Bronx Museum & AFHny's Studio Garden ARTFarm Sat AM 9/4

P A R T Y Join the celebration!

Bronx Museum & AFHny's Studio celebrate gardening new ARTFarm Sat AM Sept 4^th !

Contributions of hours of labor, donations, grants and gifts culminate this Saturday when at last the ARTFarm will be fully planted... WOOHOO! Show you know the meaning of Labor Day and reap the rewards...

After filling the cleverly designed planters gracing the steep gray cement slopes, the cool museum will be the venue for a chill party.

Please contact studio@afhny.com for exact times, http://bit.ly/AFHny

MoMA Rising Currents Exhibition & Boat Tour w/Center for Architecture

Hearing Barry Bergdoll's detailed description of each of the 5 sites on the Boat Tour last month, made the models in the exhibition tangible, less futuristic. Good thing too because the graphics of the dramatic shoreline change paint a scary future.

"If there is a 6 foot sea level, all of lower Manhattan is flooded..."

In response, the team for Zone 0: A New Urban Ground, propose a design that creates estuaries viewing the city as a whole system

"21% of the city is understood to be underwater. ..by introducing more ecology, it becomes more of a place of respect .. more sublime"

With 2 miles of continuous coastline, there will be multiple ways to move along it in the proposal for Statue of Liberty Park, Zone 1, which reconnects to New Jersey with a system of land & water & transportation.

Michael Baird, Zone 2: Working Waterline, continues the merging of water and land with no conflict between industry & parks. "By engaging the oil tanks rather than merely co-existing with them there is a commitment to cultural archeology of the Bay."

"The New Aqueous Borough, Zone 3,-Palisade will use inflatable barriers already in use in 2000 examples on public waterfront...the housing will build from the roof down each structure treating waste, lazor cut and assembled 20 ft"

Voices from the teams share their inspiration throughout the exhibition in video interviews.

"The scuba diving students of the Harbor School, in High School now, were my inspiration, they will be the gardeners of the renewed harbor." Kate Orff, Zone 4 Oyster-Tecture.

Now woven into the process, viewers are transported to the project vision of a more aquatic, ecological New York City.

Tues Aug 17 Center For Architecture MOMA Boat Tour REGISTER http://bit.ly/aia-ny - So Street Seaport Pier 17
See for yourself the five sites included in MoMA’s exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront (March 24 – October 11, 2010). http://bit.ly/RCVideo.

Zone 0: A New Urban Ground,
Stephen Cassell, Adam Yarinsky, Architecture Research Office Susannah Drake, dlandstudio Site: Lower Manhattan

Zone 1: Water Proving Ground
Team Leaders: Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David J. Lewis
Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects)
Site: Liberty State Park

Zone 2: Working Waterline
Team Leader: Matthew Baird
Matthew Baird Architects
Site: Kill Van Kull and Bayonne

Zone 3: New Aqueous City: A Zoning Ordinance for a Regional Metropolis
Team Leaders: Eric Bunge, Mimi Hoang
nARCHITECTS
Site: Sunset Park, Bay Ridge and Staten Island

Zone 4: Oyster-Tecture
Team Leader: Kate Orff
SCAPE / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PLLC
Site: Gowanus Canal and Buttermilk Channel

Oyster-Tecture Ben Abelman (5).avi

Rising Currents:NYC Harbor Boat Tour

"Rising Currents is about getting back to what brought people here.. "Barry Bergdoll, MoMA Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

“The exhibition and our tour is to view New York harbor where the national discussion on infrastructure and climate change intersect....get the idea of the water being up to your feet on deck, does that make it more palpable?”

Through his masterful interweaving of urgent issues, port history, and future visioning Barry Bergdoll led a richly informative tour through the 5 project sites. To transport us to the imaginative terrain of the architects-in-residence, Barry suggests we begin by softening the edges between land and sea and consider getting back to what originally brought people to New York, the port.

Each project team spokesperson offered some solution for us to live, work and grow more at sea:

Matter-of-Factly:

“We carved out some buildings in our design because, they'd be underwater anyway” Susannah Drake with a new sunken forest and coast extension for the East River.

“As you can see, it is currently a brownfield, the strategy is to have it absorb storm surges” Paul Lewis Water Proving Ground project for Liberty State Park

Deferentially,

“Inspired by the Dutch, the resilient inflatable dams are to accommodate the 9 million population growth “ Noah Levy for the New Aqueous City proposed for Sunset Park, Bay Ridge and Staten Island and

Michael Baird's Zone 2 Working Waterline with reuse of WWII buildings to raise green land and process waste water into fuel”

And hopefully:

"In 2050 after they have cleaned the canal, YES, we will again be able eat oysters from the Gowanus Canal" Ben Abelman's Oyster-Tecture.

Any ideas for your harbor? We'd love to hear them.

For the next Center for Architecture boat tour August, check http://bit.ly/aia-ny for details. For more about Rising Currents: Projects for New Yorks' Waterfront, visit MoMA.org/risingcurrents.

@n_o_r_a + @RachelWells re-connecting