Terreform Inc. Blog

New York (Steady) State, presented at the Holcim Forum in Mexico City last year, received a seed grant from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. You can see our project on their website here and check out other grantees from Switzerland, Ethiopia, New Zealand, Brazil, China and Mexico.

Last night at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, we launched the first Multi-Story Books project, By the City/For the City. The book features designs responding to everyday challenges faced by residents of NYC. For more on the book and other Urban Design Week events, check out this Urban Omnibus interview with Anne Guiney of the Institute for Urban Design.

Project Team: Michael Sorkin, Makoto Okazaki, Ying Liu
© Terreform Inc. (http://terreform.info)

As part of a larger project to investigate the potential for transition of New York to a condition of complete self-sufficiency, Terreform has been looking at a number of enabling morphological transformations. One of these is the “figure-ground switch”, in which nineteenth century blocks see their built mass migrate into the space of the street, freeing the block interior for the inscription of agriculture and other public uses.
When we first began to investigate this formal maneuver, we looked at it too simply. To be sure, the idea that it was possible to combine the modernist fantasy of living in greenery with a more traditional idea of the centrality of the street was and remains at the center of the proposition. The kind of city in which this might be possible was understood to be one in which the nature of urban circulation had been radically transformed with streets largely removed from the automobile system and inhabited
by pedestrians with relatively few small, slow, non-emitting vehicles. The character of these streets was decidedly pre-modern and a particular inspiration was the medieval and Islamic city.
While there’s an obvious appeal and viability to this transformation, it was largely directed to questions of movement and of the public realm, to strategies to for reconfiguring the ratio of public to private space in the city. At the conceptual outset, we devoted little time to analyzing the actual metrics of sufficiency, the relationship of the new morphology to the needs and numbers of existing populations. As we deepened our research into the production of food, for example, we realized that even if we devoted all of the new terraced roof-tops and interior courts to agriculture, the harvest was insufficient to feed more than 2.2% of the population of the site.
The conceptual predicate of New York City (Steady) State is the test of complete self-sufficiency, a city with an ecological footprint co-terminus with its political boundaries. By pushing to the maximum, we gave ourselves a basis for judging not simply the possibility of complete urban autarky but for looking at its desirability.

See more at http://www.terreform.info

This weekend the ACGA held their annual conference at Columbia. Groups came from Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Helsinki, Sweden, Miami, and San Francisco. Presenters included the Urban Design Lab, Snap Gardens, East New York Farms, Green Thumb, and Five Borough Farm. We are very excited to be in communication with all the NYC-based food production and analysis efforts in the lead-up to the publication of our food chapter in New York City (Steady) State this fall!

Other conference highlights were tours of Central Park, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Floyd Bennett field, Bed-Stuy, the High Line, Governors Island, Brooklyn-based youth farms, the East Village, Harlem, school gardens in the South Bronx, NYC food deserts, Queens Community Garden, and chicken and bee farms in the Bronx. Phew. Not to mention a film festival featuring one portion of Another World is Plantable! and The Greenhorns…

Terreform’s Self Sufficient Skyscarper

The Graduate Program in Urban Design Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK
is pleased to announce the the seventh annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism.

RICHARD SENNETT
The Edge:
Borders and Boundaries in the city.
Monday April 11th, 2011.
6:00 pm

The Great Hall of Shepard Hall, CCNY,
Convent Avenue at 138th Street, New York, NY.
This lecture is free and open to the public.
No reservations are necessary.

Terreform Inc. has been working with colleagues from Tulane University to produce a book devoted to the Architectural and Planning response to Hurricane Katrina.  In addition, TF has done a proposal for a system of self-financing, habitable levees along the Algiers (Westbank) Mississippi River front.  This proposal will stand alone as its own publication, as well as, join the larger projects compendium of proposes.

Two members from team Terreform Inc. visited the city of New Orleans this past weekend to experience the site of Algiers for the first time.  Purpose for the trip was to be able to fact-check, take pictures, meet people on the ground and experience first-hand a city known for its food, music, and culture.  Look for the New Algiers book this spring 2011.