate Repair Made Simple” the article primarily discusses the work of Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood, two scientists at opposite ends of the political spectrum who have come to some sort of consensus that a science-fiction inspired intervention of epic proportions may be our last resort at resolving our climate crises. Treaties and regulations can only go so far, they argue, and they maybe too slow in reversing our trends. They think that “the only solution lay with technology: direct, aggressive intervention…to turn down the volume knob” on the global warming problem.
Geoengineers’ two most promising solutions involve the two remaining frontiers left to humanity: the oceans and space. One popular geoengineering proposal is to “inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect a portion of the sun’s rays back into space, thus cooling the planet.” (Mooney) This is the technique suggested by Wood and Caldeira. Wood first proposed this back in the 80’s with his partner in crime Edward Teller, better known for inventing his own environmental catastrophe: the hydrogen bomb. Caldeira, a computer scientist with a green heart, began studying this idea using computer simulations of the Earth during the 90’s in order to disprove Wood’s crazy theories. The only drawback: Caldeira’s simulations proved that geoengineered solutions might actually work.
In an article called “Geoengineering our way out of trouble”, Patrick Huyghe discusses the various strategies of geoengineering and the people/institutions that are at the forefront of this exploration. Another solution proposed by geoengineers “involves dumping tons of iron into the waters of the Antarctic to stimulate plankton growth and thereby absorb the buildup of CO2 and slow greenhouse warming.” (Huyghe) Huyghe points out the controversial nature of geoengineered solutions, even among geoengineers themselves.

The general consensus regarding radical geoengineering schemes is that it's too early to be talking about them--if it's not broken, don't fix it. But the future could well bring a change of mind. ‘Geoengineering may most likely become necessary if looming anthropogenic climate change becomes a disaster that can be avoided in time only by a temporary technical fix,’ notes author Martyn Fogg: ‘Natural climate change might also be mitigated in the more distant future, such as to prevent the next glaciation which, if unrestrained, would bury the wreckage of Northern civilization under several hundred meters of ice. It is also possible to imagine a situation in the remote future where geoengineering is permanently applied to extend the life of a biosphere no longer able to conduct satisfactory homeostasis due to a hotter, more evolved Sun.’

What I think could be interesting for architects and urbanists would be to thing of ways we can start providing geoengineering solutions on a building or city scale. Of course sustainable architecture and urbanism both help to do their part, but I want to speculate on what geoenginURBanism might look like.
In 1960 Buckminster Fuller, famed inventor of the geodesic dome among other things, proposed building a giant dome over the island of Manhattan, in order to create a large scale biosphere. Although living in a super large, climate-controlled interior space for our entire lives (probably on film, a la Truman Show) is probably not a good idea, could we invent a porous membrane that is breathable and only allows good UV rays in and reflects back the bad UV rays? Perhaps this could be a way of combating the urban heat island effect—build a gigantic shading device over the entire city! It could also incorporate PV cells, Wind Turbines, and other power generating devices. It could be a filigree of sustainability.
On a side note, there is renewed interest in Bucky Fuller now due to an exhibit this summerWhitney Museum of New York. Regarding Bucky’s life’s work, curator K. Michael Hays says “We didn’t talk about sustainability in Fuller’s day. But he was trying to develop ways of living that would benefit the largest number of people with the fewest possible resources.”
Early in the 2000’s, Yosuke Obuchi, a professor at the Architectural Association in London, designed Wave Garden as a prototype for an ocean-powered power plant using the piezo-electric effect, which is ” a flexible electric generator, where bending the material or applying stress creates an electric charge.” Just by resting on the ocean this giant surface can generate electric power from the oscillation of ocean waves. What is great about the wave garden is that it turns a technocratic solution into a socio-cultural-technical solution. For this is no mere power plant—on the weekends it has the potential to turn into a vast public park half the size of Central Park. It also fits neatly into our current capitalist system by offering incentives for reducing energy consumption. According to Obuchi:

Demand for the energy the Wave Garden produces on weekdays determines its function on the weekend, when energy consumption declines. If Californians have consumed little energy, they are rewarded: the tiles rise to the surface to form recreational platforms and swimming ponds. But if weekday demand is too high, the garden remains strictly a power plant. Acting as a barometer of energy use, the Wave Garden makes invisible power visible.

What if in addition to its great power and public space generative qualities, the Wave Garden also became part of the geoenginURBanism arsenal—stick some iron panels on that sucker to grow some plankton, inject it with sulfur dioxide, let it whip up some sea spray! Infuse it with geoengineering capabilities! Now, these are just two examples of what geoenginURBanism might be. I’d love to hear from you people out there if you know of other examples or what your think could be a potential for this exciting new branch of urbanism.
(crickets chirping in background)
Umm…Ok, well…here are some definitions from Wikipedia to keep you occupied:

Planetary Engineering
Planetary engineering is the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global properties of a planet.[1] The goal of this theoretical task is usually to make other worlds habitable for life. Perhaps the best-known type of planetary engineering is terraforming, by which a planet's surface conditions are altered to be more like those of Earth. Other terms used for particular types of planetary engineering include caeliforming,[citation needed] for the creation of an Earth-like atmosphere, and ecopoiesis for the introduction of an ecology to a lifeless environment. Planetary engineering is largely the realm of science fiction at present, although some types of climate change on Earth are recent evidence that humans can cause change on a global scale.
Terraforming
Terraforming is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans.
Geoengineering
Geoengineering is the deliberate modification of Earth's environment on a large scale "to suit human needs and promote habitability". [2] Others define it more narrowly as focusing only on the mineralogy and hydrology of the Earth.[3] The term geoengineering is distinct from accidental anthropogenic climate change. on Fuller at the

Water Worlds (aka AquaURBanism)

Tomorrow (or, later today actually) I’m off on holiday to Yangshuo and Sanya for what will probably end up a rain-soaked vacation. Apparently it is already flooded in Yangshuo and frogs and snakes are taking over the streets! Rather than cancel our precariously planned trip we have decided to head straight into the murky waters. In anticipation of this predicament I have decided to write about something that seems to be a hot topic in today’s urban design avant-garde: aquaURBanism^TM.

ISAR's HydroNet, winner of this year's History Channel City of the Future contest.

AquaURBanism^TM is architecture and urban design that deal primarily with issues of water (duh!). Aqueducts, oil derricks, lily pads, etc, are among the inspiration for this branch of urbanism that has picked up steam in recent years due to predictions that global climate change will result in many of our coastal cities being flooded with at least 1m of water, forcing mass exodus and migration. As such aquaURBanist strategies place an inordinate emphasis on hydrology as a design-driver. We can think of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace as an early precedent for aquaURBanism, demonstrating the link between aquaURBanism and Landscape Urbanist strategies. Recently, AquaURBanism^TM has been made famous again by the History Channel’s City of the Future contest (wait…the history channel is doing a city of the future contest?), with aquaURBanism featuring prominently in the both of the winning schemes of the last two years: Iwamoto Scott’s “Hydro-Net” and UrbanLab’s “Growing Water”.

Many of the aquaURBanist projects—but not all, of course—fall in a subcategory of ARCOLOGIES, the branch of design invented by Paolo Soleri and most successful in works of Science Fiction. I have recently become pretty fascinated with the arcology concept, part of the reason why I have picked up an addiction to the SF genre relatively late in life—as in, like, two months ago. Now I can’t get enough of the stuff. I will now refer to Wikipedia for the definition of arcology:

Arcology, from the words "ecology" and "architecture,"^[1] is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density. These largely hypothetical structures,y are often portrayed as self-contained or economically self-sufficient. called "arcologies," would contain a variety of residential and commercial facilities and minimize individual human environmental impact.

Today I am going to bring up three recent aquaURBanist projects that I have happened across. The first is LILYPAD: A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees, designed by super-young Belgian designer Vincent Callebaut, which was featured in an Archinect showcase feature today. Assuming that millions of people will be displaced by rising flood waters, Callebaut’s scheme is described as a “prototypical auto-sufficient amphibious city”.

LILYPAD, by Vincent Callebaut

In this bio-mimetic vision of the future people will live on gigantic lily pads that will house up to 50,000 people each. Each individual lily pad will have three mountains and three marinas dedicated to separate functions: work, shopping, and entertainment, respectfully, leading one to wonder—where has this guy been? Hasn’t he been filled in on our polyprogrammatic needs? Cross-pollination baby! I want a mountain with all three at once….nah, just kidding. Callebaut describes his project as an “Ecopolis”, updating the terminology of the arcology concept, but in a great moment of branding genius placed eco in front and describes it as a city rather than architecture. All kidding aside, the projects imagery is quite an enticing vision of the future—who would not want to live on a resort—although visually it reminds me more of icebergs and oil derricks than lilypads. Lilypads, to me, would suggest a more horizontal and dispersed aquaURBan conglomeration rather than a single aqualith. All in all it is a very interesting and thought-provoking project. I greatly appreciate his pro-active stance towards the problems we might face in the future and I hope some serious research begins to take place regarding these issues.

Urbanarbolismo: Maps of Spain's Alicante Region

Second, is another project I found on Archinect this week called Urbanarbolismo. As you might gather from its name it is as much about trees and forestation as it is about water. But again, one of it’s primary concerns is water. It should be duly noted that this project is not in any way, shape, or form an arcology project, but rather falls into regional planning territory. Here is the description of Urbanarbolismo from their website (please excuse the Google translation):

Urbanization housing second home in Alicante is one of the main engines of the province's economy, now this process creates a landscape that in the long run is undesirable: it destroys ecosystems, waterproofing the soil reduces water loss and therefore the amount rain… In urbanarbolismo we are working to create a housing development that compensates for the loss of evapotranspiration caused by asphalt, deforestation and wetland drainage. We created a map of the province of Alicante with the best areas to locate these estates that cause rain. We are developing types of housing to reforest the territory.

Whereas Lilypad deals with an excess of water, Urbanarbolismo is confronting the opposite issue: the desertification of natural landscapes due to evapotranspiration, a term used to describe the total amount of water loss due to evaporation and plant transpiration. Urbanarbolism’s goal is to create a symbiotic relationship between urbanization and nature, creating a type of urbanization that produces rainfall and will allow the Alicante region of Spain to be re-forested with indigenous tree species.

One thing I really appreciate about this movement is that they have written an interesting urban manifesto. In Nicolai Ourousoff’s last article in the New York Times he closes with a quote from Rem Koolhaas which asks: “Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you don’t have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don’t know.” Urbanarbolism has answered with a resounding yes, while making an argument for both better integration between the city and nature, and for a region-specific design movement at the same time. Check out the beautiful maps produced by the group here, which demonstrate a great understanding of the Alicante region. These maps and this approach seems to be influenced by Ian MacHarg's ideas about landscape ecology and a regional approach to urban planning with an emphasis on the integration of natural and man-made systems.

On a side note about desertification, check out this interesting post found on BLDGBLOG about the desertification of China west of Beijing. The photographs resemble what Beijing looks like during the many sandstorms that take place in the spring.

Image of China's Dustbowl, via BLDGBLOG

Finally, I have to put in a word for the grandfather of arcology, Paolo Soleri, and one of his latest projects, SOLARE: Lean Linear City (find the project link in the left hand side of the website). Soleri's design is not solely a work of AquaURBanism^TM but I include it here because it's form is very inspired by aqueducts and bridges and the urban megaform straddles a river. According to Soleri:

SOLARE, by Paolo Soleri

Solare, the Lean Linear City, is proposed as a possible alternative to the developing technocracy now endorsed and pursued by China. For us ignorant Westerners, it is almost like witnessing not the rebirth of a nation, but a brand new branch of the human genome falling from the heavens. The suddenness of the metamorphosis, the size of things, and the massive population involved is jolting. One fourth of the planet’s population is taking off! It’s breathtaking, for where it will land is pure guesswork. SOLARE proposes the development of a habitat that may respond to some of the critical situations now taking form in China.

Solare is pure megastructure: an infinitely extendable structure comprised of repetitive modules that house 1500 people each. Soleri's proposal is one long linear strip designed along the length of a river but it would be interesting to speculate how it might bifurcate, coil and self-intersect itself, or even close itself in a circle to provide a limit to its expansion. It would also be interesting to think about how, like the original aqueducts, water might be better integrated into the modular structure--infiltrating it, creating more of a sectional and spatial relationship between the inhabitation and the water serving it, and how it might take on additional roles of recreation, leisure, and pleasure, releasing it from the purely utilitarian role it seems to take in each of these projects.

To conclude, let's hope these projects continue to adapt, grow, and make water a larger part of normal urban discourse. Only time will tell if these projects really hold any water, to pardon the pun. One thing is for certain: whereas 20th Century settlements such as Las Vegas and Atlanta seemed to demonstrate that we were somehow liberated from developing cities adjacent to natural resources such as rivers or harbors, divorcing cities from what was once their lifeblood, the early 21st Century represents the recoupling of cities and water.

Strange Weather

The weather has been acting rather peculiar these last few weeks in Beijing. From day to day you never know what types of climatic phenomenon, natural or otherwise, are going to take place; despite, or perhaps partially the result of, the government’s attempts to completely control it.

via my flickr page

We are coming ever closer to the future. One day we might reach it. Or maybe we have. The future is now. Rainmaking used to be the stuff of myth and legend. Traveling showmen used to claim they could make it rain in the old days of the US before the practice reached its peak during the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s. Ancient tribes used to perform rain dances. Today, in Beijing, people shoot rockets into the sky and down come the rains.

"Artificial precipitation operations” (aka cloud-seeding)are performed in which a strange concoction of silver iodine, liquid nitrogen and other seeding agents are shot into nascent rain clouds, triggering rainfall. This technique was developed in the 1940’s and used by the US military in the Vietnam War to slow down Vietnamese military trucks during "Operation Popeye.” It has apparently been used for decades in China but the pace is picking up in order to clean the skies for the Olympics. It has definitely been raining more than usual these last few weeks. Most of it, I assume, is “rocket rain”, as I like to call the synthetic stuff.

Beijing Rain Artillery

If that is not enough, government officials are planning a “cloud busting” operation in order to prevent rain from occurring during the opening day ceremonies. The first cloudbusters were invented by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. He called it an “Orgone shooter” and it manipulated cosmic orgone energy which was supposed to make clouds produce rain and dissipate. I guess this is how meteorology got its libido back.

Reich and his "Cloud Buster"

For Beijing, meteorologists are currently predicting a 47% chance of rain, according to Urbane, a free-monthly newsletter in Beijing. Hmmm…50-50 chance. I could have predicted that also. Right now “100 people and three aircraft will be ready to manipulate the weather” during the Olympics. According to Zhang Qiang, head of the city’s weather modification office, “Preventing heavy rain is very difficult.” You think??

rocket rain acid rain tornado rain earthquake rain sandstorm rain cyclone hurricane freezing rain snow sleet drizzle hail convection rain purple rain

It used to be that you could look at the sky and from the color, shape, size, and frequency of the cloud formations you could tell what type of weather was coming. “Looks like rain” you’d say, or “looks like tornado weather,” or “guess what kids, it’s going to snow tonight!” And you would probably be right so you would take the necessary precautions, etc. But the way it is now, at least in Beijing, you don’t know what is going to happen. The signals have gotten crossed and pattern recognition is nearly impossible.

From what I have experienced in Beijing the last few months, sandstorms, earthquakes, and rocket rain all start the same way: the sky turns a strange pinkish-orange color, the wind becomes ferocious, lightning and thunder pick up, and at that point anything can happen. Yesterday a strange rain came upon us late in the afternoon, prompting an email conversation between me and my girlfriend that went a little something like this:

Me: that's really cool! I forwarded it to my teammates. it is looking scarier and scarier these last few minutes—I think they are shooting rockets again.
Her: I doubt. It maybe the signs of earthquake!
Me: I know, but let's just hope they are rockets, it is safer for us, at least in the short term.
Her: Babe, do you think I should go home after work or stay in SOHO
Me: I think it is safe to go home, but do what you think you need to do. Are there any warnings about earthquakes yet? I personally think it is rocket rain.
Her: Hmm, ok.

Rescue operation in Sichuan Province after Monday's earthquake, via NYT

It’s easy to become very glum about the situation. As I was thinking about it this afternoon, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick’s groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep, the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner. In Dick’s dystopian vision of the future daily radioactive fallout has forced mankind to evacuate Earth and settle on Mars. The first sign of the fallout, which appeared like a dense fog, was the extinction of owls and other birds. The humans that remained on Earth ran the risk of becoming “special”—mentally handicapped or impotent—from the radiation. If you were to take a fatalist attitude you might reckon we’ll all end up that way someday—not from the radiation but from the rain. Any chance of rain might send us running to our fallout/bomb/earthquake shelters because we will never know what to expect! The anticipated precipitation could be our salvation or our demise.

Personally, because I’m somewhat utopian, I like to think of an alternative scenario for the future—a more positive scenario: A drought-less future. A verdant future. A future with clean air. Where rockets are used to bring joy, happiness, and good health rather than destruction. Where our motto might be, like the popeye soldiers used to say back in Vietnam, "Make Mud, Not War."

references and links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainmaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-buster
http://www.amazon.com/Do-Androids-Dream-Electric-Sheep/dp/0345404475/ref=pd_bbs_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210837555&sr=8-4
http://www.philipkdick.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/2987

agroURBanism

Since I am new to the blogosphere I haven’t gotten fully comfortable sharing my thoughts with everyone out there. I’m just not used to writing everyday, or even every week yet—I feel like I need to wait for some news of paramount importance to come along to be blog worthy. I am sure that all 3 people who read the blog are pretty bummed about that (ok, you’re right—I have included myself in that count). Luckily today I became aware of some pretty amazing news and I hope to have a flurry of activity over the next few days and really kick this blog thing off right.

First, after a couple of months of being hit over the head by the media I finally got it—we have a world hunger crisis on our hands!! Right now most of you must be thinking “Shit, this guys an idiot, he just figured it out?” I know, I know! I feel like a fool too. But now I am finally on the bandwagon. So, just in case you’re like me and you don’t read the news everyday, or you have trouble putting all the pieces together, let me fill you in.

BACKGROUND - Recent History
Since 2005 global food prices have been rising at alarming rates. According to Newsweek the current crisis is a rise in global food prices caused by “surging demand for agricultural products as an alternative fuel source, the growing food needs of developing countries like China and India, higher transportation costs, droughts and floods.” My first clue was the Wall Street Journal, who ran an article a few weeks ago about rising rice prices in Asia and how the hoarding of rice in places like Indonesia and Thailand are going to make it worse and it might lead to unrest.

The second tip was Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, who made a statement that the US’ interest in developing alternative fuel sources, aka bio-fuels, were depriving less wealthy nations of foodstuffs such as corn (I believe the statistic was something like the amount of corn that it takes to provide one tank of fuel for a car could feed a child for one year, roughly 90 kg). At the time I thought—so what, plant a little more corn—we need to reduce our carbon footprint! The UN’s argument at the time seemed reductive to me—boiling down the world hunger problem as a battle between starvation and the environment (could there not be a third way?), but it does hold some water. It still seems strange to me however, and very scary, that these two monumental global problems—world hunger and climate change—could somehow be at odds with each other.

Finally, today I open up cnn.com to find this: Somalis Riot Over Food Prices. Rioting is occurring because of food prices!! People are going hungry! There is a rice black market! We have to do something about this!!

INTRODUCTION
Luckily, architects, landscape architects, and urbanists have been planning for this type of situation. There have been many proposals in the last couple of years for different types of agricultural based infrastructures that can be integrated into nurban areas, what I am calling AGRO-URBANISM. The impetus for these proposals are manifold and include the concerns previously mentioned as well as issues of sustainability and sustainable development, a re-positioning of the landscape architecture discipline and the rise of the hybrid discipline “landscape urbanism”, and recent trends in architecture focusing on performance-based design which derive inspiration from ecological and biological systems. What I would like to do in this post is to present a compilation of some of the urban farming proposals that I personally find most interesting—it is not intended to be an exhaustive list, just some of “Dave’s Faves”.

I have grouped the following AGRO-URBAN projects into three broad categories based on their general spatial morphology—Horizontal Projects, Vertical Projects, and Mobile projects. For some of the authors of the projects these morphologies represent a strong ideological stance for the particular trajectory that urban farming should take in the future. It is my belief though that the pressures of urban geography, political structure, and modes of living result in such highly diverse contexts that a fully integrated agro-urbanism must exploit the potentialities of each of the three strands and their various sub-types.

Horizontal Projects
In the 90’s projects began to appear that integrated urban and environmental systems. Parc Andre Citroen for example, designed by Clement and Provost, is a large urban park in Paris that exploits the productive nature of agriculture as a medium and fuses it with recreational and educational functions. Two unrealized projects that are very interesting to look at are Agronica by Andrea Branzi and City Fruitful by Kuiper Campagnos and Oosterhuis.

Agronica (1994), and its follow up project for Strijps Phillips in Eindhoven (1999), is the result of the evolution of Branzi’s theoretical research into flexible urban systems since “No-Stop City” and his collaboration with Archizoom in the 1960’s. Agronica uses industrial production techniques to create a provisional, flexible, low-impact agricultural infrastructure that responds to today’s demands for fluidity and rapid change of use. It is based on a theory Branzi developed called “Weak and Diffuse Modernity” based on the transition from mechanical to digital technologies and new economic systems that demand micro-managed temporary equilibriums rather than definitive, lasting solutions. Agronica can therefore be seen as a transitional project and can take advantage of agriculture’s ameliorative properties to prepare brown field sites for future uses. It should also be pointed out that the Eindhoven project also proposes public transportation infrastructures and recreational uses for the site—including a gigantic roller coaster!


City Fruitful by Oosterhuis, et al., developed out of a particular problem in the Netherlands that most countries do not face—a lack of space for housing due to a highly developed agricultural industry largely using greenhouse and hydroponics technologies. The idea was to integrate agriculture and housing, typically “monoculture environments”, in one urban plan. The resulting design consisted of hybridized greenhouse and residential structures, agriculture public spaces, and the use of heat-exchange for an environmental and economically efficient system. You might say it is an early example of an ecolomical project, to quote a recent buzz-word of both public policy and design.

In general, the Netherlands has produced a model for highly efficient, spatially dense agriculture industry that I think could be a prototype for the rest of the world. The result of the amalgamation of the greenhouses is something I have often thought of as a “farm-city” that can be integrated into urban areas or even into hybrid building types. When I first encountered them last year near Delft I wondered if it could be possible to integrate these structures with other horizontal building types such as parking garages, big box retail, and storage facilities—the detritus result of sprawl and contemporary lifestyles, particularly in the US.
Photo of greenhouses in The Netherlands, by author.

In addition to these large-scale plans it is worth mentioning the rise in popularity of co-op and community gardens worldwide. These grassroots efforts at producing agro-urbanism are great ways of improving the environmental and social sustainability of neighborhoods and cities.


Vertical Projects
Vertical urban farms have become in vogue recently largely through the publicity efforts of Dickson Despommier and his Vertical Farming project. Despommier is a professor at Columbia University and has developed some important articles and projects espousing the virtue of vertical farms. The statistics are quite convincing: if population projections hold true our world will have 8.9 billion inhabitants by 2050, requiring us to increase our current 800 million hectares of agricultural land by 109 hectares-roughly the size of Brazil. The problem is twofold—first, the amount of arable land is limited, and second, cultivating the land for agricultural use destroys eco-systems and reduces bio-diversity, particularly with monoculture farming techniques. Vertical farming is the logical result of these issues—you can grow more crops on less land while also freeing up current agriculture land to return to its natural state. According to Despommier one thirty story vertical farm with the footprint of one city block (roughly 30 mill sq. ft.) could provide enough produce to accommodate the needs of 10,000 people.

A visit to the Vertical Farm website will demonstrate a number of vertical farm designs by practitioners and students alike. To me, the most beautiful of the propositions is the Living Tower by atelier SOA Architectes, perhaps because it is the least high-tech scheme featured on the site (and it has some great graphics!). It is also one of the few hybrid schemes featured, integrating office and residential, and agricultural functions in one building. While this is a provocative idea I wonder if that reduces its feasibility—both from a implementation perspective (what agency or developer would commission such a concoction?) and from a building technology perspective. While these are serious considerations for the future of vertical farming, I do not want to diminish the power of the Living Tower’s design.

No discussion of vertical farming would be complete without bringing up MVRDV's Pig City project. Well, perhaps it would be complete, but it was the project that first introduced me to the notion of vertical farming. Besides it's obvious humor and irony one of the things that is interesting about MVRDV's proposal is that it is one of the few projects that focuses on the production of MEAT instead of vegetables. The carnivore in me just loves that!

Recently Work AC has jumped on the vertical farm bandwagon as well—or perhaps their proposals can be seen as a hybrid of the horizontal and vertical projects as they seem to have married the urban farm to Virilio and Parent’s “function of the oblique” concept. Their competition winning proposal for this summer’s PS1 competition in New York introduces an urban farm as a piece of traditional urban furniture cum infrastructure—a folded surface that acts as stage, seating, canopy, and above all, an agro-urban ground. From the architect’s description: “our project becomes the ‘Urban Farm’ – a magical plot of rural delights inserted within the city grid that resonates with our generations’ preoccupations and hopes for a better and different future. In our post-industrial age of information, customization and individual expression, the most exciting and promising developments are no longer those of mass production but of local interventions.” Work AC also revisited this theme when asked by New York magazine to produce a Utopian vision for a site in downtown New York. Their terraced apartment building features rooftop farms and putting greens. What is interesting is that this building is essentially a collapsed version of Abercrombie’s valley section and plays on recent trends of suburbanites moving back to the city and bringing everything with them but the kitchen sink (cuz it’s already there but the golf courses, wal-marts and home depots are not).

Mobile Projects
This last category features a series of projects that respond to evolving trends in lifestyle (increasingly nomadic) and tourism (eco-tourism, to be more exact), particularly the increased mobility of the world's population. These projects are highly exploratory even among this collection of speculative proposals, and introduce movement into agroURBanism--either the movement of people in relation to agriculture, or the movement of the ground itself!

The ‘Nomadic Garden” is a transportable garden designed by Nadeau, Dupont-Rougier, and Alexander and exhibited in Paris in 1999. The concept is based on the increasingly mobile lifestyles of the urban dweller whose transient nature does not permit the ability to invest in a garden. The design consists of a stainless steel cube that opens up to reveal four wooden shelves that can be shifted horizontally and vertically to allow a variety of configurations. It utilizes a hydroponics system for growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers and it can also be converted to a small-scale green house. When the owner moves she can simply pack up the box and take it with her.

‘Soil Horizon’ is an art installation by Lateral Architecture that reveals how agro-urbanism can embed eidetic and educational purpose allowing it to transcend the primarily technocratic nature of many urban farming proposals. While not intended as an urban farm as such I think it could become a model for a nomadic farming similar to the nomadic garden project. Taking inspiration, I think, from Robert Smithson’s non-sites, Soil Horizon is part garden, part art, and part mapping project. It reveals the diverse geographic character of a region—it essentially acts as a lens through which one can view an entire territory. It also demonstrates the fundamental beauty of dirt—something I have been fascinated in since my days of soil judging in 4-H.

Alishan Tourist Routes, by Reiser + Umemoto, while not exactly urban, demonstrates the symbiotic potential of agriculture, tourism, and geography. From the architects’ website: “One degree of latitude = One kilometer of altitude. This is a crucial equation in the understanding of the potential of the Alishan Mountain as a tourist site. It allows both an ecological and cultural connection between Taiwan and a family of nations via a material argument about culture in the new global society: that new regionalisms can be constructed at all levels of material practice. We propose transforming the Alishan railroad right-of-way into an agricultural strip, supplying a series of specialty restaurants and a microeconomy of taste tourism…Agriculture maintains a varied and dynamic landscape of extreme variance. A Journey up the Alishan Mountain is a journey through four distinct ecosystems. We propose to harness this difference and accentuate it, so that the different climactic regions are reflected in a gradient of culture, cuisine, and landscape along the line. What we are proposing is the development of micro-agriculture to support international cuisine tourism along the Alishan train line.”

-to be continued-

Additonal Links and References:
Hand to Mouth in Newsweek
Global warming rage lets global hunger grow
In hungry world, Japan's farmers stuck with rice found in the Boston Globe, regarding diversifying diets and the demands it makes on Asian agricultural traditions.

Urban Farming
Sky Farming
Next Energy News features an article about a vertical farm in Las Vegas

Sustainable Agriculture from Wikipedia
Urban Agriculture from Wikipedia

Architects and Projects
Eindhoven, un modello di urbanizzazione debole article on Branzi's Eindhoven project
Architettura e agricoltura: article on architecture and agriculture in Italian (I translated it with Google translate)

From Other Blogs:
Tree Hugger
Inhabitat