January 2011
64 posts
SPACES OF FOOD #5: MADEIRA ODORLESS FISH MARKET AND THE TEMPELHOF MINISTRY OF FOOD →
bldgblog.blogspot.com
The first is the Madeira Odorless Fish Market, from 2006.
Camara de Lobos, Madeira, Chan explains, “is a fishing village located 10km west of the capital, Funchal. The fishing community is quickly dwindling into poverty as Funchal provides its own facilities for fish vending businesses. Camara de Lobos remains the only place in the world where the Black Scabbard fish industry can be self sustained, yet the fishermen still receive second hand pay for their catch as most of it is sold in Funchal.”
Accordingly, the Odorless Fish Market ”provides a place where their catch can be sold directly. The programme consists of a fish market, smokery, fish cookery school cum restaurant run by the fishermen community. Its architecture is technically driven to control Smell, Ventilation and Cooling, to provide a building with a greatly reduced smell of fish. The heart of the architecture is a solar chimney system which uses the consistent madeiran sun to, ironically, ventilate/cool the building.”
It is a spatially self-deodorizing architecture of thermal air control.
The second of Chan’s projects that I want to look at quickly here is the so-calledTempelhof Ministry of Food, from 2010.
“Tempelhof Ministry of Food is a bread and fish production community situated on the old airfield of Tempelhof Airport,” Chan writes.
More specifically, “the proposal is a joint venture between Edeka and the Berlin State, seeking to help Berlin’s current problems of unemployment and social disparity.” Local residents can produce their own food, cultivating “a spirit of co-existence and community, which they bring back to other Berliners.”
Of course, it takes more than simply activating a vegetation layer in Photoshop to create a realistic urban food infrastructure, but the technical realization of the images—as well as the historic context of the Berlin Airlift, when Tempelhof effectively became an emergency food-distribution center—make it interesting enough for a quick look.
Indeed, as much as I like the narrative background for the Tempelhof project, it’s simply too hard to tell if there is more to the proposal’s otherwise impressive imagery to suggest a financially realistic and socially sustainable intervention into Berlin’s existing systems of urban food production.
Put another way, it’s one thing to create, analyze, or even editorially promote architectural projects as narrative ideas—that is, as scenario plans for future landscapes—but it’s another thing to look at whether or not such proposals do, in fact, operate successfully as solutions to the problems they highlight.
In any case, the spatial and atmospheric implications of food are foregrounded by both projects, though it is the deliberately complicated, Rube Goldberg-like sectional ventilation chambers seen in the Odorless Fish Market that seem most worthy of further exploration.
The first is the Madeira Odorless Fish Market, from 2006.
Camara de Lobos, Madeira, Chan explains, “is a fishing village located 10km west of the capital, Funchal. The fishing community is quickly dwindling into poverty as Funchal provides its own facilities for fish vending businesses. Camara de Lobos remains the only place in the world where the Black Scabbard fish industry can be self sustained, yet the fishermen still receive second hand pay for their catch as most of it is sold in Funchal.”
Accordingly, the Odorless Fish Market ”provides a place where their catch can be sold directly. The programme consists of a fish market, smokery, fish cookery school cum restaurant run by the fishermen community. Its architecture is technically driven to control Smell, Ventilation and Cooling, to provide a building with a greatly reduced smell of fish. The heart of the architecture is a solar chimney system which uses the consistent madeiran sun to, ironically, ventilate/cool the building.”
It is a spatially self-deodorizing architecture of thermal air control.
The second of Chan’s projects that I want to look at quickly here is the so-calledTempelhof Ministry of Food, from 2010.
“Tempelhof Ministry of Food is a bread and fish production community situated on the old airfield of Tempelhof Airport,” Chan writes.
More specifically, “the proposal is a joint venture between Edeka and the Berlin State, seeking to help Berlin’s current problems of unemployment and social disparity.” Local residents can produce their own food, cultivating “a spirit of co-existence and community, which they bring back to other Berliners.”
Of course, it takes more than simply activating a vegetation layer in Photoshop to create a realistic urban food infrastructure, but the technical realization of the images—as well as the historic context of the Berlin Airlift, when Tempelhof effectively became an emergency food-distribution center—make it interesting enough for a quick look.
Indeed, as much as I like the narrative background for the Tempelhof project, it’s simply too hard to tell if there is more to the proposal’s otherwise impressive imagery to suggest a financially realistic and socially sustainable intervention into Berlin’s existing systems of urban food production.
Put another way, it’s one thing to create, analyze, or even editorially promote architectural projects as narrative ideas—that is, as scenario plans for future landscapes—but it’s another thing to look at whether or not such proposals do, in fact, operate successfully as solutions to the problems they highlight.
In any case, the spatial and atmospheric implications of food are foregrounded by both projects, though it is the deliberately complicated, Rube Goldberg-like sectional ventilation chambers seen in the Odorless Fish Market that seem most worthy of further exploration.
NEST FACTORY →
bldgblog.blogspot.com
“This drab, windowless concrete facade does not conceal an electricity substation, data servers, or a high security detention center,” Nicola Twilley writes over at GOOD. It is, instead, a living birds’ nest factory, an emerging building type that has “spread across Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and even Cambodia, towering above traditional one-story structures and transforming the urban landscape.” Their purpose? To foster the production of swiftlet nests, used in Chinese bird’s nest soup.
Nicola explains that these nest farms are, in effect, surrogate geological formations: “the buildings are intended to mimic caves,” she writes, where the swiftlets would normally live, “with a carefully spaced matrix of wooden rafters replacing the ledges and crannies of a cave ceiling, and detailed attention paid to internal temperature, humidity, and even sound.”
They are, in effect, part of what could be called a saliva industry, as the nests are made from swiftlet saliva. A spitshop, say, instead of a sweatshop. Mechanize this one step further, and full-scale 3D saliva-printing might not be far off…
“This drab, windowless concrete facade does not conceal an electricity substation, data servers, or a high security detention center,” Nicola Twilley writes over at GOOD. It is, instead, a living birds’ nest factory, an emerging building type that has “spread across Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and even Cambodia, towering above traditional one-story structures and transforming the urban landscape.” Their purpose? To foster the production of swiftlet nests, used in Chinese bird’s nest soup.
Nicola explains that these nest farms are, in effect, surrogate geological formations: “the buildings are intended to mimic caves,” she writes, where the swiftlets would normally live, “with a carefully spaced matrix of wooden rafters replacing the ledges and crannies of a cave ceiling, and detailed attention paid to internal temperature, humidity, and even sound.”
They are, in effect, part of what could be called a saliva industry, as the nests are made from swiftlet saliva. A spitshop, say, instead of a sweatshop. Mechanize this one step further, and full-scale 3D saliva-printing might not be far off…
The decay of Lisbon
When you think of Lisbon, you think of the sunny weather and you see the picturesque neighbourhoods with their labyrinthic street patterns and the beautiful monuments reminding you of the riches from the age of discovery. Of course, it’s all there. But the city is falling apart. And it’s amazing.
CITY BREATHS: Farming the city →
citybreaths.tumblr.com
CITIES has organized an exhibition in Amsterdam, showing local and international examples of urban agriculture projects. The exhibition serves as an inspiration to municipality officials, architects, farmers, designers, engineers, academics, artists and legal experts participating in a…
Urban Pioneers in the 60's: Back to the city
Interesting piece in the New York Times. It tells the story of people settling in New York in the late 60’s when cities were considered to be dying. The article nicely illustrates the life cycle of urban environments and how pioneers are needed to trigger gentrification.
CITY BREATHS: Telly Savalas and the redevelopment of British cities →
citybreaths.tumblr.com
Accompanying this video.
During the 1960s and 1970s most British city centres of considerable size underwent major redevelopments in order to make way for office space, shopping centres and growing numbers of automobiles. Centralization was the keyword, and cars were to play a…
The Nazis and US are gone, but the devil stays →
failedarchitecture.tumblr.com
Check out my contribution to Failed Architecture about Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain).
Failed Architecture is a blog by the Amsterdam based office for cultural innovation Non-Fiction.
Plastique Fantastique - Temporary Inflatable Space
Raumlabor in Duisburg, courtesy of Plastique Fantastique
I’ve written a short piece about the renowned Plastique Fantastique studio for CITIES The Magazine.
Play
'The Stables' Refab Fire Station →
blueantstudio.blogspot.com
‘The Stables’ is an old fire station in Richmond, Victoria that has been re-fabricated into a modern home. The space exposes many of the original brick walls that stand out in strong contrast to the white ceilings and wood floor. The home is currently for sale if you’re in the market for a place in the Richmond, VC area.
Loving your inspirational blog! I am a building lover too (especially if they are very old and industrial)! Thank you for following and inspiring!
i’m glad you like my blog.thank you so much for these words!
polis: The use of old buildings, 50 years later →
thepolisblog.org
Yet the real tragedy is not that we fetishize the street, but that we ignore some of the more critical insights in the book, insights which are just as relevant today as when they we first penned. Some of these lesser known ideas are grappled with smartly in Lynne Elizabeth and Stephen Goldsmith’s What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, an edited collection of essays published last year with contributions from a diverse range of thinkers, policymakers and urban activists.
This is an argument against redevelopment not rooted in aesthetics or an idea of the good city, which can always be reduced to a question of taste, but of simple economics. New = debt = unaffordability = loss of creativity and innovation. Al Attara’s fantastic Metropolitan Exchange Building - the “House of Ideas” - on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is the proof in this urban pudding. Bought for $250,000 almost 40 years ago, Attara has recently turned it into a shared office space for designers, artists, engineers, TV producers and even beiotechnologists. None of this would have been possible in the brand new 45 story tower that developers had proposed to build on the site - the debt load would have prevented it, even if the will had been present.
As cities around the world look to revitalize and compete, many have tried to build nostalgic streetscapes and expensive renovations of historic buildings in order to capture some of the magic that Jacobs described. Even more are ignoring Jacobs completely and pursing multi-billion dollar neo-modernist megaprojects in the hope of luring the innovative and the creative. Better to follow the lead of Al Attara and others who recognize the importance of the use of old buildings - collaboration, innovation and creation all like one thing, cheap space.
Jane Jacobs’s iconic Death & Life of Great American Cities remains one of the most read and influential texts in urban studies, now 50 years after publication. Surely this year will see numerous celebrations in honor of its 50th birthday, with tributes galore as to how the book helped turn around the seat tide of high modernism, urban renewal and other anti-urban activities that threatened to turn entire cities into the “great blight of dullness” which Jacobs so deployed.
Yet the real tragedy is not that we fetishize the street, but that we ignore some of the more critical insights in the book, insights which are just as relevant today as when they we first penned. Some of these lesser known ideas are grappled with smartly in Lynne Elizabeth and Stephen Goldsmith’s What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, an edited collection of essays published last year with contributions from a diverse range of thinkers, policymakers and urban activists.
This is an argument against redevelopment not rooted in aesthetics or an idea of the good city, which can always be reduced to a question of taste, but of simple economics. New = debt = unaffordability = loss of creativity and innovation. Al Attara’s fantastic Metropolitan Exchange Building - the “House of Ideas” - on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is the proof in this urban pudding. Bought for $250,000 almost 40 years ago, Attara has recently turned it into a shared office space for designers, artists, engineers, TV producers and even beiotechnologists. None of this would have been possible in the brand new 45 story tower that developers had proposed to build on the site - the debt load would have prevented it, even if the will had been present.
As cities around the world look to revitalize and compete, many have tried to build nostalgic streetscapes and expensive renovations of historic buildings in order to capture some of the magic that Jacobs described. Even more are ignoring Jacobs completely and pursing multi-billion dollar neo-modernist megaprojects in the hope of luring the innovative and the creative. Better to follow the lead of Al Attara and others who recognize the importance of the use of old buildings - collaboration, innovation and creation all like one thing, cheap space.
