VERTIGO FARMING: o exemplo de NY

Vertigo Farming: Eco-savvy food lovers demand locally grown edibles to ensure freshness and reduce the carbon footprint of their food. Eating sustainably whilst living in a densely packed metropolis isn't easy, but Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm is making it possible for New York City dwellers. Its farm - over 40,000 square feet of rooftop agricultural land - grows tomatoes, herbs, greens and other vegetables according to organic, planet-friendly principles and sells them to local people and businesses. An urban green space, the Rooftop Farm also enhances the environment, improving air quality, cutting the heat island effect and providing a habitat for bees, butterflies and other insects.

http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/finalists/7/Vertigo_Farming

World Monuments Fund announces 2012 WATCH!

WORLD MONUMENTS FUND ANNOUNCES 2012 WATCH, ENCOMPASSING 67 THREATENED CULTURAL - HERITAGE SITES ACROSS THE GLOBE

Founding Sponsor American Express Grants $5 Million to Support ProgramFor Next Five Years.

For Immediate Release—New York, NY, October 5, 2011…At a press conference held at World Monuments Fund’s Empire State Building headquarters today, WMF President Bonnie Burnham announced the 2012 World Monuments Watch. Since 1996, the biennial Watch has drawn international attention to cultural-heritage sites in need of assistance, helping to save some of the world’s most treasured places. The 2012 Watch includes 67 sites, representing 41 countries and territories. Ranging from the famous (Nasca lines and geoglyphs, Peru) to the little-known (Cour Royale at Tiébélé, Burkina Faso); from the urban (Charleston, South Carolina) to the rural (floating fishing villages of Ha. Long Bay, Viet Nam), the 2012 Watch tells compelling stories of human aspiration, imagination, and adaptation. The 67 sites vividly illustrate the ever-more pressing need to create a balance between heritage concerns and the social, economic, and environmental interests of communities around the world. Moreover, in addition to promoting community cohesion and pride, heritage preservation can have an especially positive impact on local populations in times of economic distress, for example through employment and the development of well-managed tourism. Ms. Burnham stated, “The World Monuments Watch is a call to action on behalf of endangered cultural-heritage sites across the globe. And while these sites are historic, they are also very much of the present—integral parts of the lives of the people who come into contact with them every day. Indeed, the Watch reminds us of our collective role as stewards of the earth and of its human heritage. “I am enormously pleased to announce that American Express, founding sponsor of the World Monuments Watch, has made a generous new grant of $5 million in support of the program over the next five years. World Monuments Fund is deeply grateful for this new grant, and for the company’s steadfast support of more than twenty years.” in http://www.wmf.org/

Nova Iorque: «ONE IN A MILLION»

MillionTreesNYC, é uma iniciativa lançada pelo Departamento de Parques e o New York Restoration Project, conta com numerosos colaboradores, incluíndo:

Grupos comunitários e sem fins lucrativos, organismos municipais, estatais e federais, corporações e pequenas empresas, promotores imobiliários, arquitectos e arquitectos paisagistas, donos de propiedades privadas, e TODOS os nova-iorquinos!

I want a tree in my street!
I just planted a tree!
I know a good place for a tree!
I want to dig in and volunteer!
I want to make a donation!
I want to be a tree steward!

http://www.milliontreesnyc.org/

Fotos: A "prova dos nove". Duas avenidas em Manathan, uma já arborizada e outra ainda "careca" - as vantagens e benefícios da arborização de arruamentos são óbvias e não precisam de explicações! Que Lisboa, e todas as cidades de Portugal, sigam este bom exemplo!

Nova Iorque: Plantar 1 milhão de novas árvores em 10 anos!

Nova Iorque embarcou num ambicioso projecto: plantar 1 Milhão de Árvores na cidade! Já foram plantadas quase meio milhão!

MillionTreesNYC, uma das 127 iniciativas de PlaNYC, é um programa público-privado em toda a cidade com uma meta ambiciosa: plantar e cuidar de 1 milhão de árvores novas nos cinco distritos da cidade durante a próxima década. Ao plantar 1 milhão de árvores, a cidade de Nova Iorque pode aumentar em mais de 20% o seu bosque urbano — o nosso recurso ambiental mais valioso, constituído por árvores nos arruamentos, nos parques e em terrenos públicos, privados e comerciais—, obtendo ao mesmo tempo os numerosos benefícios da qualidade de vida que provêm da plantação de árvores. A cidade de Nova Iorque plantará 60% das árvores em parques e outros espaços públicos. Os restantes 40% provirão de organizações privadas, proprietários de casas e organizações comunitárias.

Porquê 1 Milhão de Árvores?

A cidade de NY está a crescer! Todos nós podemos vê-lo—e senti-lo —em todos os bairros de cada distrito municipal. Mas, tal como acontece em qualquer ciudade próspera, é importante assegurar que NY e os seus residentes - isto é tu - estejam felizes e saudáveis enquanto se adaptam ao crescimento e mudanças que vêm com isso.

Plantar árvores é uma das formas máis benéficas e eficientes, em termos de custos, de ajudar a aliviar estes problemas de crescimento. As árvores ajudam a limpar o ar e reduzem a contaminação que pode desencadear ataques de asma e exacerbar outras doenças respiratórias. As árvores refrescam as nossas ruas, passeios e lugares nos dias quentes de verão. As árvores aumentam o valor das propriedades, e promovem a revitalização dos bairros. E as árvores fazem com que a nossa cidade seja ainda mais bonita e confortável para viver, trabalhar e visitar.

MillionTreesNYC, Uma chamada à acção!

MillionTrees NYC é muito mais que plantar árvores, é um movimento! Todo o novaiorquino pode participar no MillionTreesNYC, desde proprietários e administradores de propriedades até aos grupos comunitários e escolas, associações cívicas e donos de pequenas empresas. MillionTreesNYC convida todos os novaiorquinos— como tu —a plantar e cuidar de árvores através de programas de plantação e cidadania em toda a cidade, incluíndo:

Dias de voluntariado
Formação profissional e workshops
Eventos do "Dia da Árvore"

Não importa como participa — ao plantar um árvore, estará a plantar um legado, um presente extraordinário à cidade de Nova Iorque para as gerações futuras.

MillionTreesNYC, é uma iniciativa lançada pelo Departamento de Parques e o New York Restoration Project, contando com numerosos colaboradores, incluíndo:

Grupos comunitários e sem fins lucrativos
Organismos municipais, estatais e federais
Corporações e pequenas empreas
Promotores imobiliários, arquitectos e paisajistas
Donos de propiedades privadas, e
Todos os novaiorquinos!

I want a tree in my street!

I just planted a tree!

I know a good place for a tree!

I want to dig in and volunteer!

I want to make a donation!

I want to be a tree steward!

http://www.milliontreesnyc.org/

Fotos: cada árvore plantada vem com uma engenhosa bolsa de rega com 75 litros - treegator - que liberta lentamente, gota-a-gota, água durante um periodo de 9 horas. O objectivo é assegurar uma plantação bem sucedida, ajudando a árvore a ultrapassar o choque do transplante; grande número das árvores de alinhamento plantadas em Nova Iorque são as notáveis Ginkgo biloba.

AS ÁRVORES e os LIVROS: Thomas Jefferson

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

Thomas Jefferson

Nota: Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826) foi um advogado e político dos Estados Unidos da América, terceiro presidente daquele país (de 1801 a 1809). Além de estadista, foi também um filósofo político, um revolucionário, proprietário agrícola, arquitecto, arqueólogo, autor e um espírito elucidativo do Iluminismo.

FOTO: Central Park, Nova Iorque.

LaGuardia Corner Gardens em Nova Iorque

Um exemplo de Hortas Urbanas em Nova Iorque:

LaGuardia Corner Gardens is an award-winning community garden in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. It is a place of natural beauty, where the visitor can find an oasis of calm in urban surroundings. During the growing season visitors can enjoy a dazzling display of daffodils, tulips, irises, peonies, roses, and other perennials, as well as shrubs and fruit trees.

The garden was created in 1981 by volunteers on a strip of barren land. It is maintained and supported by volunteer members. LCG is registered with GreenThumb and is a designated Backyard Wildlife Habitat and Monarch Waystation. The garden has trees, shrubs, and perennials that attract birds, butterflies, and bees.

In the spring members conduct programs for local school-children. Garden events include seasonal celebrations, events for children, and a variety of musical offerings. LCG is proud to be among the LaGuardia Gardens and the Time Landscape in forming the “ribbon of green,” a flow of green spaces along the east side of LaGuardia Place, from West 3d to Houston Street.

The garden’s location, between Washington Square Park and Soho attracts visitors from around the world. LCG is easily reached by public transportation.

Para saber mais visite http://www.laguardiacornergardens.org/

CBS - CORK BLOCK SHELTER!

O Museu Guggenheim de Nova Iorque lançou um concurso internacional de Design a que chama "Shelter Competition". Foram admitidos cerca de 600 projectos de 68 países. Dos 600 projectos foram seleccionados 10 finalistas, entre os quais está o projecto do arquitecto português David Mares. A cortiça é o elemento do qual é feito o abrigo do arquitecto lusitano. O "CBS - CORK BLOCK SHELTER " é um abrigo construído na versátil cortiça. Mas para além da já honrosa posição de pertencer ao Top 10 deste concurso, o abrigo de cortiça está em 1º lugar na votação do público. Para quem desejar participar neste concurso votando, por favor acedam ao site do concurso em http://www.guggenheim.org/

A votação decorre até às 23:00h de 10 de Outubro de 2009. Além do prémio do público, este concurso contempla também um prémio atribuído por um Júri, que será divulgado na Guggenheim Museum's 50th Anniversary Celebration.

CBS is located at Vale dos Barris. It was designed to be an ecological and living block. In a microclimate that ranges from the dry heat to damp cold, the application of cork is a good way of thermally isolating the shelter and also providing acoustic insulation for study/sleep. The dynamic facade gives visual interaction when in living-studying mode; in rest-sleep mode it closes to provide privacy for its occupant.

FOTOS: projecto do CBS, "Abrigo de Blocos de Cortiça"

«FOREVER WILD»

Central Park, Nova Iorque, Maio de 2009

Patience is a flower that grows not in everyone's garden

Patience is a flower that grows not in everyone's garden.

(provérbio inglês)

Nota: Imagem retirada da revista The New Yorker, Fevereiro 2009

ELEVATED PRINCIPLES

Uma obsoleta linha de caminho de ferro elevada em Nova Iorque foi transformada num "arruamento" arborizado só para peões. A inauguração do primeiro sector foi em Junho passado:

One of the most striking tropes of any sci-fi city of the future has always been the stratification of travel, the elevated railway, the monorail, streets in the sky, the flyover. From Le Corbusier to the World’s Fair Futuramas, the skyscraper skyline has always been interwoven with aerial roads and tracks.

For a while, these visions seemed to be coming true in New York. The Empire State Building was crowned by a Zeppelin mooring mast, the Rockefeller Center introduced a layered city of subterranean plazas and terraces while subway and rail lines cut swathes under and over the city in complex webs of structural steel.

But it didn’t last. The High Line, a freight railway built to service the huge industrial buildings around Chelsea, was begun in 1929 but, by the 1960s, after less than a generation, was already defunct. Wandering around Chelsea today, wending between galleries and lofts, between photo-shoots and audition lines, it is hard to see it was ever there. The High Line’s rusty legs poke hesitantly through the cliffs of masonry but, occasionally, glimpses of the railway flash into view; a delicious art deco detail, a rusty riveted column, a web of steel beams. Now it is being revived in a vision of the new transport for the future, a new vision of the stratified city. It is becoming a place to walk.

The surface of the High Line has been made into an elevated linear park and, in a rare stroke of urbanistic genius, a defunct amenity, long considered a strip of urban blight, has become an engine of regeneration.

Its rebirth has spawned a boom in development along its length and its environs have become the city’s most extraordinary architectural showcase. It is becoming a kind of museum of contemporary design. And at its heart is the Standard Hotel. (...) Its rooms, decked out in a kind of retro-futuristic-nautical, give the most astonishing views over the city. The vista sweeps out over the Hudson and out to the Statue of Liberty while the endless activity around the meat storage units below roots the views in the gritty everyday life of the city, such as workers with blood-stained aprons and wasted clubbers at dawn.

But it also looks out on to its own vista, the long, green expanse of the High Line. The story of these old tracks is an encouraging tale of perseverance and preservation. Joshua David and Robert Hammond set up the Friends of the High Line in 1999, garnering instant celebrity support. Working hard to encourage community activism and commissioning New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the plan emerged to turn the tracks back into a more refined version of the picturesque wilderness they had become.

An exquisitely sylvan set of photos by Joel Sternfeld showed the lines as they were, an artery of untamed foliage flowing through the city and they helped people understand that this could be a green amenity rather than a toxic eyesore.

It helped also that this had been done before, in Paris’s wonderful Promenade Plantée. The architects of the High Line, who are also responsible for the recently-opened Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Centre, worked hard to analyse the strange collection of plants that had gathered and thrived along the tracks. The very particular ecosystem was maintained and encouraged, rotten tracks were removed and replaced. The park enables the visitor to walk, uninterrupted by crossings and lights, across 18 blocks of the city centre.

Along with the new arrivals, there’s still plenty of the old Chelsea on view. The glistening skyline spike of the Empire State Building keeps the journey focused as the former tracks wend their way up from Gansevoort Street. The path passes under the brick hulk of the former Nabisco factory, its massive underbelly delicately graffitied in filigree tags, its once-shattered windows transformed into an artwork by Spencer Finch, each new pane derived from a colour study of the endlessly changing waters of the Hudson.

There is the radical new architecture itself spawned by the prospect of the High Line’s urban revitalisation: Neil Denari’s extraordinary HL23 Tower bulges over the tracks, its base squeezed on to an impossibly tight site, the cross-bracing rippling up through its skin in an echo of the High Line’s metal structure; there is the space-age pod of Diane von Furstenberg’s crystalline loft by architects Work; there is Shigeru Ban’s wonderful apartment block, an open crate of terraces with aluminium screens to shutter it up like a storefront; there are the patchwork façades of Jean Nouvel’s 11th Avenue condo tower and beside those the rippling fronts of Frank Gehry’s IAC headquarters by the Chelsea Piers.

As the High Line crosses over 10th Avenue, the structure reveals an unusual view to Midtown and the structure dips down to make a hanging public space suspended above the flowing current of traffic. There is the industrial vernacular that litters the route: metal bridges, an industrial version of Venice’s Rialto, spanning between mountainous brick buildings; there are the spindly hats of the dwindling water towers, so characteristic of the city’s roofscape.

Already the revived landscape of shrubs and reeds, saplings and grasses is obscuring the tracks and railings, the latticework sides and deco details. The High Line has become a wonderfully strange landscape, a park that takes up no space, which drifts through the city like a magic carpet. If Central Park is the most extraordinary monument to nature, a huge slice of Manhattan’s natural landscape in the midst of the world’s first modern city, then the High Line is nature winding its way back through the grid, reasserting itself over the city of industry.

And this is the moment to see it. New York is at its best at the moment it changes, the dark grids of still-exposed structural steel skeletons, the hum of construction, the evocative juxtapositions of fire escapes and scaffolds, decay and renewal, water towers and cranes. For now, the clubs and the warehouses, the meatpackers and the models, the glaziers and the gallerists co-exist in a slice of real urbanity. One day, it’ll all be condos and museums but, for now, this extraordinary linear park offers the most thrilling architectural walk in the world.

in Financial Times, 18 Julho 2009

FOTOS: retiradas do http://www.thehighline.org/

Nova Iorque: «THE CARBON COUNTER»

National debt used to be the big number we all lived in fear of. Now it's greenhouse gases.

Climate change is likely to have all sorts of nasty consequences over the next century—among them, according to a brand-new report from the U.S. Global Change Research program, an increase in torrential downpours in the American northeast.

So it was uncomfortably fitting that a major climate-consciousness-raising event took place in just such a downpour. As reporters and dignitaries huddled under leaky tents just outside New York's Madison Square Garden on Thursday, Deutche Bank switched on its mammoth Carbon Counter billboard. The counter, towering 70 feet above busy Seventh Avenue and dramatically visible to hundreds of thousands of commuters who take the train to and from Penn Station, displays a real-time count of heat-trapping greenhouse gases we're pumping into the atmosphere—about 2 billion metric tons every month, added to the 3.6 trillion tons already floating around up there.

How do they know it's 2 billion tons? Actually, they know it isn't. Although carbon dioxide is by far the most significant human-generated greenhouse gas, it isn't the only one. Methane, generated by ruminating cows and rice paddies is another; nitrous oxide, created in making fertilizer, is another; so are halocarbons, used as refrigerants. If you really want to know about how much heat we're trapping, you have to take these into account too—and that's what Deutche Bank and its scientific advisers from MIT wanted to do.

It's complicated, though. For one thing, each of these gases traps heat at a different rate (OK, they really trap infrared radiation, but it ends up amounting to the same thing). Methane, for example, is a much more efficient energy-trapper than CO2; it's just that we emit a lot less of it. Each of these gases, moreover, degrades in the atmosphere at a different speed. That means you can't just add them up. "It's like you give someone a hundred dollars," says MIT atmospheric scientist Ron Prinn, "but it's a mix of Australian and Canadian and U.S. dollars. "You have to make some conversions before you know what it's worth." For the Carbon Counter, those conversions run into many pages of equations, at the end of which you get a number representing the "CO2 equivalent" of 20 different gases. Add them up, and you're at 2 billion tons monthly.

That's a big number, certainly, but what exactly does it mean? Most popular accounts of climate change don't talk about tons; they talk about parts-per-million—the number of CO2 or other molecules you'd find in a million molecules of atmosphere. CO2 was at about 280ppm back in 1700; it's now at 386 and rising. For perspective, climate scientists believe that if CO2 rises to 450ppm or so, the global average temperature could rise as much as 2 degrees Celsius, with serious consequences (and heavy rainstorms are hardly the worst).

But if you factor in the other greenhouse gases, we're already at 450, or pretty close to it. That being the case, you'd think we'd already be seeing dramatically rising seas and severe weather changes. There are two reasons why we aren't. First, it takes a while for heat to build up once the gases are up there. Second, and more important, the Carbon Counter doesn't take aerosols into account. These are tiny particles of soot, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants spewed into the air along with greenhouse gases. "The problem with these," says Bill Chameides, dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, "is that some aerosols tend to cool the planet, some tend to warm it, and some interact with clouds in ways we don't understand."

That's the good news. The bad news is that aerosols cause their own problems— lung disease and acid rain, just to name a couple. Presumably, we'll be trying to limit those emissions in the future, which will leave the greenhouse gases to do their thing without interference.

By leaving some factors out, the Carbon Counter is by definition somewhat inaccurate. But since most of us don't know what 3.6 trillion tons of carbon or carbon-equivalent or whatever actually means, it hardly matters. It's a big number, and it's getting bigger, fast. Deutche Bank and the MIT folks hope that seeing these huge numbers scroll by on a giant billboard will make people more aware of what we're doing to the planet, just as billboards with the U.S. national debt try to raise awareness about another scary number.

Given how much people pay attention to the debt, though, let's hope this one is more effective.

In NEWSWEEK, 19 de Junho de 2009

http://www.newsweek.com/id/202757?from=rss

Hoje, dia 21 de Junho...VERÃO!

A Montanha, 1936-1937

Balthus (1908-2001)
óleo sobre tela, 248.9 x 365.8 cm
Metropolitan Museum, Nova Iorque

A Montanha é uma das obras mais importantes do início da carreira de Balthus. Foi terminada em 1937, três anos depois da sua primeira exposição individual, quando tinha 26 anos. Este grande panorama é a sua tela de maiores dimensões e uma das poucas que retrata figuras numa paisagem. Foi exposta pela primeira vez em 1939 com o título «Verão» pois era suposto ser a primeira de quatro telas sobre o ciclo das quatro estações. Mas Balthus apenas criou a tela dedicada ao Verão. Uma visão moderna e misteriosa. Com uma intriga surrealista mas pintada com a poesia dos antigos mestres italianos que Balthus tanto admirava.