Architecture
AT GREEN APPLE LANDSCAPING, WE FEEL so strongly about putting out a positive message of what we can all be doing to improve our relationship with nature, that not only have we blogged about it in articles… and not only have we documented in with photography… but we have even produced a full-length feature movie about it! It has been called the definitive documentary about natural building, and it was shot in eight countries on four continents, over a period of over four years. Publishing house PM Press has signed on as distributor and will be officially releasing the DVD in a couple of months. The name of the film is FIRST EARTH – Uncompromising Ecological Architecture.
Continue reading about Green Apple Landscaping Presents First Earth Cob Building Movie
THIS PAST WEEKEND, I TRAVELED to New York City to see an exhibition of landscape architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Well, okay, the MoMA exhibit was not the main reason I went to New York — enjoying the last gasp of summer with a little vacation time in the Big Apple was my primary objective. But while I was there, I stumbled upon this interesting exhibit, and so I took the time to check it out and to document it. So I’m uploading some of the photos that I took at the gallery, complete with the original texts that accompanied the drawings and models. And I’ll add just a few short words of my own by way of introduction: More often than not, art installations and academic articles about architecture are incomprehensible and irrelevant. But occasionally it is a valuable exercise to see what so-called institutions of higher learning and haughty-totty art snobs are saying about our industry, because some of these ideas can lead to new ways of understanding the landscape and how we might better transform it…
THE PROBLEM IS Malthus remixed: the population of the planet is expanding exponentially, but forty per cent of the planet’s land mass is already being used for agriculture. There are hardly any virgin patches left in the temperate zones to convert into new farmland, and what’s currently being used to grow food is expected to fail in the decades to come. These are the facts and figures for so-called conventional agriculture, using poisonous pesticides. If we demanded that everyone have the right to eat organic food — currently less than three per cent of the population does — we would need to more than double the amount of land being cultivated for food crops. It would mean the total destruction of all of the tropical rainforests, since they would need to be used for grazing, to produce poop for natural fertilizer. So how do we provide the whole human family with healthy food?
IN OUR BLOG POST of a couple of weeks ago, Beautiful Blanc Walls, we looked at the possibility of greenifying not only the land that surrounds a building, and not even just the land that’s on top of a building, but land that’s on the sides of buildings, as well! In our blog post of last week, Chow Towers of Babel, we took a close and critical look at the way that our civilization produces most of its human food, far away from most of its humans, and far from healthy for human, animal, and plant alike. Now here in this blog post, The History of High, we will begin examining the futurist pancake-stack answer to the agricultural crisis, Vertical Farming.
IN THE CURRENT political climate, there is a tendency to herald every baby step taken in the general direction of sustainability as a giant leap for humankind. Sure, it is important to give positive reinforcement to young children when they achieve even modest accomplishments. But we are not children! We may be acting like spoiled children, despoiling the environment for our own short-term convenience, without a thought for the long-term consequences. But we have the mental acumen of full-grown adults, and we can no longer claim ignorance of the ecological emergencies in this day and age. So let’s be a bit more humble about our tiny triumphs and encourage each other to strive higher. Let’s not compare ourselves to ecological laggards — but to environmental visionaries like Freidensreich Hundertwasser.
