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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... View full entry
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. — CNU
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." View full entry
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. — citylab.com
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — National Geographic
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— businessinsider.com
[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.
— cbc.ca
More from the world of grain elevators and their reuse potentials:The Evil, Evil Grain Elevator: Places Journal studies how grain elevators can seem both friendly and terrifying.Stored Potential launches: a 2010 competition for an "iconic vacant grain elevator near downtown Omaha".The Wassaic... View full entry
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... View full entry
