More Milan

"...While Herzog has a point that the planned structures are indeed fantastical, it is debatable whether interesting, informative exhibitions and wild pavilion designs are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, innovations in architecture, construction, and urban design are an integral part of how the world will address the food challenges of the 21st century..."

"...However, there are a handful of designs that stand out as attempts to rethink the way we build and how it relates to modern agriculture and sustainable food production for the next century. Most of the pavilions use sustainable materials and construction methods that utilize national building techniques. Inside, exhibitions—often interactive—showcase the biodiversity, culture, and food traditions of each nation..."

"...While the architecture of the Milan exposition overall continues the recent trends of the “vanity fair,” some fragments exist that might shed light on how architecture can interact with innovations in agriculture and food production in the coming decades. Ideally, this concept would be pushed much further, but for now these will have to serve as examples for future projects..."

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Food + the City

Food and the City makes the relationships between food and the city visible by exploring both the ways in which buying and eating food have become such a significant part of urban public life, and the ways in which design supports and enhances the place of food in the city. It is timely because the proliferation of urban cafes, restaurants, and markets continues, but is not sufficiently recognized or analyzed. Food related topics are now of great interest in academic and design disciplines but the theme of this issue, food as it relates to the variety and vitality of urban life, has not been addressed. Food and the City, will develop ideas from the popular Food and Architecture (2002). 

Contents include: Raw, Medium, Well Done: A Typological Reading of Australian Cafes by Jane Lawrence & Rachel Hurst; Blurring Boundaries, Defining Place: The New Hybrid Space of Dining by Gail Satler; The New and the Rare: Gourmet Food in the Japanese Department Store by Masaaki Takahashi; Tasting the Periphery: Bangkok’s Agri and Aqua-cultural Fringe by Brian McGrath & Danai Thaitakoo; “Big Sign” Dining in Hong Kong: The City as Dining Room by Jeffrey W. Cody and Mary C. Day; Taste, Sound and Smell:  On the Street in Chinatown and Little Italy by Nisha Fernando; What’s Eating Manchester? Gastro-culture and Urban Regeneration David Bell & Jon Binnie; Designing the Gastronomic Quarter by Susan Parham

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Canada Green Roofs

The city bylaw requires green roofs to be 80 per cent covered three years after planting. If you're harvesting crops every season, the green roof is periodically naked while the new crops grow, and this breaks the law, Throness explained.

“I think the fear was that edible plants would take too much labour and water,” and the city wanted to give developers a low-maintenance solution for building green roofs, Throness said. “But we’ve been monitoring our water use and don’t require any more.”

After a pilot project in 2013, last summer the roof hosted a five-crop rotational farm that produced more than two tonnes of vegetables, she said. “We’ve found that we can grow everything here.”

The harvest is split between campus kitchens and the Gould St. farmer’s market on Wednesdays.

Ontario imports billions of dollars of produce from California each year and this supply is becoming threatened due to the state’s prolonged drought, said Throness. Rooftop agriculture adds local food security to the existing environmental benefits of green roofs.

For Peck, while rooftop farms aren’t appropriate everywhere — older buildings often can’t handle the extra weight — they’re an essential part of the future of the city.

“There are still hundreds of millions of square feet of roofs in Toronto that could still be greened,” Peck said. “We invest billions and billions of dollars on grey infrastructure. It would pay great dividends to devote a small part of that to green infrastructure.”

By the numbers:

72,020: Square metres of green roofs built in Toronto in 2014

232,000: Square metres of green roofs already in existence

185,000: Additional square metres approved.

4,984 hectares: Land area identified as the total available area for green roofs in the City of Toronto, about 8% of the total.

20 %: Minimum area that must be covered by green roof on new buildings.

2 tonnes: Amount of produce produced by a 929-square-metre farm on the roof of Ryerson University’s George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre last summer.

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Architecture and Food

Specialist Design Consultancy dedicated to developing the architecture of Building Integrated Agriculture.

We work with building owners and developers to unlock value in their sunlit roofscapes and concept designs for new-builds by developing a model of horticultural production infrastructure supplying local markets and consumers with fresh produce.

Once roofscapes are activated and relationships with their hosts are negotiated and agreed, A&f will form branches of sister company * Hyperlocal to take on the horticultural operation. We hope to eventually develop London's own indigenous, high-volume, resilient food production capacity supplying fresh produce at stable prices, free from supply-side volatility, over the long term.

Urban Agriculture is a field steadily gaining attention for its commercial and social opportunities. We believe it will be a major influence on the development of architecture and a powerful tool in urban food security, community development and climate change adaptation.

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Urban Agriculture

Book: http://www.verticalfarm.com/

Vertical Farming update

"If you follow architecture or design at all, you may have come across aggressively futuristic renderings of skyscrapers topped with rice paddies, or tree-shaped buildings, sprouting plant life from every orifice."

Check out the updates on what's happening with Vertical Farming here:

Food Cart + Mobility + Social Causes

Geneva-based architect Aurélie Monet Kasisi has designed a mobile stand based on street-food carts to travel around Switzerland as a promotional vehicle for a suicide prevention organisation.

"The mobile units often used to serve food or sell various goods host a small collective experience within the city," she said. "That is exactly what I wanted the mobile stand to generate in Swiss public spaces."

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Waffle House re-do

Nahser's aim was to make the yellow-and-red color scheme integral to the company's brand, and he succeeded. Is there a more recognizable roadside sign than the yellow Scrabble pieces spelling out WAFFLE HOUSE? (One designer has called the sign a great example of a monospaced font.) Whether deliberately or through benign neglect, the company did not move far from Nahser's vision until now. While other national chains tinker endlessly with their store designs—there are now McDonald’s restaurants with wood slats—Waffle House has kept things old-school. And why not? Nahser's bright box is the perfect symbol for a business that prides itself on welcoming customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. (Waffle Houses are so dependable, in fact, that FEMA created a Waffle House Index for natural disasters.)

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