Archinect - News

Guerrilla Grafting: fruit activists turn city trees into (free) food sources

2018-06-18T15:28:00-04:00

After pothole gardeners and pavement crack fillers, the Guerilla Grafters are the next urban hacking collective that wants to make streets a better places for everyone. The collective sees grafting branches of fruit trees onto trees in the streets as an opportunity to provide free access to food to urbanites. The process of adding a small branch to an existing city tree is considered vandalism. However, that doesn’t stop the Guerilla Grafters [...].

"The Guerrilla Grafters are not welcomed by everyone," writes Doris Tielemans for Pop-Up City about this branch (no pun intended) of Fruit Activism. "Most trees in cities don’t grow fruit for a reason."

A self-taught designer builds a secret work studio on the underside of a bridge

2017-08-15T19:54:00-04:00

Abellanas’ secret cabin replicates the childhood experience of hiding under a table or in a closet – ‘The feeling kept hidden while still being able to hear and see what happens around us,’ he says. ‘Observing passing cars and trains with no one seeing me gives me great sense of peace.’

Fernando Abellanas, a self-taught designer from Valencia has created a pop-up studio into the underside of a traffic bridge. Its metal base is moved from one side of the bridge to the other by a hand crank along rails, where a shelf, chair, and desk have been bolted to the bridge’s concrete wall. Though a practical space, the tiny moveable workspace has whimsical origins—the secret urban refuge aims to replicate the childhood experience of hiding under a table or in a closet. "The feeling kept hidden while still being able to hear and see what happens around us," explains Abellanas. "Observing passing cars and trains with no one seeing me gives me great sense of peace."

Photography: Jose Manuel Pedrajas

The cabin’s exact location is a secret, and is part of a collection of spaces Abellanas is creating. ‘The project is an ephemeral intervention, [it will remain] until someone finds it and decides to steal the materials, or the authorities remove it,’ h...

Revisiting the urban plan of Burning Man

2016-08-30T14:41:00-04:00

When a group of Burners describing themselves as the Black Rock City Ministry of Urban Planning announced a design competition last fall for a new urban plan for Burning Man, Phil Walker had never given the matter much thought. “I’m actually not a Burner. I’ve never done it,” says Walker, the senior associate vice president for CallisonRTKL, an architecture firm and design consultancy. “Maybe a bit of vicarious living for a middle-aged suburban dad is what appealed to me.”

"So Walker didn’t set about to change the orientation of Black Rock City [...] instead, he built out a “kit of parts” for simple streetscape interventions that he says can have a dramatic impact on urban flow and cultural space."

Related Burning Man stories in the Archinect news:

Assemble wins Turner Prize, becoming first architects to win "UK's most prestigious art prize"

2015-12-07T16:20:00-05:00

The 18 members of London-based Assemble were named winners of the 31st Turner prize on Monday night, receiving their £25,000 prize from the Sonic Youth co-founder and artist Kim Gordon at an awards dinner broadcast live on Channel 4 from Tramway, Glasgow. Assemble are the first non-artists, in the strictest sense of the word, to win the prize. They were nominated for their work tackling urban dereliction in Toxteth, Liverpool...

Assemble, the architecture-ish collective known for their direct action urban interventions, has just won the prestigious Turner Prize. Working "across the fields of art, architecture and design," they are the first non-artists, in the strictest sense, to win the prize, and the first whose work so directly contends with the urban environment.

Specifically, Assemble was praised for their work in Toxteth, Liverpool, that involved using design to improve the living conditions and the houses of a derelict area called Granby Four Streets.

"[Assemble] draw[s] on long traditions of artistic and collective initiatives that experiment in art, design and architecture," the judges stated. "In doing so they offer alternative models to how societies can work. The long-term collaboration between Granby Four Streets and Assemble shows the importance of artistic practice being able to drive and shape urgent issues.”

With their Granby Four Streets project, Assemble created a showroom to display product...