[bracket] Announces Selected Projects for "On Farming" Issue

Today, [bracket] announced the selected projects and proposals for issue #1 “On Farming”.

[bracket] is a collaboration of Bustler’s parent site Archinect and InfraNet Lab, and is composed of a collection of diverse editors and an open-source contributing membership.

[bracket] is an annual publication documenting issues overlooked yet central to our cultural milieu that have evolved out of the new disciplinary territory at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urbanism and, now, the internet. [bracket] is a publishing platform for ideas charting the complex overlap of the sphere of architecture and online social spheres.

Issue #1 “On Farming” is scheduled for publication in winter 2009. Jurors are Fritz Haeg, Kate Orff, Heather Ring, Michael Speaks, Mason White, Nathalie de Vries.

Here is a small collection of selected works that followed the call for entries:

Cloud Skippers

Cloud Skipping is about harvesting the resources of earth’s atmosphere. By harnessing the tremendous energy of the jet stream, Cloud Skippers imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the surface to drift amongst the clouds in machine-like dwellings designed for gliding.

Farm Logic

Farm Logic has exerted a continual pressure on barn design for centuries, leading to creative and subtle evolutionary changes driven by pragmatic necessity and the desire to achieve a maximum effect through minimum means. While rarely inventing new technology, barn design embraces current technology, runs it through an ascetic filter and pares it down to its minimum condition. The new sheep barn continues this lineage, utilizing minimum material and energy to provide column free space, performative enclosure and functional apertures for daylight and ventilation. This pragmatic mandate resonates with the current call for sustainability, without the hype.

Food Matrix

Food Matrix is a quick-reference guide for the small-scale producer. At a glance compare energy input/output ratios, average yields, water or land requirements. Plan for the seasons with typical farming cycles and practices. A fast and convenient method to contrast the benefits or disadvantages of many common crops and livestock.

GEOtube: Vertical Salt Deposit Growth System

GEOtube is a proposal for a new 170 meter tall tower for the city of Dubai. With an open structure and an exposed membrane skin, the vertical planes of the GEOtube tower are continually misted with local salt water via an internal vascular water system. The result is a continual uniform growth of salt crystal deposits upon its vertically expansive surfaces, providing a highly identifiable architectural icon for the city, a specialized habitat for wildlife that thrives is this specialized environment, and an accessible skin for the harvesting of salt.

Long Island City: Farming Park

All too often we see land being taken away for parking and at the same time the reclamation of abandoned parking lots to turn into viable land, specifically farms in urban environments. The project, which is a park and ride facility and urban agricultural farm attempts to combine these two typologies to co-exist on one site, bringing the process of food production and consumption in contact with a major multi-modal transfer point between the car and NYC’s existing public transportation network. The project will provide an alternative option for those accessing NYC by car and also challenge the conventional function of a park and ride facility to provide a greater good for those users and the surrounding neighborhoods; connecting Long Island City and Sunnyside Queens with a much needed public green space.

Project :: Farm

Project :: Farm is an ongoing investigation into the procedural and cultural economies of farming in the high plains of West Texas. Ranging from tactical maneuvers to playful experiments, these projects are more weed than crop, more dust-storm than soil, more uncertainty than efficiency. Embedded in the everyday practices of farming, these projects exploit the temporalities of cultivation, the contingencies of weather, and the astonishing beauty of productive landscapes.

Vegetal Housing | Inhabiting the Nature

See the complete list of selected proposals at brkt.org.