By Josh on September 7th, 2009, 5:33 pm 0 Comments

Projects such as this Vertical Garden seem to be easier and easier to find, which hopefully means that they are becoming realized more often and in more locations. This particular project is a vertical collection of plant life that Patrick Blanc recently completed on a corner of the Athenaeum Hotel in London, England.

According to the project summary located on the hotel’s website, “It’s a fairytale dream of a wall, erupting with trailing tendrils and flowers eight storeys high above Piccadilly’s red buses like a living tapestry. As well as hosting native plants and flowers, way down below beside our Garden Room there’s the world’s biggest collection of non-nettly-looking nettles – or Urticaccae… This humid microclimate is the perfect spot for the more exotic species.”

Tagged: buildings garden vertical

By Justin on July 8th, 2009, 11:15 pm 6 Comments

Another walk along the riverfront today, this time with Andrew and Barb from Render / DodoLab. Windsor’s meadows are looking incredible, and if this strike ends it’ll be quite disappointing to see so many patches of long grasses and wildflowers cut down.

I can understand that there was a point at which people could have thought that things looked “messy,” but I think we’re well past that now. Windsor is now into a full-on prairie meadow stage and it’s gorgeous.

So, this sign, and this area pictured above, is as the sign says, a Wildflower Garden. It’s official, it was made official by that simple blue sign on a galvanized pole. So, if all it takes is a sign, why don’t we make official some other prime Windsor meadow locations and reclaim some space for “naturalized areas.” I’m going to be on the look out for particularly great locations to formalize as Windsor’s naturalized meadows.

Or if signs aren’t your thing, but you still want to work with these amazingly wondrous meadows, head out with Leesa Bringas at 8am every morning for some grass braiding.

Tagged: garden meadows sign strike wildflowers Windsor

By Justin on June 2nd, 2009, 2:18 pm 2 Comments

As part of the Eyebeam OpenLab residency program, Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley have been working on a project called, Window Farms. Fashioned out of recycled and/or low-cost materials, the project calls for vertical gardens that use hydroponics to grow beans, tomatoes, and lettuce.

Designed with crowdsourcing and R&DIY (Research & Do-It-Yourself) in mind, the project is not meant to create a one-size fits all product, but rather a framework to further develop and refine the process. If urban agriculture is one the many necessary steps we’ll have to take to create sustainable cities, this is one way in which food production can be managed at a household or neighbourhood scale.

[via Scaledown & Eyebeam]

Tagged: context farm garden hydroponic New York window

By Justin on May 5th, 2009, 9:28 am 2 Comments

Frtiz Haeg is a difficult person to write about. That is, he has had some considerable press coverage over the last few years, much of which from the major TV networks casts him in a kind of strange “green” light, and whether he’s described as an artist, architect, gardener, or designer, Fritz Haeg (in practice) seems to dodge all of these titles. He’s not nearly as eloquent as Natalie Jerimijenko (though her Ooz Inc. project and his Animal Estates project are fairly similar), yet he does craft some very exciting language around being a catalyst for community activity, and so while I’ve seen his work in a number of places over the last year or so, I thought it was finally time to post it.

The project that seemed most appropriate to note is his Edible Estates, an ongoing collection of front-yard or community gardens across the US, where he basically directs the tearing up of suburban grass farms to replace them with vegetables and native plants. The image above is from Maplewood, New Jersey.

I’ve seen a few front yards in Windsor and Essex County without grass, but I’d be interested to know where they are specifically, or if there are others hidden throughout the area. Maybe instead of one community garden in Sandwich, we should be pushing for the transformation of all the front yards on a block to be one, big connected garden? Yes, we should.

Tagged: artist community context front yard garden

By Justin on April 30th, 2009, 11:20 am 5 Comments

After taking a week off, Broken City Lab Office Hours started up again with a focus on getting a number of the shells for the magnetic planters completed. It was a really productive meeting with some more welcomed new faces and a whole bunch of planters now ready for the next step. It wasn’t all fun though, we lost an invaluable BCL member—Mike’s blender.

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Tagged: BCL blender community garden magnetic paper planters pulp research shopping

By Justin on April 28th, 2009, 10:41 am 0 Comments

re:farm the city is a low-tech urban / community garden project of sorts. The image above is a part of that low tech. This is a simple monitoring system developed using Arduino and Processing that will track humidity levels in six planters and alert the gardener if they get too low (essentially broadcasting that they are in need of watering).

The project is aimed at developing a series of tools that would enable city-dwellers to grow and monitor an urban garden using open-software and open-hardware and as much recycled materials as possible. It also focuses on new ways of visualizing and understanding relationships between plants situated in close or distanced proximity to one another.

I’ve been anxious to get into learning more Arduino for a while, but we haven’t seemed to have an appropriate project as of yet. Maybe there are some ways to include some technology that would aid in the educational element of our community garden…

[via  we make money not art ]

Tagged: arduino community context garden open source processing urban

By Justin on April 15th, 2009, 3:17 pm 3 Comments

Another cold, rainy Tuesday for Office Hours, but we were inside imagining spring. We pushed ahead on doing some more research and development on the planters, started a plant list and design ideas for the community garden, and got closer to finalizing the list of submissions from Text In-Transit.

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Tagged: BCL community garden lists maps planters research submissions

By Justin on April 10th, 2009, 7:59 pm 5 Comments

I went out to the site for our proposed community garden to take some photos yesterday. It’s looking fairly likely that this will be the site for our community garden starting this summer. This park is located at Russell and Mill near the Sandwich windmill. We’re still working out all the details, but everything has been really positive so far. Many more details to follow, but for now, I just started to visually map out there area.

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Tagged: BCL community garden park research Sandwich site

By Justin on April 8th, 2009, 3:16 pm 4 Comments

Despite the snow, the lethargy onset by exam schedules and year-end assignments, and a few core BCL folk leaving town for the summer, we had a great and productive meeting. We started going through the Text In-Transit submissions, continued working on our magnetic planters, worked on our Rhizome commission, brainstormed the idea of a book, and started to refine our ideas for our community garden (more details on this soon).

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Tagged: BCL books commission community editing garden planters research

By Justin on March 24th, 2009, 12:40 am 2 Comments

I saw this on Render’s blog, and considering our work towards an artist-led community garden, I had to repost it. Not much to look at lightly dusted in snow, but the idea is incredibly great.

Running from April 2009 to the following winter, GROUNDWORK will function as a community garden and creative research site. The project will take place on the grounds of Rare, a 913-acre nature preservation and agriculture education site located on the Grand River between Galt and Blair. GROUNDWORK will bring together a core creative group of a dozen youth from the Gaweni:io School (Six Nations) and Waterloo Collegiate Institute’s Collision group to develop and cultivate a community garden/site of creative research and knowledge-sharing.

The community-outreach on this project is considerable, and it’s projects like these that involve such deep integration and collaboration with different parts of a community (and it seems Render is taking on more and more of them) that really interests me as an artist and parallels some of the bigger things I think we’d like to do in BCL.

Tagged: community context garden nature youth