3d printing restaurant

The world’s first 3D printing restaurant, Food Ink. brings together artists from various disciplines including architects, chefs, designers and engineers. The restaurant opened successfully this April in Venlo, the Netherland. The restaurant utilises 3D printers to create dishes out of hummus, chocolate mousse, smashed peas, goat cheese and pizza dough. The printers can technically make anything as long as it is in the form of a paste. The printer is being produced by dutch company byFlow.

READ MORE

food and architecture

The nature of the space in which someone dines is intrinsic to their experience of the meal. The Gardener’s Cottage grew out of a belief that dining should be an inclusive, social activity, and should connect diners to one another, to chefs and producers, and to a time and place. One of the things I really enjoy about architecture and food is that, although both are fundamentally necessary things that can be considered from a functional point of view, they are also both deeply complex socially, politically and emotionally. They also relate directly to what it is to be human.

As long as chefs and restaurateurs recognise and respect the importance of architecture and the necessity of provoking and inspiring it, and architects view the production, transformation and consumption of food in the same way, they should get along famously.

LINK

Inter-Farm-Market

"There was a disconnect in that vertical farming had tremendous benefits for so many of the challenges traditional agriculture was facing, but no one really knew about it. I wanted to show people this technology was available and profitable today,” says Max Loessl about his passion for vertical farming. In 2013, Max Loessl and Henry Gordon-Smith co-founded the Association for Vertical Farming. Today, AVF is an international nonprofit organization comprised of individuals, companies, research institutions, and universities focusing on advancing vertical farming technologies, designs, and businesses.

READ HERE

Bio plastics

The IAAC also employed some unusual materials in the study, including orange peel, coffee powder and shrimp shells. There was a method to this and the material used has a genuine effect on the final plastic. The orange peel infused plastic was stronger, with better heat resistance, while the material containing coffee grounds displayed hydrophobic qualities.

The IAAC concluded that a combination of coffee and orange would make the best bioplastic and the geometry of the structure could then be varied to produce differing behaviour. Not every country has an excess of coffee and orange, but the study notes that each individual country can find their own combinations of food waste and plastic.

The amount of waste can also affect the level of shrinkage and bend over time in the plastic, which can be tuned for the individual purpose.

READ MORE

food unites us

If politics divides us, it is surely food that unites. It is food that inspired most if not all the great campaigns to discover the world: spices that drove trade between the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans with Asia, the Arabs to cross the Indian Ocean, the Persians to find overland routes to India, the Europeans to discover the Americas.

While many, many wrongs were done during the great ages of Empire, the movement of people around the globe over the last 5,000 years in particular has been of infinite mutual benefit. As people discovered new cultures they discovered new ideas, new people to fall in love with, new books to read, new colours, new architecture, new foods.

In kitchens around the world, people welcomed new elements, new techniques of cooking, new ingredients, incorporated them into their own cuisines and synthesised them into new dishes.

READ MORE

Uber for food

Uber is best known for delivering people for prices that black cabs can’t beat. But it’s recently started delivering something else: food.

UberEATs, which launched on Thursday, delivers lunch, snacks and dinner to Londoners from 11am to 11pm, seven days a week.

The service is already available in 16 cities including New York and Paris. But will Uber be able to cope with London’s dreadful traffic? Or beat established competition like Deliveroo at service and speed?

READ MORE

FLW - foodie commune

"One part of that vision is to return Taliesin to a fully diversified farm; contoured rows crops cover the Welsh hillside, hundred-year-old trees are tapped for maple syrup, grapevines produce fruit table wine, and cows freely graze on the pasture before being milked or slaughtered for meat. But Taliesin is also meant to be a self-sustaining community of chefs, farmers, and architects contributing to the property as they once did as part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fellowship Program, established in 1932. According to a 1934 brochure the program had fellows “farming, planning, working, kitchenizing, and philosophizing in voluntary co-operation in an atmosphere of natural loveliness they are helping to make eventually habitable.”

Taliesin worked closely in conjunction with Taliesin West, which Wright built in the McDowell Mountains of present-day Scottsdale in 1938 as a winter retreat for himself and the majority of the Wisconsin residents. Throughout the colder months, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, and preserves were sent by rail from those looking after the farm to their peers in Arizona. Wyer plans to revive this tradition this season with a shipment of preserved produce.

Sounds kind of like a commune, right? It closely resembled one. So much so that shortly before Wright’s death in 1959, a Wisconsin circuit judge determined that Taliesin was in fact operating for the sole benefit of Wright and not as a non-profit organization. Whether Taliesin was an Emersonian utopia or labor camp is still up for debate, along with the stigma surrounding the property’s existence. “Throughout the whole history of this place, they were so isolated that people in town shunned them, called them socialists, and didn’t want to get involved with them. They didn’t know what was going on with them and didn’t want to know,” Dungue says. “I think that carried through history and people still don’t know.”


READ MORE

cricket housing

eeing the added potential to introduce insects into Western diets, Terreform ONE decided to take their design further and researched cricket behavior and enhancements that ensure the shelter could also be used as a clean way of farming insects for food in urban areas.
Joachim says the team quickly observed that crickets "don't like density" and become fussy with their food in crowded situations.

LINK

Farm Pod

“This is how you’re going to get people fed when we have no water,” said Mike Straight, chief executive officer of FarmPod LLC, who dreamed up the idea of putting a fully automated aquaponics system inside a shipping container. “This is how you get fed when you have no land.”

Straight and his fiancée, Siria Bonilla, see the pod, the Santa Fe startup’s first prototype, as a common-sense solution to food deserts. New Mexico, where many people live in remote communities far from grocery stores or farmers markets, has some of the nation’s most expansive food deserts. About 300,000 people in the state, or about 15 percent of the population, lack access to healthy foods, according to recent studies.

Inside the shipping container that makes up the FarmPod’s bottom level, fish grow in three large tanks. One tank holds koi and two hold barramundi, a mild-flavored fish, also known as Asian sea bass, that’s popular in Thai cuisine. Water containing the fish’s waste is pumped up to the greenhouse on the second floor, where it trickles down through the vertical towers, feeding the roots of young plants. The clean water circulates back to the fish.

Read more here

changing american diets

After seeing the Open Data Institute’s project on the changing British Diet, I couldn’t help but wonder how the American diet has changed over the years.

The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of these sort of things through the Food Availability Data System. The program estimates both how much food is produced and how much food people eat, dating back to 1970 through 2013. The data covers the major food categories, such as meat, fruits, and vegetables, across many food items on a per capita and daily basis.

In the interactive below, we look at the major food items in each category. Each column is a category, and each chart is a time series for a major food item, represented as serving units per category. Items move up and down based on their ranking in each group during a given year.

READ MORE

Infinity Kitchen

MVRDV designs transparent Infinity Kitchen to make food healthier and sexier


Venice Architecture Biennale 2016: Dutch office MVRDV has designed a completely see-through glass kitchen that aims to inspire a "more healthy, if not sexy" approach to food (+ slideshow).

Making its debut at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Infinity Kitchen has been proposed as a way of improving the cooking process by drawing greater attention to food choice, preparation and waste.

Each of the units and shelves is transparent, as well as the tap, sink area and worktops.

"If we imagine everything is transparent, clear and clean, doesn't it mean that the only thing that is colourful and visible is our food?" said the firm's co-founder Winy Maas.

"Doesn't it then imply that we are encouraged to love the food, in that way, and that maybe it even becomes more healthy, if not sexy?"

MVRDV hopes that the transparent elements will expose all aspects of the kitchen's function and processes, highlighting people's food choices as well as less attractive aspects like waste storage and disposal.

"The Infinity Kitchen wants to make better cuisine, better food preparation practices and it wants to raise awareness for the one room that we all rely so heavily on, and the processes that go on inside of it," said MVRDV.

"How much food do we have hidden away? How much waste is really being created? Is the kitchen really as clean as we like to think it is? But [the Infinity Kitchen] also wants to do one main thing: celebrate food and cooking."

READ MORE

ReGen Village

It's no secret that today's aggressive agricultural techniques can take a heavy toll on the environment, both on the land used for crops and livestock, and in the surrounding atmosphere.

But a new vision of a more sustainable 'integrated neighbourhood' community is being implemented in the Netherlands, with the first of a series of high-tech farm villages set to be completed next year. The project, being built just outside of Amsterdam, is the brainchild of California-based developer ReGen Villages, and after its pilot community is finished in 2017, the company plans to bring the concept to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany.

READ MORE

greenhouse/community farming in Halifax

The greenhouse, designed by Fowler Bauld & Mitchell along with Dalhousie professor Brian Lilley, CBCL Limited engineers and the youth at Hope Blooms, was a massive community undertaking.

“It’s just something great. We’re all jumping for joy over here,” said Jessie Jollymore, Hope Blooms founder.

“To me, it really sheds a light on the youth, community and the innovation here. It shows that believing in young minds can shape a beautiful environment.”

The greenhouse opened last May at Brunswick Street and Divas Lane, and served to help the grassroots, youth-driven initiative that allows members of the community grow their own food.

The Hope Blooms message is that the youth can make a difference in their lives and community, and they help at the garden in Halifax.
READ MORE

art of bento

Time to Play With Your Food: The Art of Bento

LINK

plant tower

D+DS Architecture developed an apartment building that allows tenants to grow nutritious food year-round using hydroponic methods.

read more

More Bompas

While they work to establish a permanent home for the BMoF, B&P do collaborations with established institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as temporary installations. “We’re sort of a moving, roving nomadic museum at the moment,” he says. The latest iteration took place at the Borough Market this winter. It included exhibits like “Be the Bolus,” whereby visitors could experience what it feels like to be a hunk of chewed-off food going along the human digestive track. The cross-modal experience was obtained with a PillCam, and a massage chair that pummeled you up and down as watched the film, so you could feel what it’s like for the bolus. There was also the butterfly gallery that highlighted the fact that butterflies are “some of the unsung heroes of pollination.” The takeaway? “We are trying to think about how to make sustainability really sexy, making people ask questions rather than belaboring them with gloom and doom about the current state of the planet and food security.”

MORE

big bee hives

BGHJ Architects in Charlottetown are designing “bee houses” that look like animated creatures and will stand about 12 feet high that will house four beehives at the Farm Centre.

The beehive project aims to educate Islanders on the importance of honeybees and to bring awareness about their situation.


Some experts say one in every three bites of food we eat is made possible by bees and other pollinators.

The BGHJ firm is interested in the activation of downtown Charlottetown and strengthening the core of city, making it better place to live, said architect Shallyn Murray

READ MORE

indoor farming

INDOOR HARVEST IS A FULL SERVICE, STATE-OF-THE-ART DESIGN - BUILD ENGINEERING FIRM FOR THE INDOOR FARMING INDUSTRY. WE PROVIDE PRODUCTION PLATFORMS AND COMPLETE CUSTOM-DESIGNED BUILD-OUTS FOR BOTH GREENHOUSE AND BUILDING INTEGRATED AGRICULTURE (BIA) GROWS, TAILORED TO THE SPECIFIC NEEDS OF VIRTUALLY ANY PLANT CROP.

With extensive R&D and production collaborations with some of the world’s most reputable names in research, pharmaceuticals and food production, Indoor Harvest maintains a growing design portfolio of Intellectual Property based on our Modular Racking and High Pressure Aeroponics platforms.

WEBSITE

fake food

"Developed especially for children and families, Guixé’s large-scale, custom-designed space will combine the artist’s own graphics with design challenges and hands-on activities for young people that encourage a rethinking of the familiar foods that we eat each day and sprout new ideas for food concepts and flavours."

Learn more here

secret history of a food that everybody loves

The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen.

Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere.

But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.

READ MORE

food architecture - geometries

Architecture of Food  -

Full document here

Hidden Kitchen

[Hidden kitchen 2014]is a portable restaurant which is designed as a backpack. This idea from the time when the artist hung around across the country, he packs all the stuff in an one bag. This project devised to go to backwoods where is the Mokyon-pocha could't go.

Take a Look

climate change = food issue

"The causality around food security and climate stressors runs in both directions—food insecurity can contribute to instability and violence, just as surely as instability and violence can lead to food insecurity. In Syria, both are true. Between 2006 and 2011, more than 60 percent of Syrian territory endured the worst long-term drought in recorded history. The country’s total water resources were cut in half, with disastrous implications for rural areas. The primary northeastern wheat-growing region suffered 75 percent crop failure and 85 percent losses in livestock. The United Nations estimated that 800,000 Syrians lost their livelihood as a result of these droughts: 1 million Syrians were declared food insecure, and 3 million were driven into extreme poverty. This profound climate and food crisis led to large-scale migration: In 2010 alone, 50,000 Syrian families moved to cities from rural areas and, in 2011, an estimated 200,000 rural Syrians left rural areas for cities. Syria’s urban centers were ill-equipped to deal with this influx, with poor infrastructure and their own endemic water shortages and high levels of unemployment.

The disaffection with the government—which was unable to respond effectively to the social and health needs of migrants—brought diverse ethnic and religious groups into close contact under trying circumstances and contributed to the protests which, following President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression, morphed into civil war. Climate change and food insecurity did not by themselves cause the rebellion, but they contributed to the circumstances that gave rise to it. And similar stressors will likely drive the next major upheaval, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere."

READ IT ALL

floating forest

Looking for a new way to obtain fresh produce? This floating urban forest has your back. Swale, a barge topped with a forest of trees and edible plants, will be docking in Brooklyn, Governors Island and the Bronx this June.

The 80 feet by 30 feet barge and collaborative floating food project will let people on board harvest scallions, rosemary, blueberries, wild leek, radicchio, ramps, sea kale and other fresh produce.

Mary Mattingly, the artist behind the project, told Brooklyn Based via email...

READ MORE

When local ain't that local

Laura Reiley, the food critic at the Tampa Bay Times, recently delivered a riveting two-part series called “Farm to Fable” that hones in on the specious claims of “local food” at restaurants and farmers markets. She took samples from restaurants that were celebrated for their seasonal menus, and submitted them to scientists for testing, and she visited the small farms that many restaurants claimed, in pretty chalkboard lettering, to be partnering with. “Fiction started seeming like the daily special,” she found.

At farmers markets, Reiley discovered that actual farmers — as opposed to resellers — tend to be few and far between. In the Tampa Bay area, after several weeks of visiting markets, she counted 346 vendors, many of them selling in several different markets. “Of that number,” she wrote, “only 16 sold their own produce, honey, eggs, meat or dairy. Plenty of wind chimes and hot sauces, but less than 5 percent represented Florida farmers growing their own food.” In fact, the colorful fruits, vegetables and leafy greens on display typically come from “Mexico, Honduras, Canada,” and represent the glut of food that local grocers have already passed over.

READ MORE

The Chinese Take out box

When you order Chinese delivery, do you ever stop to look at the takeout box? That white container adorned with red pagodas is one of the most iconic boxes around. But did you know that it's actually an American design? In fact, you probably won't even find these boxes in China.

LINK

mid century mod foods

There is no mystery for me in the almost cultlike enthusiasm for midcentury modern architecture and design. Whether it’s a Bakelite bracelet or a Barcelona chair, there is absolutely no denying the perfect harmony of 20th century technology and art. It doesn’t matter if it’s cars, toasters, apartment buildings, couches … it’s impossible not to appreciate the vision, if not to covet the object.

The same cannot be said for midcentury cuisine. It looks bad, tastes worse, and consumed over decades surely must kill you. Whoever first decided that food and technology were meant to comingle and produce offspring was delusional. Maybe evil...

Kurt Cyr, a Palm Springs renaissance man who has not only garnered a reputation for his modernism tours and popular lecture series/social gathering, Salon of the Parched, became fascinated several years ago with the question of why people who love midcentury architecture revile the food. His discoveries resulted in ModEats, a demonstration/cooking series he put on at the Saguaro Hotel. “If we are going to talk seriously about midcentury food, the spectacle of kitsch draws the focus away from one important factor that we take for granted today,” he says, “[And that is] the revolutionary discoveries of food science during this period.”

In fact, Cyr believes the work of world-renowned chefs such as Ferran Adrià of elBulli, would not have been possible without the trailblazing work of the mad food scientists at General Foods or Nabisco. “Molecular gastronomy is definitely the grandchild of the food science discoveries of the 1950s,” Cyr says, pointing out that the balsamic vinegar pearls that top modern deconstructed Caprese salads would not be possible without the invention of … Jell-O.,,,

Read more

Maple to the rescue

Maple, a David Chang-backed restaurant in New York City, doesn’t have any tables, cash registers, or waiters. Instead, its customers order meals through its website or mobile app, and a fleet of bike couriers deliver them. By eliminating the dining room and bringing meals to you, Maple is betting that it can sell more meals per hour, using less real estate, than a traditional restaurant.

The current gold standard for zipping patrons through a lunch line (what the industry calls "throughput") is Chipotle. According to its 2014 annual report, Chipotle manages to serve 300 meals per hour—a transaction every 12 seconds—at its best-performing locations, and the chain is so obsessed with its productivity that it assigns employees efficiency roles with names like "linebacker."

When Maple launched its first location in April, it served around 50 meals per hour at peak times. Less than a year later, on average it is now serving 800 meals per hour from each of its four kitchens. A few days before I visited in February, it had set a new record: 1,100 meals cooked and delivered in one hour...

That’s why continuing to invest in technology that can squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of its modest space and crew is important. Maple recently introduced, for instance, ordering windows that serve a dual purpose of allowing customers to schedule their lunch delivery at certain times and, at some point, helping to manage demand. The app could, for instance, allow people in a building where deliveries are already scheduled to order lunch, while telling a customer in an address not already scheduled in a route that lunch is sold out. Or, it could accept your order for instant delivery of a salad, which can be prepared in minutes and can join a trip to your address that’s almost ready to leave the kitchen, but tell your coworker who wants to order a chicken breast, which takes longer to cook, that his order will need to be slotted into the next hour’s trip.

With data science and smartphones, possibilities for increasing efficiency seem endless. As it scales, Maple even plans to coordinate its couriers so that they don’t need to come back to one kitchen to pick up orders—they can return to a different, closer hub, or receive a new order from another courier they’ll pass on the way.

READ IT

More Bompas

The first thing I notice about the Bompas & Parr studio is the human skull on the conference table. As I await my hosts, two culinary entertainers who’ve made a name for themselves in London with their wacky flavor-based experiments, I take the skull in my hands to determine whether it’s real. It is. A loose tooth falls out into my palm. I panic and put the skull back on the table.

A few minutes later, Sam Bompas whirls into the room. He’s a svelte 32-year-old with a tall puff of blond hair, a playful smile, and a rumbling deep voice. He’s wearing a purple suit over a shirt covered in pineapples, which is actually modest compared to his counterpart’s getup: 33-year-old Harry Parr is sporting a bright long-sleeved shirt covered in McDonald’s characters, including Ronald and Grimace. He says his wife made it for him.

READ MORE

Computer Oven

This new oven is designed to guess the type of food you put in it, and cook it for the correct amount of time and temperature
San Francisco-based modern appliance company June, have taken the guess work out of cooking with the design of their countertop oven.

Looking more like a toaster oven, this smart oven can guess the type of food you put in it, know how long you need to cook it for, and at what temperature.
It has a built-in camera that can also send your device a live stream video, so you can keep an eye on it, and share photos on social media. Plus it will message you when it is done cooking.

MORE

Momofuku

Ando is named, like its parent company, after instant-ramen creator Momofuku Ando. (It is also Spanish for "I walk"—fitting for a delivery service. Momofuku itself is Japanese for "lucky peach," hence the name of the magazine and also Má Pêche.) The business is a joint venture with Expa, a San Francisco–based startup lab built by Uber cofounder Garrett Camp. Expa is designing the app and overseeing logistics, while UberRush will tackle the actual food drop-offs. "We have a pretty big vision for it," said Expa partner Hooman Radfar, Chang’s cofounder on the project. "But our focus is very much delivery to delivery, meal to meal, neighborhood to neighborhood, until we get it right. We want to make this feel great—like Momofuku at home." Tosi is also involved; she’s creating three new cookies that will be initially sold exclusively through Ando: salt-and-pepper, Ritz Cracker, and what she describes as "darn good, slap-your-mama chocolate chip."

READ MORE

Target and it's food ideas

Consumers believe they are buying one thing when, in fact, they are buying something else. "We don't really know what we are putting inside our bodies at all," he says. And this isn't just true in the fresh produce aisle of the grocery store. Labels on packaged goods are often inaccurate, he argues, as any parent of a child with allergies will tell you.

This is just one of many food-related quandaries and opportunities that Shewmaker and his colleagues are exploring out of Target's Future + Food coLab, which is located in the Kendall Square tech district outside Boston and looks much like the other incubators that have set up shop in the area. MIT-trained data scientists are coding away, entrepreneurs are writing business plans, and designers are at standing desks drawing mock-ups of potential products. They are working together to imagine the future of food—and where Target might, eventually, fit into that future.

READ MORE

People Changing the Future of Food

9 People Who Are Changing The Future Of Food.

Danielle Gould
Founder, FOOD + TECH CONNECT
In 2010, when many farmers and chefs were still depending on fax machines and handwritten invoices, Danielle Gould founded the networking platform Food + Tech Connect. The goal: unite food producers with digital creators through meet-ups and weekend-long hackathons. Thanks to connections made through F+TC, more small-scale producers are selling via online marketplaces and developers are creating cloud-based systems for restaurants.

NO CHEESE, PLEASE!
How Bryant Terry, chef in residence at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, is working to lower disease rates in food-insecure communities

THE SOIL SAVANT
A radical new approach to raising cattle helped fourth-generation rancher Cory Carman save her family’s land.

MORE WHO MATTER
Kara Goldin
Founder, HINT WATER
As soda giants grapple with plunging sales and consumers hunt for healthier options, beverage companies like Hint Water are finding ways to juice up old-fashioned H2O.

Nick Green and Gunnar Lovelace
Co–CEOs, THRIVE MARKET
Ecommerce site Thrive Market sells high-end natural products at 25% to 50% below market rates. Since it launched in 2014, it has raised $58 million in funding and attracted more than 195,000 members who pay a $60 annual fee.

Megan Miller and Leslie Ziegler
Founders, BITTY FOODS
When a United Nations report heralded insects as the most sustainable source of protein, Megan Miller and Leslie Ziegler set out to make crickets a palatable meat alternative. Bitty Foods has developed everything from cricket flour (a nutritious blend with 28 grams of protein per cup) to Chiridos, which are air-puffed chips made from crickets, lentils, and spices.

READ MORE

Beverage to Bench

American fast food chain Chick-fil-A, don’t just throw their customers used polystyrene cups into the landfill. Instead, they take those cups and transform them into park benches.

Let’s see how they do it…

CHECK IT OUT

Student design - eco - food cart

Students of Jamia Millia Islamia have built an eco-friendly food vending cart which has provisions for waste disposal and solar power generation. The cart was one of the submit showcased at the Festival of Innovations at Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi.  The project, which the university is in process of patenting, was among the six entries selected out of 114 sent for presentation at the recently concluded Festival.

READ MORE

another tower

London firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has revealed details of a concept for a bamboo-framed vertical farm that could provide an alternative to traditional land-intensive farming.

Named Skyfarm, the design is for a multi-storey hyperboloid structure that integrates different types of farming – ranging from traditional planting to aquaponics – and also produces its own energy.

READ MORE

growing the desert

With 75 percent of its country comprised of desert, it’s not easy for Tunisia to grow food. But the Sahara Forest Project aims to change that with a $30 million facility funded by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Building on their first projects in Qatar and Jordan, the group will use solar energy and desalination technology to sprout food in the Sahara Desert.

READ MORE

IKEA garden

If you’ve always wanted to grow your own veggies and herbs, but don’t have a yard where you can set up a garden, IKEA has the perfect product for you. The furniture retailer just unveiled its new KRYDDA/VÄXER hydroponic garden, which allows anyone to easily grow fresh produce at home.

LINK

3d printed treats

Not only does 3D printing open new creative doors in just about every industry, it also enables entrepreneurs to combine aspects of seemingly disparate industries into new and exciting businesses. Peter Zaharatos has spent his career working in the field of architecture, and he currently teaches the subject at New York City College of Technology. He’s a talented architectural designer whose skills have served him well in his chosen profession, but not long ago he decided to use those skills for an entirely different purpose. Last month, Zaharatos opened Sugarcube Dessert and Coffee, a gourmet café in Long Island City, New York. In addition to serving coffee, the café offers desserts that are nothing short of works of art.

LINK

McBarge

A floating McDonald’s restaurant may sound like a wonderful fast-food industry concept but you won’t find any Happy Meals at this restaurant.
The McBarge was built in 1986 for an estimated cost of $8 million (£5.6 million) but proved to be a bad investment and has been left empty for the last 30 years in a creek on the west coast of Canada.
Urban explorers have more recently ventured inside the abandoned restaurant to capture what it looks like now, sharing the photos on a Facebook group.

READ MORE

NYC's food web

Over the past year, Open House New York’s The Final Mile has explored the architecture of New York City’s food system. From the markets of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center to the food halls of Brooklyn, The Final Mile has explored how the spaces in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed have helped shape the city and our experiences of it.

READ MORE

Japanese Market

Glass walls provide woodland views from inside this structure by Japanese architect Takuya Hosokai, which contains a market and restaurant serving only locally produced food

SEE MORE

chefs 3-print

The detailing is due in part to Natural Machine’s Foodini, a 3-D printer that “manages the difficult and time-consuming parts of food preparation that often discourage people from creating homemade food,” according to its website. As the BBC notes, 3-D printing is helping chefs create customized dishes from foods ranging from mashed potatoes to chocolate. It even has internet capabilities which means users can upload designs from the web and have the designs show up on their plate. Mateo Blanch, who utilizes 3-D printing in his dishes, tells the International Business Times, “It has changed the way I work with food… I am capable of a level of precision that would never have been possible before.”

READ MORE

more than a box?

Must a grocery store be simply an aesthetically mundane warehouse in which groceries are stocked and sold?

Read more

Food Better - Harvard

Throughout the academic year, the Harvard community focuses on the food system and how to improve it – how to grow better, eat better, shop better, conserve better . . . how to Food Better. In 2014-15, the Harvard Innovation Lab hosted a year-long Deans' Food System Challenge, in which students from across the university were invited to develop innovative solutions to make our food system more healthy and sustainable. In conjunction with the Challenge, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Harvard University Dining Services, Food Literacy Project, and Harvard Office for Sustainability opened a community-wide dialogue about how we can Food Better, which included events, field trips and more. These events continue on into the 2015-2016 school year.

LINK

lecture - cheng

How does architecture and design influence our relationship with food?  Join architect Christy Cheng to explore how the catalytic nature of food and drink can be used to redefine architecture and design characteristics.  Does food inspire what our buildings and urban spaces look like? Do we eat the food that is curated by our surroundings?

Christy will discuss her work with the Alimentary Design studios at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her latest project, the West Louisville Food Port. Alimentary Design explores how the fundamentals of food can be used to redefine architecture and urban design typologies. This field of design examines everything from farming and harvesting to consumers and waste and all the ingredients in between.

Is the future of architecture and urban design appetising?
READ MORE

fantasy projects

reeHugger has had some trouble digesting vertical farms for a decade, as has Stan Cox of Alternet, who wrote in 2010 that “Although the concept has provided opportunities for architecture students and others to create innovative, sometimes beautiful building designs, it holds little practical potential for providing food.” Now he is at it again, refining his points in a new article in Alternet that was picked up and retitled in Salon as Enough with the vertical farming fantasies: There are still too many unanswered questions about the trendy practice.

READ MORE

agro-ecosystems

‘hyperions’ is a sustainable agro-ecosystem project that is capable of resisting climate change due to healthy economic and environmental systems. developed under vincent callebaut architectures, the study aims to combine archaeology and sustainable food systems, that grow up around wooden and timber towers in new delhi, india. ‘hyperions’ is made of six garden towers, each 36-story high containing residential and office spaces. the name comes from the tallest tree in the world ‘the hyperion’ – a sequoia semperviren found in northern california – whose size can reach 115.55 metres (close to 380 feet). the aim behind the project was to create a cultural hub that combines urban renaturation, small scale farming, environmental protection and biodiversity.

LINK

Food Tower

ABF-lab is a paris-based design collective founded in 2011 that specialize in creating projects that mix architecture, energy, climate, and engineering. for a building in romainville, france called ‘food-farm tower’, they aimed to optimize the volume to follow the sun’s path, making it as productive as possible and liberating it from the use of artificial light to supply power to the gardens. the project proposes both housing and gardening at the same time.

Read more

Paper food

Barcelona-based paper artist Raya Sader Bujana gives a distinct twist to the saturation of food images online. From afar, her photographs seem to depict food items, but these are in fact painstakingly intricate paper creations.

Bujana transforms delectable food items into intricate paper sculptures. Through her creations, she strives to capture the same color, texture and sumptuousness of these foods in their original state. A slice of pie includes a dollop of whipped cream on top— a piece of white paper expertly folded and placed to resemble the luscious topping it imitates.

READ

dumpster house

How to get students thinking about their environmental footprints?

Jeff G. Wilson and his students at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Tex., retrofitted a garbage container into a cozy pad that he lived in for an entire year. It was, he says, “a radical experiment in what it would mean to live on, and in, less” — specifically, 33 square feet. He moved out last February but the experiment continues.

Nine educators have since taken up residency for up to a week to see what it’s like to live without running water. Cooking is on a camping stove. But there is electricity. To battle interior heat that rises to over 130 degrees in Texas’s sweltering summers, the bin had to be connecting to the grid so air-conditioning could be installed. There’s now a TV and an overhead light. But it’s still tight quarters.

Read more

roadside architecture

On 8th street in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, a single stair leads to a raised, red and white tile platform. This trash-strewn urban ruin is tucked into the corner of a large parking lot within sight of the neon marquees of the Broadway theatre district. It is what remains of Taco House, one of LA’s iconic hamburger stands, which are quickly being erased from this rapidly transforming city.

Los Angeles is, of course, inextricably associated with the automobile, and it was here that many suburban building types – from modernist homes to fast-food restaurants – were pioneered. But it is changing: five transit lines are being built, and cranes loom over the city’s boulevards. The epicentre of this transition is the once moribund downtown, where a denser and wealthier city is displacing, among other things, one of its old, car-oriented icons.

The hamburger stand is part of southern California’s rich tradition of roadside architecture. These buildings are typically 100 square-foot boxes, with an outdoor window to order and pick up food. Next to the structures are rudimentary dining areas, often consisting of no more than a plastic tarp and a few fold-up chairs and tables. To compensate for their diminutive size, the stands sometimes have large signs and, in more elaborate cases, are decorated to resemble everything from a log cabin to a traditional Korean house.

Read more