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The project started as a very strong need from the client in regards to the possibility to create a summer house using these parameters: the monetary expense and the footprint. Raw concrete floors, industrial grade windows and wood siding creates a space that’s more unique. Almost like a modern hunter’s cabin with a strong presence.
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With global warming threatening coastal cities and a new era of mass migration on the horizon, going mobile just might be today’s bright idea – and tomorrow’s way of life. Those who want to get rolling right away have a tantalizing choice of ambulatory abodes from which to choose. Here are a dozen tech-packed trailers that are full of Win… without the Winnebago.
(images via: Dornob and Inhabitat)
Slovakia-based Nice Architects has a nice idea for future mobile-homers: the Rolling Stone eco-capsule. Though not connected in any way with a certain English music group, a certain American pop culture magazine or a song by a certain singer named Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stone stands on its own when it comes to being environmentally friendly, self-sufficient and generally cute & cozy.
(images via: Balleride and Core77)
Those who wouldn’t be caught dead in a classic, Harvest Gold motor home might find the svelte & stylish Mehrzeller much more appealing. German for “multi-cell”, the Mehrzeller caravan concept maximizes interior space while displaying an organic, polygon exterior that resembles natural mineral crystals. The Mehrzeller hails from Graz, Austria, birthplace of another svelte & stylish object: California “Governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger.
(images via: All Hydrogen Cars and Fotki)
The 2030s, that is. Actually the Airstream concept Ford’s been showing off lately looks both ways: its eco-friendly hybrid hydrogen fuel cell is most futuristic while the silvery style and iconic name harken back to the good old dust bowl days when hydrogen power was all the rage… until that idea went down like a lead zeppelin.
(images via: Treehugger)
Dutch designer Niels Caris has created a foldout trailer called, naturally, the Foldoub Trailer. Tow, park, push a switch and the whole kit & kaboodle opens up like Godzilla’s big pop-up book of home design. On the downside, the Foldoub Trailer has no kitchen, bathroom or storage… which could be a problem if you’re parked 50 miles past the “100 miles to Next Gas & Lodging” sign.
(images via: Busyboo and Yanko Design)
The 252° Living Area springs from the creative mind of French designer Stephanie Bellange. Small enough to be towed by a Mini, the 3-wheeled trailer features supporting feet that spread automatically once the trailer’s outside shell is opened. The interior parts follow, much like the petals of a blossoming flower.
(images via: Trendbird and Luxist)
The Colim Modular Camper is a car, a trailer and a motorhome all in one. Park at your campsite, then tour the sites in the two-seater convertible module. The interior lives up to the exterior’s promises as well, with flowing, organic surfaces and eye-pleasing colors – not a splinter of plastic wood anywhere. The Colim Modular Camper is eco-friendly as well, with a solar panel on the roof and a hybrid engine nestled under the hood.
(images via: Squob and Design Applause)
The T@B XL takes the classic teardrop trailer concept and lifts it into a new level of luxury. T@B’s (pronounced “Tab”) lesser models are anything but trashy but the twin-axle XL definitely rules the roost. Sleekly styled, the XL still stretches 22 feet from stem to stern and is expected to be priced in the $60K range. That is, if manufacturer Knaus Tabbert manages to emerge from bankruptcy – times are tough for the purveyors of luxo-goods.
(images via: Carscoop and American Custom Trailers)
You’ve seen cars towing motorcycles, but how about ‘cycles towing cars? They may be scaled down a mite but these very cool trailers still evoke the spirit of pinstriped, big-tired muscle cars. Mustangs and Corvettes are featured but the manufacturer, American Custom Trailers, also takes custom orders.
(images via: Gear)
The Sylvan Sport GO trailer looks like a comfy pop-up camping trailer at first glance but the more you look, the more you see. Indeed, versatility is the Sport GO’s middle name. Weighing in at 800 lbs., the camper morphs into an ATV hauler, a camping gear hauler, basically whatever you need it to do. Calling it the Transformers of pop-up campers would be an understatement, though the Sport GO seems to be the non-combative type. Here’s a video of the Sylvan Sport GO in action:
The Sylvan Sport GO, via PCTV1
(images via: World’s Fair Community and Gizmag)
This intimidating mobile home concept from General Motors Advanced Design Group shows the beleaguered corporation isn’t bankrupt – at least when it comes to provocative ideas. The GMC PAD is sort of a Winnebago on steroids that sports 6 wheels, an enormous full length (and width) windshield and a curious articulating feature that extends a step-like device out from the, er, fuselage to ease entry and exit. The PAD runs on a diesel-Electric hybrid system and its innovative resource management technology ensures onboard fuel and water supplies will last weeks, even months!
(images via: Find A Property)
The Tumbleweed Tiny Home Company has got a good thing going. These tiny perfect houses come mounted on wheels, so by law they’re considered travel trailers and thus a building permit isn’t required. Tiny they are, however: could you live in 65 to 140 square feet of space without padding the walls?
(images via: Design Art Book)
The Capsule Caravan may look lke an oversized M&M but there’s nothing nutty about what’s inside. British designer David Tonkinson engineered the ovoid trailer to separate into distinct Comfort and Service Pods to keep men and machines apart. Conceived as a way to take in summer music festivals by day while resting comfortably by night, the Capsule Caravan is one of the sharpest trailers around – and that’s saying something as it’s one of the smoothest designs going!
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(Réflexions colorées by Hal Ingberg. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
Exactly four years ago today, in one of our very early posts, we noted the start of the latest edition of the International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens. We would like to tip our readers again the start over the weekend of this year’s festival, which will last until 4 October. Below are some photographs of the gardens to temp you to make a trek to Quebec.
While the gardens look rather inventive, something you’d expect when the designers are given absolute creative freedom, however, you can be sure that there will always be some sort Picturesque-esque visualary:
(Réflexions colorées by Hal Ingberg. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
And hyper-modern geomet-o-rama:
(bois de biais by Atelier le balto. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
And everyday objects given post-modern cooptery for high designery:
(Passe-moi un sapin Rita by Stéphane Halmaï‐Voisard, Francis Rollin and Karine Corbeil. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
(Camouflage View by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
And volup-terra-ry (see this one with bouncing, infectiously joyful kids):
(Safe Zone by Stoss Landscape Urbanism. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
And green-goism (though this one isn’t overtly treebuggery):
(Pomme de parterre by Angela Iarocci, Claire Ironside and David Ross. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
And pushing-it-with-the-project-statement:
(Dymaxion Sleep by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
And rhythmametry:
(Le jardin de bâtons bleus by Claude Cormier Landscape Architects. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)
It’s interesting to note briefly that not one of the gardens are peddling in what Piet Oudolf, the avant-gardener of the High Line, would call “the soft pornography of the flower.” The installations are less about botany and almost singularly about sculpting spaces and programming them with melodrama.
Go see (and play).
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It’s that time of the year and the Bartlett Summer Show begins today. Over 450 students are showing innovative drawings, models, devices, texts, animations and installations. I find it usually takes a few visits to absorb everything.
Location
Main Quadrangle and Slade Galleries of UCL, Gower St, London WC1
Official show opening by Massimiliano Fuksas
Friday 26 June, 19.00
Exhibition open to the public
Saturday 27 June, 10.00 – 20.30
Sunday 28 June, 10.00 – 17.30
Monday 29 June, 10.00 – 20.30
Tuesday 30 June, 10.00 – 18.00
Wednesday 1 & Thursday 2 July, 10.00 – 17.00
Friday 3 July, 10.00 – 20.30
Saturday 4 July, 10.00 – 17.00 (show closes)
Guided exhibition tour by the Bartlett Professors of Architecture
Tuesday 30 June, please arrive at 6.30pm for 6.45pm start, tour duration approximately 1 hour.
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Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.
As Geoff mentioned last month, London’s Building Center hosted a daylong seminar at the end of May called London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground.
[Image: From London Yields: Urban Agriculture].
The speakers covered a lot of terrain—so, instead of a full recap of the event, the following list simply explores some of the broader ideas, responses, and questions about urban agriculture that stood out from the day’s presentations.
1. Becoming public policy
The event was introduced and moderated by David Barrie, a sustainable development consultant, who framed the day as a collective opportunity to brainstorm ways in which urban agriculture could be moved from mere “sustainable accessory” to become a standard practice of both everyday life and city design. Interestingly, Mark Brearley, Head of Design at Design for London (DfL) and the day’s first speaker, provided confirmation of Barrie’s diagnosis, confessing that food production was a recent add-on to many of their open space projects. Why? “Because people were asking us about it,” he said.
Brearley’s presentation was an overview of DfL’s hundreds of urban regeneration and infrastructure improvement projects; these are, in themselves, interesting but, in aggregate, somewhat exhausting. However, as an office of the London Development Agency, working on behalf of the Mayor of London, Brearley was able to provide a fascinating insight into some of the current institutional priorities that need to be satisfied before urban agriculture can become a standard part of London public policy. For example, DfL’s main interest in food production today is in terms of its “public engagement potential” and their primary stumbling block is how to measure the scaleability of local initiatives. Any London-based urban agriculture projects hoping for a mayoral blessing, take note!
2. Food is a design tool
The second speaker was Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. Hungry City traces how food has shaped both the city and its productive hinterland throughout history, from the Sumerian city of Ur to today’s London via the markets and gates of ancient Rome. Steel provides a wide-ranging historical look of food production, importation, regulation, and culture, before putting forward her own intriguing and potentially revolutionary proposition: what would happen if we consciously used food as a design tool to create a “sitopic” city? Steel’s coinage here, sitopia—from “sitos” (food) and “topos” (place)—is derived from her realization that “food shares with utopia the quality of being cross-disciplinary… capable of transforming not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, [and] cities.” And because “food is necessary,” a sitopian city (unlike its utopian cousin) would remain tied to reality and of universal relevance.
The quotations above come from Steel’s book, however, rather than her lecture; twenty-five minutes was enough time to provide fascinating examples of food’s role in shaping cities and urban life, but, sadly, not enough to explain (let alone explore) further thoughts about food’s use as an urban planning tool. More to come soon, I hope, on this topic…
[Image: Ebenezer Howard's original scheme for the Garden Cities of To-morrow shows a landscape reimagined in terms of food production and supply. As Carolyn Steel explains in her own book Hungry City, Howard's plans relied on land reform that was never carried out, and the garden cities of today (Letchworth, Welwyn, etc.) are, as a result, little more than green dormitory suburbs].
3. Partnerships as infrastructure
Anna Terzi, who runs London Food Link’s small grants scheme for Sustain, was the day’s third speaker; she described one of their current projects, demonstrating how key insights from both Mark Brearley’s and Carolyn Steel’s talks might look in action.
Sustain (a nonprofit alliance for better food and farming) is currently poised to create borough-wide institutional change by partnering with Camden Council and Camden Primary Care Trust (part of the National Health Service). This alliance—with its intriguing implication that the National Health Service might be the one institution with the most to gain by promoting urban agriculture—speaks to the impact of creating new interest groups for locally grown food. By partnering with institutions responsible for dealing with established urban challenges—issues such as public health, economic growth, community engagement, waste, and environmental sustainability—groups like Sustain have the potential to take urban agriculture from decorative hobby to investment-worthy infrastructure.
The Camden partnership’s report (still in draft stage) aims to outline a relatively coherent and holistic food program for the borough—a plan that promises to use food to reshape at least this part of the city, in terms of promoting social enterprise, meeting infrastructure needs, and reducing health inequalities.
[Image: A lemon grown in Dulwich; photograph by Jonathan Gales (2008), ©Bohn & Viljoen Architects].
4. Mapping and visualization tools
The last two presentations of the day agreed that successfully producing food in the city requires a detailed resource inventory combined with effective promotion efforts. Mikey Tomkins, a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, described systematically mapping the rooftops, grass patches, vertical faces, and vacant lots of Elephant & Castle—whereupon he discovered that 30% of the area’s food needs could be met through the cultivation of found space alone.
Architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen, creators of the uninspiringly named CPUL (Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes), emphasized the need to think about spare inventory in terms of population and three dimensionality (their Urban Agriculture Curtain filled a display window one floor above us). Their research techniques included the accumulation of census data and questionnaires combined with GPS mapping and site visits in order to analyze a landscape’s food production capacity.
Both Tomkins and Bohn & Viljoen also showed several projects intended to help people read the city in terms of food, using tools as diverse as “edible maps” of London and visual analyses of urban agriculture in Havana, to installations and public events, such as the Continuous Picnic. This was a day-long event, part of the 2008 London Festival of Architecture, that included an “Inverted Market” (bring your own locally grown fruit and vegetables to be admired, judged, and then prepared), as well lessons in “Community Composting”; a giant public picnic then spread throughout Russell Square and Montague Place, with connecting corridors between.
Meanwhile, for his Edible Maps series, an example of which appears below, Tomkins targets a new type of urban resident: the “food-flâneur,” who, map in hand, “could start to picture… the grassed areas around housing, the corners of parks, or the many flat rooftops of this quarter of Croydon spring into life with psychogeographic food.”
Another example of urban agriculture as an opportunity for community activation was Croydon Roof Divercity, Tomkins’s collaboration with AOC (previously discussed, along with other AOC projects, on BLDGBLOG here).
[Image: From Mikey Tomkins's series of Edible Maps, this guide represents the area around Surrey Street car park, site of Croydon Roof Divercity, in terms of inventory and potential yield].
5. Easy, cheap, and somewhat under control
Both Anna Terzi and Bohn & Viljoen recognized the difficulty of maintaining urban agriculture projects, once the initial novelty has worn off. Bohn & Viljoen are currently working on a twelve-step program to prevent relapse, while Sustain are offering ongoing practical and financial support to new food growing spaces in London through their Capital Growth initiative.
Throughout the morning, David Barrie repeatedly registered his concern that urban agriculture needed to be economically viable, not just an upscale $64 Tomato lifestyle choice. Several of the presenters added a layer of nuance to Barrie’s formulation, noting that cheap food has simply had its costs externalized and hidden (Carolyn Steel) and that organizations like the New Economics Foundation are developing the much-needed tools to measure urban-agriculture-created value, such as increased community engagement and environmental sustainability, which is currently perceived as intangible and qualitative (Katrin Bohn). Mikey Tomkins argued against an economics-based one-size-fits-all approach to urban agriculture, explaining that the scale of a food growing project determines its possible benefits. Thus differentiated, food gardening generates educational and quality of life outcomes and should be measured accordingly, while market gardening creates recycling benefits, and urban agriculture can be evaluated in terms of yield.
Finally, the elephant in the room was the degree of coordination and regulation needed to transform London into a food-producing landscape. In an environment where, as Carolyn Steel said, the supermarkets where Londoners buy more than 80% of their groceries refused to participate in consultations with the Mayor’s London Food Strategy, it seems unlikely that sustainable food production and distribution will become the norm without legislative intervention.
In her book, Steel quotes Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman who wrote: “You who control the transportation of food supplies are in charge, so to speak, of the city’s lifeline, of its very throat.” At the moment, Steel tells us, roughly 30 agrifood conglomerates—unelected, and with no responsibility other than to their shareholders—have almost unfettered control over London’s food supply. Until that changes, urban agriculture can’t help but remain “at the artwork stage”—an inspiring, attractive, and completely optional extra.
[Previous guest posts by Nicola Twilley include Watershed Down, The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, Park Stories, and Zones of Exclusion].
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