Uber City Farm

My final project is going to be a digital Sydney Terrarium, a portion of the city reduced in scale and abstracted into the form of a simulation. The simulation runs the period of Sydney's 2030 strategy, and the player is essentially given to chance to grow their own Sydney.

Sydney Terrarium is also the extension of a proposed real, full-scale nursery located above the Eastern Distributor southern ventilation stack.

The nursery-terrarium is an adaptation of City Farm Chicago. The City Farm works on a minimal architecture maximum impact model - it reaches far beyond its single acre farm by supporting satellite gardens around Chicago. But where Chicago has a patchwork of undeveloped lots, Sydney only has balconies and open roofs. Thus my project proposes to extend the reach of the nursery, and of the residents in surrounding suburbs, by lacing the city with a connected network of potted plants that are geared to evolving ecological models. Just as ecology is about interrelatedness, a sustainable Sydney should leave no one in the ecological dark.

"With tens of thousands of vacant city lots in Chicago, mostly in economically under-developed neighborhoods, turning vacant land into an asset for the community is a primary objective of City Farm."

About Terraria [Wikipedia]
Sustainable Sydney 2030 [City of Sydney]
City Farm, Chicago [Resource Center Chicago]

Kismet Posters

See them in larger resolution via my Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzalot/2986568882/in/photostream/

DRAFT 2: proof

Music by Cake.

Poster and 500 words to come.

Nature Spheres: Inversion

This post follows my Nature Spheres post.

Like the Eden Project, the Lost Gardens of Heligan is a bit of a theme park. However, it is the grown up and matured version of the Eden Project. Its collection is marked by cultural uniqueness rather than structural uniqueness; It is the permanent home and birthplace of produce, rather than a stadium where produce is brought to be marketed. It has geometrical forms, but rather than contain nature they support and are intertwined by nature. It is not an overly expensive cause of tourist congestion at the expense of small towns, its restoration revitalised the gardens "but also the local economy around Heligan by providing employment." (Wikipedia)


Heligan Gardens [Wikipedia]
Heligan Gardens [Official Website]

Nature Spheres

There's something about geometrical greenhouses containing sample ecologies that just seems grand. I guess it says, "Science owns nature" or something similar. It's the modernist ideal, isn't it?

So to continue the formal study, what or who owns science, and how does that get represented? The Biosphere 2, originally built by a cult-like organisation as a sealed experiment, has been given to the University of Arizona, and its surrounding land will soon be filled with suburban houses. It is the odd piece of history around the corner.

The Eden Project is more recent, and not in desperate search of support. Its calendar is dotted with festivals and celebrations, and operates almost as a theme park. Like most theme parks, it has land distinct from any urban centre. Its bubbles exist in a world apart from ours.


Biosphere 2 [Wikipedia]
Biosphere 2 [Official Website]
Eden Project [Official Website]
Eden Event Diary [Official Website]

Earthships: The individual within the whole

I visited the Earthships a few years ago, and have used them as precedent studies within a number of projects. Their paradoxical embrace of both self-reliance and interdependecy are poetry through function.

Although I couldn't see a whole world dotted by these off-grid houses, I could see a whole world teeming with their sensibility (a utopia, no doubt): Keep your environment personal, take time to think creatively, and always remember that you are part of a larger whole.


Earthships of Taos, New Mexico [Sangres]

Green Between the Cracks

The influences of guerilla gardenning and trash mirrors converge, in this post about moss-based graffiti:

The graffiti is grown in lines of text, the wall framing a single line of a larger poem - the entirety of which will show up over time on various walls around town. Not quite as responsive as the trash mirrors, but also reflective - in a different way.

Perhaps there's also something of the telectroscope here too, in the emergent connection of different places.

20 Masterpieces of Green Graffiti [Environmental Graffiti]