Civic Center Victory Garden

Claiming civic space for food production

On July 1, 2008 volunteer urban gardeners, led by Rebar, began removing 10,000 square feet of turf from San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. Over the course of the following two weeks, teams of volunteers transformed the site into a temporary food-producing garden. On July 12, over 250 volunteers transplanted thousands of seedlings into donated soil.
Wedged between San Francisco’s Civic Center, an area that contains many of the city’s largest government and cultural institutions, and the Tenderloin, a neighborhood shackled with significant poverty, homelessness, and crime, the garden stood as a true social and political experiment. Within weeks, this new ‘Garden of Communities’ was producing approximately 100 lbs of fresh organic produce a week, all of which was donated to the San Francisco Food Bank, and subsequently distributed to meals programs throughout the City.
Originally slated to be removed on September 21, Mayor Gavin Newsom requested that the Garden stay in place through Thanksgiving 2008. The Garden was part of a broader effort to reconsider the way we think about urban open space, transforming ornamental landscapes into productive landscapes.
The project was a great success, but a temporary garden is not sufficient to achieve the fundamental change in the food system we seek. If the Civic Center Victory Garden truly succeeds, it will become a powerful symbolic gesture of both the political will in City Hall to support urban agriculture in San Francisco, and of the collective surge of interest in fixing our country’s broken food system.
Numerous groups are at work in San Francisco and across the nation responding to rising fuel prices and food costs by getting their hands dirty and rebuilding the practice of local food production, building bridges between urban communities and the peri-urban and rural farm families that support them, and teaching young and old how to garden again.
The Civic Center Victory Garden was built in collaboration with SF Victory Gardens, Slow Food Nation, City Slicker Farms, CMG landscape Architecture, and hundreds of community volunteers.
Date: Summer, 2008
Location: Civic Center, San Francisco, CA

http://rebargroup.org/victory-garden/

Nomadic Grove

A meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city

Commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Nomadic Grove is a meditation on rootedness in the relentlessly changing city. To sit, relaxed, looking up at a tree framing the sky is a simple and profound human experience, but one in surprisingly short supply in modern cities. Perhaps it is because trees resist the city’s constant motion, the city’s ruthlessness–they are specific in a world of impatient cosmopolitanism.
Nomadic Grove is an experimental landscape that straddles the poles of stability and movement. The Grove consists of an archipelago of gem-like islands suspended low on wheels, floating just above the surface of Jessie Square as if it were the plane of a calm lake. Fragments of this floating terrain are solidly but temporarily anchored in one of several compositions that change from week to week. In the abstracted islands, large specimen trees are rooted, defining the center of a small world. The trees–oak and olive–are adapted to the climates of both Israel and the Bay Area, representing the Mediterranean biome that is shared between the two regions.
The gem islands, singly and in relationship with one another, provide a means for visitors to inhabit a familiar urban space in novel ways, creating amphitheaters, seating, lounging decks, informal classrooms, or social spaces, depending on the day and the configuration.
Playing on themes of migration, rootedness, local adaptation, and miniature landscape, Nomadic Grove is an inhabitable sketch of the ever-evolving relationship between human and non-human nature.
Date: 2012
Location: Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA

http://rebargroup.org/nomadic-grove/

Rooftop Vertical Farm

The chef of the restaurant John Mooney uses a pulley to send his crops all the way down to the restaurant below his vertical garden served to their customer fresh. This idea really helps in keeping the environment safe and clean. First, one needs not to spend so much carbon in transporting crops and produce because all they need is a pulley. Next, the plants themselves are great filter of air pollutants thus; fresh and clean air is highly possible in this rooftop vertical farm.

http://www.igreenspot.com/have-a-good-and-clean-harvest-with-your-rooftop-vertical-farm/

The Riverpark Farm In NYC

The Riverpark Farm is located at the Alexandria Center and is hailed as New York City’s most urban farm. The farm then produce fresh and local produce to its adjacent restaurant, the Riverpark Restaurant. In this way, carbon emission produce for transporting produce will be minimized if not eliminated, which is good for the environment. Other large cities, should take the Riverpark Farm in NYC as their example and go hand in hand in saving the environment.

http://www.igreenspot.com/enjoy-fresh-produce-with-the-riverpark-farm-in-nyc/

RYCKAERTSPLEIN

The renovation of the station area at the edge of the city of Antwerp brought back a coherent relationship between the 2 ha square and the infrastructure surrounding it. Instead of just being a traditional station square, a place for passing through, West 8 sought to achieve a constantly changing perspective effect in a garden for the passers-by.

Freeform patterns of natural stone, gravel and 80cm high, evergreen hedges create a silent inward turning world interacting with the busy travellers; It is defining arbitrary routes through the station square.

http://www.west8.nl/projects/public_space/ryckaertsplein/

COUR DE LOGES

The green garden is located inside a contemporary urban block. The ‘Cour des loges’ is made of a composition of five distinct volumetric buildings. The roof garden connects the different buildings with each other and give coherence to the public area.

. The different heights and scales make it possible to plant trees. The sculptural Ginkgo Biloba trees, placed in inclination, are supported by steel structures. The natural elements are dramatized. The raised edges invite the users of the building to sit down and meet. At night, the Cour des loges is enlightened by spotlights which are placed on the roofs of the buildings. The projected circles create a theatrical atmosphere. Around the building, the green area and the use of materials are in coherence with the existing plans of public spaces.

http://www.west8.nl/projects/gardens/cour_de_loges/

Sustainable Living Pavilion, United States by Behin + Ha

In a demonstration of traditional community spirit, more than sixty volunteers from New York volunteered their time to make a house sustainable Behin Ha to its realization. Living Pavilion “is the winner of a contest -” City of Dreams Pavilion – led by the participatory FIGMENT arts training new architects York Committee of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (ENYA) and Association of Structural Engineers New York (SEAoNY) to design and install a flag of architecture on Governors Island for the duration of the summer.

Built over a period of three weeks – first in New Jersey, and on Governors Island – Living Pavilion is “low-tech, low-impact” architectural installation, consisting almost entirely of milk crates and natural flora. Similar a green wall, the plants were inserted into the milk crates to provide a “synthesis of form, structure, light and life”, composed mainly of hanging plants shade tolerant. Because of its technical ingenious construction, installation can be easily removed as the summer winds down and the milk crates planted divided between New York City.

Regarding the construction process, Behin Ha explain. CNC routing plywood ribs allowed us to incorporate features that have recorded all the parts in the assembly, thus eliminating all time measurements manual alignment and accelerate the process of assembling “Not only the act of building proactive lead members of the local community with a common goal, but the design itself,” seeks to embody and communicate the ethics of reuse, recycling and re-purposing, educating members of the public passing quietly on the ease and accessibility of sustainable design

http://www.designtopnews.com/architecture-design/sustainable-living-pavilion-united-states-by-behin-ha/

Unire/Unite - Urban Movement Design

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/yap/2012rome_urbanmovement.html

Public Farm One/ work AC

PF1 (Public Farm One) is an urban farm concept built with inexpensive and sustainable materials recyclable after its use at P.S.1, such as cardboard tubes that form a continuous surface creating multiple zones of activity including swings, fans, sound effects, innovative seating areas, and a refreshing pool at its center, as an Urban Beach.

http://www.archdaily.com/708/ps1-young-architects-program-2008-work-architecture-company/

http://www.publicfarm1.org/index.php?/images/