Icon | February 2012
On a cold, wintry day in late 2011, I visited P.S. 216, in Gravesend, Brooklyn, to see the Edible Schoolyard designed by Work AC. Teaser below. To read the entire article, download the pdf here.
Urban Farmers
Dear New York City regulators of the future, I have a request: Please relax or rescind any environmental protection standards that might prevent WORK Architecture Company from realising its plans for integrating rural and urban environments. Because it would really be a shame not to have, about 40 years from now, fish swimming in underutilised sewer systems that would flow directly into ponds located in high-rise basements. Or to be able to turn broad avenues (as cars have been phased out) into farmland where fruit and vegetables could be cultivated and then sold in local grocery shops, thus eliminating the need for inefficient, impersonal supermarkets.
These radical ideas are the basis of WORKac’s vision for Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant, two underserved Brooklyn neighbourhoods, a plan that was conceived for an exhibition last summer at New York’s Center for Architecture. The exhibition invited architects in the Netherlands and the US to speculate on life in waterfront cities in the year 2040 via renderings and animations, and was divided into different “life-themes,” such as “breathing,” “moving,” and “dwelling.” Not surprisingly WORKac was the go-to American firm for “eating.”
