- Via Claiming Public Space

” BY MARTY HAIR

FREE PRESS GARDEN WRITER

Greg Willerer raises specialty organic produce — burgundy bush beans, pungent herbs for flavoring teas, edible flowers — and sells them to restaurants. It’s unusual fare, “stuff you just can’t buy off a truck,” he says.

The fact that he grows this produce in Detroit, near Tiger Stadium, might strike some as unusual. But Willerer, a 38-year-old teacher who loves to cook, is one of many urban gardeners turning to microfarming as a smart use of vacant land. He says his neighborhood near the old stadium is nearly as open as the country, ripe for cultivation. Growing produce to sell allows residents to reap some economic benefit from unused space where businesses and homes once stood.
“What we’re doing here is kind of a wildfire of positivity,” he says. “We’re not going to be filling the void left by the auto industry, but we’re doing something.”

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Not a favorite… i categorize this as news more than anything else..

- Via World Architecture News

Abu Dhabi Municipality announces the prestigious and unique Emerald Gateway project designed by KEO International

” Abu Dhabi Municipality has announced that it is developing in partnership with the private sector, the unique Dhs 7 Billion Emerald Gateway project. The development includes 88 Towers on both sides of a 3.5 kilometer segment of the Highway. The site offers tremendous potential to become an important high-end residential and hotel destination. At its center, there will be giant artistically designed sculptures inspired by the wings of a falcon. These beautiful forms will be placed inside the Sculpture Park, resting on a reflecting pool that will create an impressive gateway to the city during the day and especially at night when it will be lit to glow as two translucent forms.

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- Via The Guardian

The Guardian interviewed Koolhaas on Preservation, CCTV, and OMA..

” Welcome to the future Any self-respecting world city now needs outlandish buildings, but what about the past? Superstar architect Rem Koolhaas tells Jonathan Glancey why even he gets nostalgic

Rem Koolhaas has some photographs to show me. Not glossy shots of some earth-shattering new building he has created but small snaps of street life in the age-old courtyards of Beijing. Known as “hutongs”, these are tight webs of hotchpotch homes and alleys gathered around wells.
“Most of them will soon be gone,” says the architect, speaking in the Rotterdam headquarters of his company, Oma.”The Olympics next year will find them old-fashioned and unsightly. Those who live there are being given new high-rise flats. These are well-equipped and clean, but people, I think, miss their old life down below in the courtyards.” Yes, down below - with the fruit-sellers, public kitchens, urban bustle and banter, the travelling conjurors and steaming public laundries. All going to make way for the brave new Olympian world. …..” read more

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- Via Architectural Record

” By itself, the image is not necessarily striking: a battered boxcar being hoisted into place at a construction site. Its power lies in knowing its history. The car, an exhibit at the new Museum of Memory and Tolerance, which opens next year in Mexico City, once transported Jews and other people destined for Nazi death camps in Poland during the Holocaust.
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- Via Dezeen

“Filmmakers Neutral will present their first solo exhibition at the Architecture Foundation’s Yard Gallery in London, starting on 14 September.”
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- Via BLDBLOG

“Michael Cook is a writer, photographer, and urban explorer based in Toronto, where he also runs a website called Vanishing Point.
Despite its subject matter, however, Vanishing Point is more than just another website about urban exploration. Cook’s accounts of his journeys into the subterranean civic infrastructure of Canada and northern New York State – and into those regions’ warehouses, factories, and crumbling hospitals – often include plans, elevations, and the odd historical photograph showing the sites under construction.
For instance, his fascinating, inside-out look at the Ontario Generating Station comes with far more than just cool pictures of an abandoned hydroelectric complex behind the water at Niagara Falls, and the detailed narratives he’s produced about the drains of Hamilton and Toronto are well worth reading in full.
As the present interview makes clear, Cook’s interests extend beyond the field of urban exploration to include the ecological consequences of city drainage systems, the literal nature of public space, and the implications of industrial decay for future archaeology – among many other things we barely had time to discuss.
Or, perhaps more accurately phrased, Cook shows that urban exploration has always been about more than just taking pictures of monumentally abstract architectural spaces embedded somewhere in the darkness….”Read the full article

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- Via Jetson Green

” There’s an excellent interview by CNN with Ken Yeang, principle of the UK firm Llweleyn Davis Yeang.  Almost a year ago, I wrote about Yeang’s fascinating Menara Mesiniaga building, and that article has been a popular one in terms of visitors.  Yeang is an ecological, architectural visionary designing in a way that blurs the boundary between the natural and human-built environments.  With eco-logical design, the goal is to build a structure with no pollution or waste.  And we’re getting there, too.  To quote Yeang, “we’ll see green buildings long before 2020 — I think the movement is intensifying. Within the next 5-10 years we’ll see a lot more green buildings being built. Not just buildings but green cities, green environment, green master plans, green products, green lifestyles, green transportation. I’m very optimistic.“  The green buildings pictured in this post are only a fraction of those designed by Ken Yeang.  If you’re looking for more information, feel free to pick up his latest book: ECODESIGN: A Manual for Ecological Design. ”

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Montevideo Tower by mecanoo. Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 

* Foster + Partners. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. USA

Popularity: 3% [?]

- via A Daily Dose of Architecture

Sea Ranch Condominiums in Sonoma County, California by Charles Moore, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon and Richard Whitaker (MLTW Group), 1965.

Popularity: 2% [?]

hello all…

a new section has been added to Architecture Lab. “Archilab Set”, this section will be dedicated only to architecture photos..

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