Rescue Bubble 2.0, Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington Ontario

Following one week of fine-tuning......

Rescue Bubble 1.0, Nuit Blanche 2009, Toronto

I will reflect more on this experience shortly

For now, some links:
Salman Ashrafi's Video for TheMark
On Flickr
Torontoist/Globe&Mail
Live With Culture

Rescue Bubble

And with one week left to go, progress on the bubble continues slowly but surely.

Following its short stay in Toronto next weekend, the piece travels on to Burlington, where it will live out its twilight weeks at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

hookah heat

….. Orientalism is so hot right now. (This one's actually from a few years back)

Buroland(wirt)schaft : Thesis Work, 2008

The cyclical nature of free-market urbanism is difficult to escape. By engaging the speculative process on it’s own terms however, it may be possible to design the next real-estate bubble to leave productive frameworks in its aftermath.

BuroLandschaft (office landscape), the leafy, free-plan collaborative environments proposed by the Quickborner Team in the 1960’s starkly contrast with the systems furniture and fluorescent wash that define the setting of today’s North American social drama; the spec office. Over the years, promising experimental office environments have emerged, though usually at the hands of large corporations and public institutions with deep pockets and cultural aspirations. The majority of office workers continue their workaday lives in buildings planned and often executed prior to tenant involvement, as investment vehicles for private capital.

Decades before sub-prime lending and CDO’s entered the lexicon of the average American homeowner, office space was the speculative soup de jour. In hindsight, the massive bubble that spanned most of the 1980’s and early 90’s shows many hallmarks of an all too familiar tale. Regulatory loosening welcomed in new financial players (R.E.I.T.s, Foreign capital) whose appetites quickly developed a taste for a promising real-estate sector. An ensuing bonanza lead to inevitable crisis (Savings and Loan) followed by massive over supply, asset devaluation and eventually, gradual painstaking recovery.

Apples to Apples (lettuce to Aeron) comparison of office space and controlled environment agriculture (C.E.A) inputs and outputs per 1 square foot annually.

BuroLand(wirt)schaft (office agriculture) is an approach to the spec office building born of the begrudging acknowledgement that developer-driven investment remains the dominant engine of growth in free-market urbanism. This project tweaks the business model of the spec office, enlisting the rapidly expanding field of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to hedge against the cyclical nature of office markets (and vise versa). Large horizontal buildings are composed of paddy-like cells that are converted from office-space to agriculture and back with the prevailing economic winds. This system permits for a degree of spatial flexibility better suited to the looser nature of Post-Fordist business practices.

In response to the recent bumper crop of architectural propositions for high-density, vertically organized urban farms, this project attempts a step back to encompass a wider urban swath and question the logic of planting such buildings precisely where population densities and land values are highest. The new species is envisioned to thrive as a ‘cleaner’ alternative where speculative development operates most freely; the marginal terrains of the outwardly expanding city, where there are few opportunities for architects to be critically engaged; where cash-strapped municipalities welcome any new source of tax revenue and most importantly, where land is plentiful and cheap. Large swaths abutting regional infrastructure corridors, light industry and logistical zones, all within a stone’s throw of expanding suburban enclaves will form new fertile deltas for both produce and business, indiscriminately.

Specscape 2

Specscape 1

Cultural Imaginary Friends

Two composite images from an ongoing project exploring the cultural imaginary of Canadian provinces. (Churchill Manitoba, Man & Nature Revisited)

Rescue Bubble

Currently in development, Rescue Bubble has been selected for inclusion in Toronto's 2009 Nuit Blanche .

project text:
As the humble foot soldiers of disposable infrastructure, traffic pylons solicit an indifferent compliance in our daily navigations of the city. Here however, hundreds are amassed into a single glowing beacon of urgent concern.

On the verge of massive stimulus spending, governments are heralding fast-track infrastructure investment as the panacea for current economic woes. Speculative conditions that emerge under such massive spending can stifle rather than foster creative change. With schedules compressed to feed a shovel-ready hunger, unsustainable models can be entrenched rather than challenged.

This installation represents an attempt to link imagery from the world of Sci-Fi; that of the solitary, ominous alien vanguard with our current speculative economic reality in order to crystallize a feeling of a looming presence; a spore-like organism at once familiar and foreign, promising and dangerous.

Has the Rescue Bubble emerged to save our world or devour us all?