Archinect - News

Lever Architecture among recipients of the USDA's Wood Innovations Grant for material innovation and exploration

2021-05-14T12:50:00-04:00

Portland-based LEVER Architecture is known for its work with material innovation, specifically cross-laminated timber (CLT) and mass timber construction. Founded by Thomas Robinson in 2009, the practice has received much notoriety and was recognized as one of the Architectural League of New York's Emerging Voices in 2017. Since then, the practice has developed impressive mass timber projects and restorations such as the Oregon Conservation Center, Redfox Commons, and Albina Yard, their first US building made from domestically produced CLT.

Funding from the grant will aid the firm in its collaborative project Forest to Frame: An Architecture of Resilient Forestry. In partnership with Sustainable Northwest and Ecotrust, the project will be a web-based platform for "researching and tracking regional wood products that will meet the building industry's changing needs, as well as a tool to better understand the forestry practices associated with these products," shares the firm.

Redfox C...

Crowdfunding effort helps create a 22,200-acre nature preserve in Canada

2019-09-09T13:00:00-04:00

The B.C. Parks Foundation, an independent charity that works with B.C. Parks, was able to raise $3 million to buy [1,977 acres] in Princess Louisa Inlet from a private seller.

According to CBC News, the B.C. Foundation aims to bundle the new nature preserve with a series of surrounding properties to create a 22,200-acre provincial park around the entire inlet.

Ireland to plant 440 million trees by 2040

2019-09-04T19:59:00-04:00

Twenty-two million trees are to be planted every year in Ireland over the next two decades as part of a plan to tackle climate change, the Government has said. While the Government’s climate action plan, published in June, proposed 8,000 hectares – or 19,768 acres – of new forestry every year in a bid to capture carbon emissions, it did not specify the number of trees involved.

Ireland is aiming to turn a large portion of its agricultural land over to forestry as a plan to plant 22 million trees per year for the next 20 years takes shape.

A Department of Communications spokesperson for the Irish Climate Action and Environment told The Irish Times, “The climate action plan commits to delivering an expansion of forestry planting and soil management to ensure that carbon abatement from land-use is delivered over the period 2021 to 2030 and in the years beyond.”

Trump pushes for increased logging in the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest

2019-08-29T09:00:00-04:00

President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago [...] The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule,” which has survived a decades-long legal assault.

The move comes as global awareness over widespread deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical regions around the world intensifies.

In Brazil, where land clearance and deforestation have increased rapidly this year under the country's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, smoke from the burning Amazon rainforest recently plunged São Paulo into sudden darkness.

Atlanta to create country's largest public "food forest"

2019-05-28T13:24:00-04:00

The Urban Food Forest would include edible trees, shrubs, vines, walking trails, community garden beds and a number of other features that would be open to the public for free.

The Conservation Fund is working in southeast Atlanta to help create a new 7.1 acre Community Urban Food Forest, the largest in the country. The effort aims to convert an existing agricultural property into a new model for urban park and forestry initiatives by growing a variety of fresh foods for public consumption within a public park.

The food forest will help Atlanta achieve its goal of ensuring "85 percent of the city residents are within one-half mile of fresh food access by 2021," according to a recently-approved Atlanta City Council ordinance.

The City of Atlanta will now take over the site as the development of the food forest moves forward.

Holistic design tool HOMEKIT takes on issues of resilient community and sustainability in rural Colombia

2016-06-28T13:14:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by Boston Architectural College.

Population growth and lack of shelter are the main indicators of increased poverty in developing countries. Every year, millions of people in rural communities in tropical climates migrate to cities in search of a better life. Informal settlements proliferate on the cities’ peripheries. However, what often awaits them is misfortune: few employment opportunities, lack of clean water, crowded housing spaces, crime, and other threats to their family traditions and lifestyle.

The HOMEKIT training program educates people in rural areas to sustainably cultivate bamboo and empower their villages to be self-reliant and to meet their own shelter needs. The system reduces forest depletion and contributes to the socioeconomic infrastructure of the villages. It provides safe, dignified, highly functional homes that respond to the local environment and natural disasters, connects people with the natural systems that support them, and he...

Boeri Studio's Bosco Verticale in Milan makes the forest tower fantasy a reality

2014-05-16T14:14:00-04:00

Boeri Studio will soon realize the dream of the forest tower with Bosco Verticale, or Vertical Forest -- and they're building two. The thought of a tower "built" out of living greenery has been rendered by architects numerous times, it has reached the point where it's considered a trope of green architecture. But from an idealistic view, seeing the tree-tower design get past the planning stage and move toward completion is quite refreshing, if not intriguing, to say the least.

Located in Milan's redeveloping complex of Porta Nuova Isola, Vertical Forest was designed to help alleviate the city's increasing air pollution problem and provide a biological urban habitat in a total area of 40,000 m2.

The towers -- at 110 meters and 76 meters tall -- allegedly have 900 trees (measuring between 3m-6m) already planted in the residential balconies, along with 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 floral plants on terraces up to the 27th floor. As described by the studio, the vast number of plants will not on...

Scenario 4: Building the Urban Forest

2014-04-04T15:48:00-04:00

The forest carries deep cultural significance. Within the urban landscape, this ecologically complex, spatially layered, dynamic system is also understood to perform a wide range of essential ecosystem services. As arborists, parks departments, landscape architects, planners and community groups engage in the reforesting of cities, how are they collectively shaping the urban landscape? What hybrid ecosystems are yet to be designed? How many trees are enough?

Scenario Journal's just-released issue, Scenario 4: Building the Urban Forest, features a broad, interdisciplinary conversation between architects, ecologists, landscape architects, and artists, about the meaning and possibilities of the spatial, biological, and metaphorical construct of the "urban forest." From living machine, to novel ecosystem, to provider of ecosystem services, to spatially and culturally rich landscape, the urban forest is an inspiration, a challenge, an opportunity, and a fertile source of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Reforesting cities is one of the defining trends of twenty first century urbanism. Among designers, the forest has served as inspiration, as model, and as tool. At the same time, forest managers and cities have been wrestling with the actual challenges of maintaining existing tree canopy and forested land. As an increasing number of projects and programs concern themselves with shaping, managing and advocating for a new generation of urban for...