Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…

This fall, Aperture has released three photography books that, each in its own way, talk about development, the environment, and the human relationship to the landscape. This last point in particular—the way the landscape is both affected and perceived by human beings—struck me as the connecting thread among three otherwise quite different books. While each body of work tells a different story, they all made me think about my own environment, both local and global.
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In Sawdust Mountain, Eirik Johnson presents us with the familiar struggle between humans and the natural environment upon which they depend. His subject is the logging and salmon fishing industries of the Pacific Northwest, and the way these industries must adapt as the landscape changes. The photographs refer clearly to the history of landscape photography—calling to mind, particularly, early American photographs of the West by such greats as Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson. But Johnson does not herald triumph in his images; rather, his pictures are quiet—nearly silent, in fact—and his palette is dominated by the subdued, rain-washed blues and greens of the Pacific Northwest. Here, the sun never blinds us, but rather appears as through gauze. These muted hues complement the subject matter—the industries and the towns that serve them are in transition as the old-growth trees and wild salmon grow more and more scarce. Read more…

Our recent story on Thom Faulders’s backyard installation Deformscape has been all over the blogs lately. People seem particularly amused (and rightfully so) by a quote from the owner, a senior vice president at Apple, regarding his ambition for the flat surface’s vortex effect: “I wanted someone to barf when they look at it.” Well, over the weekend, the project’s photographer, Theodor Rzad, chimed in on the story’s comments page with an important addendum to the discussion:

I’m Thom Faulder’s photographer for this project and I can promise you that neither of us barfed during the shoot.

Glad we cleared that up. You can view more photos of Faulders’s vertiginous installation over at Digited Image Company. And be sure to read the original story here.

This is part one of our fall roundup of new and notable books on architecture, culture, and design. Stay tuned for the second installment later this month.
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Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture
Edited and designed by Ian Luna and Lauren A. Gould
Cover design by Kenya Hara
Rizzoli, 232 pp., $65

Having outlined the architect’s key design principles in its introduction (an emphasis on humanitarian design “pressed into service”) Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture follows the relatively linear evolution of Ban’s constructions in paper, a building material that he has championed and a typology he’s developed over the past 20 years. Ban’s achievements are nothing short of remarkable—he builds cheaply and with minimal environmental impact, which, in particular, makes his architecture ideal for temporary relief structures. But it remains to be seen how structurally complex the buildings can get, since the largest and most sophisticated architecture in Shigeru Ban tends to be elaborately constructed roofs and open-air exhibition spaces. (By no means should that diminish the architect’s success to date.) Ban excels at exceeding expectations, and recent projects, like the unbuilt Georges Pompidou Centre in Metz, France, hint at interesting new possibilities for his paper creations.
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Once Upon a Chair: Design Beyond the Icon
Edited by Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, Andrej Kupetz, and Shonquis Moreno
Designed by Floyd Schulze
Gestalten, 272 pp., $65

Once Upon a Chair: Design Beyond the Icon is not really about chairs, and only superficially about post-iconic design. Nor, as is implies in its introduction, does the book ever explain what’s so “progressive” or “responsible” (its words) about the work it showcases: pieces like the Rockin’ Chair, which comes equipped with built-in microphone and headphone jacks, or the PING-PONG Dining Table—whose name pretty much says it all. The chairs (and tables, stools, lamps, bookshelves, vases, kitchenware, and rugs) showcase the avant-garde in product design, and they’re often refreshingly whimsical and innovative in their use of material and technology. What they’re not—and this is a problem only because the book claims it as its guiding principle—is either socially impactful, or representative of identifiable trends in the world of furniture making. Read more…

Balkany in front of a Gropius-designed power plant on the Reese hospital campus. Photo: Edward Lifson

When Chicago recently dreamt of hosting the 2016 Olympics, its bid included the demolition of an unused hospital complex to make way for an Olympic Village. Then a young architect in town named Grahm Balkany sounded alarm bells that some of the buildings, the planning, and other aspects were the work of the pioneer of modern architecture and creator of the Bauhaus—Walter Gropius! Once Chicago lost the Olympics to Rio you’d think the city would have called off the bulldozers, right?  Alas, if you think that, obviously you don’t know “The Chicago Way.”

During our recent conversation, Balkany looked battle-weary, as if he fears that if he ever got a good night’s sleep, he’d wake up to find the Gropius buildings gone. It often takes a transplant to show locals what they’ve got. Balkany moved from Denver to Chicago in 1998. “Specifically for the architecture,” he says. “I saw a beautiful Gothic Revival limestone field house, and learned Chicago was about to tear it down! I thought, man, you don’t have buildings like this where I’m from and here they toss them out like rubbish.” He wrote letters to newspapers, and helped establish Preservation Chicago to advocate. Three years ago Balkany brought to light drawings, letters, and blueprints that seem to show that Walter Gropius and his firm, the Architects’ Collaborative, were heavily involved in designing at least eight buildings, plus the master and site plans and the landscaping of the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital complex on the near south side by Lake Michigan. Balkany founded the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to try to save it all. The city of Chicago, which now owns it, has other ideas.

Did you celebrate when Chicago lost the bid for the 2016 Olympics?

We would never celebrate anything that is a loss for Chicago. But I admit a part of us rejoiced. Only that part that sees this as an opportunity to revisit the premature decision to demolish Michael Reese Hospital. Read more…

In aerial photos, the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park—also known simply as “100 Acres”—looks like a remote swath of unspoiled nature, with a forest and wetlands surrounding a pristine lake. In reality, you’re looking at the newest addition to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The IMA created the park out of an old gravel pit and construction yard—and, next June, 100 Acres will finally be complete with the installation of eight site-specific works by an impressive roster of international artists. Read more…

Bilbao might still be best known for a single museum, but civic leaders in the Basque capital have been aggressive in their efforts to revitalize the city through a series of broader urban redesign initiatives. In 2002, city fathers commissioned César Pelli, Eugenio Aguinaga, and Diana Balmori to produce a masterplan for the Abandoibarra area in the city’s downtown. Five years later, its government announced BilbaoJardín 2007, a contest that solicited designs for garden plots of up to 80 square meters (about 860 square feet), to be built on scattered sites throughout the city. And when that project proved successful—132 contestants entered, 27 proposals were built—the contest was renewed for the summer of 2009.

On the invitation of contest organizers, Balmori Associates (which worked on the downtown masterplan, and then judged Jardín contestants in 2007) contributed its own version to this year’s contest. Balmori’s park—descriptively named “The Garden That Climbs Stairs”—was completed over the summer, but photos just arrived in our inbox the other week. Sited between two Arata Isozaki towers, the miniature urban park is an arresting combination of native and exotic plants sidling up the steps leading to Santiago Calatrava’s Nervion River Footbridge. (Seen from above, it kind of looks like a cross between The Blob and the High Line.) For a look at the other winning entries—a total of 31 were built this year—visit the BilbaoJardín 2009 site; see more photos of Balmori’s climbing garden after the jump. Read more…

Meyer May photos: courtesy Steelcase

Last week I was fortunate to be in the audience at the Meyer May house anniversary symposium, a wide-ranging discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas and principles as embodied in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, house he built for the clothier Meyer May in 1909. In 1987, the local furniture behemoth Steelcase finished a meticulous two-year restoration of the house—which, among other problems, had a seriously leaky roof—and opened it up for public tours. It’s now considered perhaps the most complete distillation of Wright’s vision, and this year it turned 100 years old.

But the symposium didn’t dwell on the past. Read more…

If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, New Yorkers (and Venetians, Parisians, Savannahians, and Sydneysiders) might soon feel their ears burn. Last week, administrators of the Songdo International Business District, the work-in-progress eco-city located just 40 miles from the South Korean capital, announced the completion of “phase one” of the project’s ambitious, $35 billion development scheme. The first phase is officially marked by the completion of 100 acres of green space modeled after New York’s Central Park (and named, appropriately, “Central Park”). Also to be included in the final scheme for Songdo: Italianate canals, Savannah-style parks, Parisian boulevards, and a convention center modeled after Jørn Utzon’s iconic opera house. Read more…

Renderings: Lincoln Center West 65th Street Project: Diller Scofidio + Renfro in association with FXFOWLE Architects

The other day I checked out the latest phase of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ongoing facelift of Lincoln Center, a new outdoor-seating area called Barclays Capital Grove (catchy name!) located just north of the Metropolitan Opera House. Although its official opening isn’t until August, the grove has been available for use since May—thankfully, since it offers more of what the Lincoln Center campus has always sorely lacked: public places to sit and meet. Read more…