Archinect - News

Testbeds is giving discarded architectural mock-ups new life in New York's community gardens

2022-12-08T12:13:00-05:00

A new project from New York-based duo New Affiliates is making headlines in the Queens neighborhood of Edgemere, where architects Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb have invented a radical new way of reusing one of the design processes’ most wasteful customs – discarded architectural mock-ups.

With the help of Columbia GSAPP doctoral candidate Samuel Stewart-Halevy, the pair have begun a pilot program called Testbeds that takes the temporary structures and repurposes them as toolsheds for community gardens around the city.

Previously on Archinect: The Founders of NY-based New Affiliates Discuss How Their Love for Arguing Betters Their Work

Beginning with the generally underserved neighborhood located on the Rockaway peninsula, Testbeds has been experimenting with a new way of adapting the notion of a “circular economy” into the built environment. The program got off the ground in 2018 with the blessing of officials from the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation's GreenThumb program, u...

The hidden potential of vacant homes

2019-08-28T12:28:00-04:00

Now comes encouraging news of a Detroit program to take abandoned homes which can be saved into a land bank and then auction them off. The program is coupled with forgivable loans for repairs.

Detrroit is auctioning off vacant homes to "people who commit to fix them up and live in them." The implementation has supported Detroit's growing identity as a financially feasible place to "make a start with a home and a business."

A 1950's replica town in San Diego aids patients with memory therapy

2018-09-17T14:12:00-04:00

On August 13, a brand-new town in Southern California welcomed its first residents [...] on a light-industrial stretch of Main Street in Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb. Then they emerged in Town Square®—a 9,000-square-foot working replica of a 1950s downtown, built and operated by the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers. Unlike the businesses around it hawking restaurant supplies and tires, Town Square trades in an intangible good: memories.

The new 50's replica town in San Diego is the largest US investment in reminiscence therapy for dementia and age-related cognitive impaired patients. The industrial warehouse has been transformed into a fake town of 14 storefronts complete with a diner, a movie theater, a pet store, a park-like square, and a city hall. Patients are aided in therapy by props from the years between 1953 and 1961. Several other locations are forthcoming, the next planned for a former Rite Aid in Baltimore.

Construction begins on Atlanta's largest public park by John Portman & Associates

2018-09-10T15:49:00-04:00

Construction has begun on Atlanta's soon-to-be largest park by John Portman & Associates. The repurposed quarry pit will not only provide an outdoor recreational area but also create 2 billion gallons of emergency drinking water for Atlanta, increasing the city’s emergency water reserves from 3 to 30 days.

The first phase of Westside Park at Bellwood Quarry includes constructing a signature gateway for the park's entrance. Once completed, the new green space will be 100 acres larger than Atlanta’s currently largest park.

Dutch prisons converted into homes for refugees

2017-06-21T18:09:00-04:00

As the country’s crime rate and prison population have steadily declined for years, dozens of correctional facilities have closed altogether. So when the number of migrants started to rise—more than 50,000 entered the Netherlands last year alone—the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) saw a solution.

Many prisons in the Netherlands have been repurposed to house refugees who are waiting to be granted asylum status, a process that usually takes at least six months. Free to come and go as they please, the refugees are not allowed to work but are encouraged to learn Dutch and build connections with the surrounding community.

Rejecting modernist master planning notions, MAD's Milan master plan repurposes dilapidated rail yards by symbiosis

2017-04-27T14:02:00-04:00

Repurposing and renovation have gained greater appeal in the years since the overwhelming success of The High Line, extending to a variety of applications and structures. At the recent Milan Design Week, MAD took this to a new level by showcasing their proposal for a new masterplan of Milan, which transforms dilapidated rail yards into a series of thriving new city districts, or micro-systems.

According to MAD, these spatial districts, termed “City of Connections,” “City of Green,” “City of Living,” “City of Culture,” and “City of Resources" each address "a vernacular development typical of Italian cities, where various typological elements and scales are overlapped into dense systems of relations. Designing first at the human scale within recognizable landmarks, the broader urban scale is connected to smaller ones through the interjection of topographic landscapes, serving to unify the continually changing relations of the pedestrian, city, and nature. Each of the yards, following t...

Explore mitigating human suffering via design in this New School symposium

2017-02-23T13:41:00-05:00

As cities densify and the global population increases, much has been made of reclaiming physical spaces: but how does one reclaim a place that is bound up in tragedy, whether that tragedy was natural or man-made? On March 3rd and 4th, Parsons the New School for Design will host a symposium featuring Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian-American architect, writer, and activist who hails from Aleppo.

In addition to Attar's keynote address, the symposium, entitled “Making Home in Wounded Places: Memory, Design, and the Spatial," will explore several dozen case studies dealing with refugee shelters, the repurposing of Latin American prisons into shopping malls, and how painful memories of the past have been represented and memorialized in places including a Warsaw ghetto. Those interested in registering to attend can do so on the website.

Abandoned schools = new development opportunities

2015-08-05T19:02:00-04:00

Many school buildings that used to house children now just primarily house debris thanks to a precipitous drop in public school enrollment over several decades. One independent website puts the figure at over 1,000 abandoned schools in states stretching from West Virginia to Indiana.

Some advocate selling the empty buildings to charter schools, while others see the buildings as potential spaces for artists and inventive start-ups. According to NPR, "A few deals are in the works to renovate old schools into apartments, offices and artist spaces." In Japan, so-called "haiko camps" allow adults to camp overnight in refurbished former schools to both satisfy nostalgia and keep the buildings from becoming the eyesores and crime scenes they've become in the United States.

Turning Japan's golfing greens into solar farms

2015-07-22T13:10:00-04:00

Japan has been hungry for alternative energy ever since the 2011 Fukushima disaster made nuclear power an unattractive option in the country, and golf courses just happen to be perfectly suited for solar power — they're large open spaces that often get lots of sunlight. Kyocera's first project, now under construction, is a 23 megawatt solar plant on a golf course in Kyoto prefecture. When it goes live in 2017, the plant will produce enough power for about 8,100 households.

A student architect's plan to repurpose grain elevators into community spaces

2015-07-21T10:52:00-04:00

[Ali] Piwowar, who studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, wrote her masters thesis in architecture on preserving the heritage of grain elevators by transforming them into community spaces. Saskatchewan once had over 3,000 wooden grain elevators. One by one, however, the structures have been disappearing from the skyline, victims of changing economic and transportation conditions. Today, Piwowar estimates there are around 400 such elevators remaining with only 80 in working order.

More from the world of grain elevators and their reuse potentials:

K O S M O S asks: is architecture merging with other media?

2015-07-15T18:11:00-04:00

Telephone poles, scaffoldings, abandoned utility plants: like taxpayer-sponsored dark matter, these elements form the largely ignored visual majority of our daily urban experience. K O S M O S, a self-described "virtual firm," whose four partners occasionally physically convene in New York, Basel, or Moscow, has spotlighted and transformed these otherwise drab infrastructural elements into a ribbed foil pop-up in Moscow entitled EMA. Described as "a temporary installation and renovation of ex-industrial territory in Moscow," EMA essentially repurposes an abandoned eyesore into an event space. We emailed Leonid Slonimskiy a few questions about K O S M O S' global approach to revitalizing forgotten infrastructural elements, as well as the selfie-savvy aesthetics and corresponding media-blurring issues of EMA's design.

Archinect: You describe EMA as "reveal[ing] and leverag[ing] the hidden infrastructure of the city." In what other cities would you like to attempt similar infrastructura...