Objective: Finding an appropriate way of reading the ideas of Broadacre City in the present and future.

There are many things that Broadacre City is, but that people tend to forget. And then there are many things that Broadacre City isn’t, but that people think that it is. Throughout our research, we tried to clearly define the precise issues that Broadacre City addresses, which then formed the basis of our conceptual expansion of the original Broadacre City to transform into Broad(er)acre City.

We documented and mapped all the components that were specifically planned in Broadacre City, neatly compiled in “The metrics of Broadacre City”.

The metrics of Broadacre City

In short, the Broadacre City model represented a 4 square mile area (or four “sections” in land surveying speak) that would house between 2,283 – 3,044 people on average, though some sources implied a larger density. We calculated this based on household sizes between 3 to 4 inhabitants per house on the model. Main zoning components involved agriculture, open space, civic, educational, institutional, transportation, industrial and commercial uses.

In 1929 when Wright was 67 years old (and some would say with a career already behind him), he would witness one of the greatest economic busts of his time – the Wall Street Crash of 1929. This would lead to the Great Depression, one of the greatest and most long lasting economic crises of his time. Witnessing on the city streets the hunger and despair from people of former high-ranking positions, Wright began questioning the existence of cities and the close ties that its architecture and urbanism had to capitalism. One of his greatest inspirations for Broadacre would come from his childhood experiences; growing up on a farm and being close to all things that provided life. Cities like Chicago and New York, he argued, were situating people too far away in both geography and lifestyle from the fields that provided for them. Out of sight, out of mind, this American agrarianism that was left in favour of the rapid industrialization in the new world.

Through our research, our conclusion gave us the understanding that Wright created Broadacre City as an alternative urbanism given the crises that had befallen conventional capital-driven cities; an arable urbanism with human value systems at its core to drive design decisions. Every design feature served to further the autonomous freedom of the individual human. No man under his design would be able to unfairly earn money, having absolutely no tolerance for the rent of land, ideas or money. These policies were at the core of Broadacre City, underpinning all other design decisions around them.

Broadacre City was addressing a crisis that was human-based; an economy gone bad. The crisis we face today does not originate from any single source, neither is it easily defined in any sense. The complexity of our contemporary crises have a large area of effect, much larger than we have ever anticipated. Therefore, our idea of “broadening” the concepts of Broadacre City meant not only considering the design, but to also take on the design brief that he set for himself.

To understand the ideological position of Broadacre City in relation to our concept of the new Broad(er)acre City, we created a diagram system that we dubbed the “über-concept” (in lack of a better name at the time, the silly nickname kinda stuck). The über-concept attempts to create a systematic approach to understanding and comparing different spatial designs with each other.

The ÜBER-CONCEPT explained!

To walk you through the above diagram: Earth is represented by the (1) global environment box in which (2) all living organisms on Earth exist. As a sub-part of all living organisms (3) humans are highlighted, and so are the (4) human environments that they design, such as houses and cities. Outside of the global environment box you will find two surplus capital systems: (5) the original ecological capital and (6) the human-invented economic capital.

One of the largest contributors to economic capital is ecological capital in the form of raw goods and services that we take for “free” from nature. However, many surplus incentives in economics do not assist the production of ecological capital, but instead encourage producer and consumer behaviour that often runs completely counter to the production of ecological surplus. For a deeper and very inspirational explanation of the role of ecological surplus, we recommend reading The Virtues of Ignorance by William Vitek, Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson. Buy it from Amazon!

Broad versus Broad(er)

In Broadacre City, the human stands central in the design. The design scope of Broadacre City is represented by the yellow box, which included the design of the human environment and the consideration of economical values. All flows of influence in Broadacre City (black arrows) originate from the human (Wright was a true humanist) to the production of economical capital, which would feed itself directly from ecological capital. This would happen regardless of the economy’s ability to assist in the creation of ecological capital, much like the prevailing  business mentality today. Also, no productive dialog would happen between humans and their immediate contexts except for the farming of the land; a purely human activity.
In Broad(er)acre City, the design encompasses a larger scope of consideration, including other flora and fauna (all organisms) as well as the creation of ecological capital. The flows of influence are also very different from those in Broadacre City. Instead of humans leading a one-way conversation with the world, Broad(er)acre City envisions humans to actively participate in ecological cycles with other organisms and environments. This requires humans to have a symbiotic dialog with all organisms and the global environment that we all inhabit, and in doing so we would develop ways to assist the creation of ecological capital. The creation of ecological capital caused by us will determine the growth of our own economy. The growth of our own economy would be an indicator of a healthy ecology, and the feedback would strengthen our ability to create ecological capital. In other words, Broad(er)acre City requires humans to create surplus ecological capital in order to feed their economical capital.

The template of the diagram was very useful for us because it enabled a method to catalogue and grade different urban habitats, and to visually be able to ideologically compare them to each other. It also served to highlight how extremely self-centered most human endeavors on the land tend to be. Our later design ambitions were heavily influenced by the stark reminder of the diagram, as it served as a clear beacon of purpose in an otherwise muddled and experimental design and decision-making process.

Five spatial ideologies of surplus revealed.

Objective: Get under the skin of Frank Lloyd Wright (FLLW). Try to understand the underlying reasons for why he created Broadacre City the way he did.

For almost three weeks we delved into the FLLW archives in Taliesin West, digging up artifacts that directly and indirectly related to the creation of Broadacre City. We discovered that he was an avid writer during his later years and that a surprisingly large part of his written work was spent on the subject of cities, democracy and new technologies – all thoughts and musings which would directly inform his ideas around Broadacre City.

Written works by Wright (black is Broadacre related) | Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings Vol. 1-5 | Graphic assistance: Paul Tseng

This is, of course, opposed to his actual work which comprises mostly out of private homes and smaller residences, a few larger commercial and industrial buildings, and truly few public buildings which would have been his dream commissions (public buildings from the top of my head: Monona Terrace (uncompleted) and the Marin Civic Centre (completed posthumously).

Architecture by Wright | Source: wikipedia.org | Graphic assistance: Paul Tseng.

Our tentative conclusion: although he is most famous for his built works and theories about form (e.g. organic architecture), privately he was equally as occupied with Broadacre City and the concepts of of urban-scaled communities, governance and planning.

The hybrid building-machine that inspired a generation of designers...

Like the tractor, one of the most influential agricultural inventions is the ‘modern’ grain-elevator. Despite varying in physical form/construction these structures would generally all house the mechanisms to receive, weigh, grade, separate, store, clean, and redistribute bio-material. The consolidation of these various functions in one efficient place forever changed farms and agriculture by re-wiring the method in which bio-material was moved. Any construction or technical changes that would  increase efficiency or scale immediately affected the surrounding farming enterprises in an elevator’s catchment area.

Before, the technology of elevators allowed them to serve a greater catchment area (and thus contributed to larger consolidated farms) these ‘sentinels’ defined an era in agriculture and agrarian settlement, most notably in the towns where many elevators were erected.

Famous Elevator Row (Inglis, Manitoba Canada) - verlo.ca, these 25,000 bushel elevators lined early agrarian towns

Originally the location of these structures was based on a delicate balance between a large enough volume of bio-material to warrant a rail line and a given distance a farmer could travel, today’s elevators can reach mega sizes that best fit larger farm operations.

One of the 'World's Largest' grain elevators - Hutchinson, Kansas USA

On a design level, these hybrid-machine-buildings once dubbed ‘Prairie Sentinels’ were also very influential, inspiring an entire generation of designers interested in exploring a functional/engineering aesthetic.

In our current ‘age of crisis’ (for example crisis in agriculture, food security, and ecology) one might wonder what the new ‘elevator’/silo would do, how it would work, and subsequently what impacts that would have on design professions. Might the new elevator trigger a new ‘modernism’?

Some excellent resources on grain elevators can be found on a variety of Canadian Heritage Websites:

The Canadian Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan

Verlo (photos)

National Film Board (video)

Respiratory Urbanism: Playa Eco-Region (Hale County, Texas) ... seen from the observation deck of the Inter-Prairie Airship, a proposed regional scale of transportation in a future without roads or rail, where urbanism is allowed to evolve where ecology and human innovation want to.

The landlogics team is very excited to have finally finished our Broad(er)acre City project and exhibition, now on display at the LWR Gallery at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto (230 College Street).

The project was made possible through the Howarth-Wright Fellowship that I was awarded in May 2009, which enabled both Fei and I to travel both to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesins as well as a cross-country tour through the Great Plains in the United States (Some of our earlier blog posts will give more detailed descriptions of what we visited while on tour).

Here is a short description of the project:

Broad(er)acre City was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s urban ambitions to radically reconsider status quo cities in a time of crisis. Like Broadacre City we have considered future urban potential by projecting the spatial impacts of fundamental social changes. However, our human-induced crises stretch beyond the borders of our local ecologies, and in our current time of broader crises one cannot afford to think about solutions based on socio/political rights alone. If we are to continue developing our civilizations around cities, we need to design them with agendas broader than commerce, transportation and property in mind. Broad(er)acre City begins exploring those broader issues by challenging the traditional anthropocentric bias of urban design and takes the position that cities can be designed to achieve eco-system symbiosis.

As our test ground we chose the Great Plains (temperate grasslands) of North America. The temperate grasslands being the most human-converted eco-region in the world, simultaneously as the Great Plains are experiencing property right changes, it was an ideal location to experiment on. City speciation emerges as each project demanded unique technological, social and logistic solutions to a design works with the ecology in order to achieve interactive viability.

Below are some pictures from the installation completed:

Broad(er)acre City finally up...with our first visitors!

The three urban-species displays

Breakdown of what each of the urban-species displays contains

The exhibition introduction and our 144 page 'bible' of research

And to finish off here are the other posters…

Non-equilibrium Urbanism ... seen from Polli-Nations & Wetlands, just outside Kilojoule Fields

...and last but not least Clockwork Urbanism seen from atop the TG Crane with a view out to a Spring prairie fire in the distance

More details about the show and its content will be uploaded soon.

So here we are again, a month and a half ago when we got our first Good Food Box, I’ve decided to document the unpacking of this round’s food box too, as there are so many yummy things here to talk about.

So much goodness in one $17 box!

Quite a nice mix of things I usually wouldn’t buy, such as the bunch of Chard, or even the Buttercup Squash! This week’s total amount of food seems larger than our first batch, or at least my back was telling me so as I was lugging it all in a big backpack from OCAD. There are more root and dark-green leafy veggies too this time around, reflective of the season we’re in.

Out of curiosity, I took note of the produce that had labels on them, some PLU (Price Look-Up), others not. The pineapple, unsurprisingly, comes all the way from Costa Rica. The bananas are from Columbia who surprisingly (to me anyways) is not the largest exporter in the world. The tomatoes come from Del Fresco Produce Ltd. here in Kingsville, Ontario, where they use hydroponics and green houses to get these tomatoes to households worldwide. The carrots originate from the very productive lands of the Holland Marsh, made from millions of years of ice age crunching and grinding on the land, making North-America the amazingly fruitful land that it is.

Labels with varying amounts of information

While I was looking for Del Fresco (their website is not Google crawl friendly, took me a while to find it…) I found this amazing website on food labels that two french guys are responsible for, and they just have tons and tons of labels, all categorized and sorted very neatly! Their tri-lingual attempt (English, German, French) is good enough to get you by most parts of the site, though I recommend just browsing for the experience of being inundated with labels.

According to the Good Food News that came with this shipment, the Butternut Squash is from the Big’r Apple Farm, run by the Ferri Family who were recently nominated to be the 2009 Farm Family in Peel Region! And check it out in all its glory below:

How to eat such an expressive and emotional squash?

(If I were Dutch, I would exclaim “wat een prachtige stuk pompoen!”)

By the way, the provided recipe for both the Baked Squash and the Curried Pumpkin Soup looks awesome… can’t decide which cause the squash should go to.

—-

Some recipe highlights from the past weeks:

Beet and potato soup, from the recipe provided in the booklet in our previous shipment:

23rd of September: Beet and Potato Soup - A soup that tastes as great as its colour... pure magenta, no kidding. Nature at its best!

Next:

Apple cake, from our apple picking endeavors. I still have apples left – that’s how many apples we picked!

Eaten best with vanilla ice cream.

Recipe provided by my old trusted Norwegian cookbook “Fra Boller til Burritos”. Will write a post about this book later, as it has an interesting story.

And today’s freshest creation: improvisational vegetable soup. (What soup is not improvisation really? Bit of an oxymoron…)

Vegetable (and fruit... I put an apple in there for good measure) soup.
Observe the apple pieces bobbing around in there...

The quick recipe for this one:

Fei’s Improv Veggie Soup

1.5 l water, bring to boil
A couple of teaspoons broth (or the real stuff if you want)
one spoon of olive oil

1 carrot, diced
6 small potatoes, diced
3 celery stalks, roughly chopped
1 onion, roughly chopped
handful of cabbage, roughly chopped
1 apple, diced
2 sprigs of thyme (just put in the whole thing)
salt and pepper to taste

I also made a bit of a garlic/basil paste to sprinkle on the top when serving. Just fine-chop a bunch of fresh basil and garlic. Adds a nice bite to an otherwise rich soup.

The items went into the pot in the order you see them on the list, as I was able to chop them up. It’s nice to have some bite-size pieces, while others are more finely chopped. I let it cook for about 30-45 mins in total, from start to finish. Even though the apples were the last to go in, they were the softest. Great surprise item as they look like potatoes, but totally melt in your mouth…

Hope these images will make more people want to cook! I’m no saint myself, but I do always enjoy myself whenever I do cook, and it’s a great motivation when one has good raw ingredients at one’s disposal.

French Pastoral Poster - Cataloging Apple Types and Lineage

Thanksgiving weekend (the Canadian edition) for my family is of course always about turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and the like, but it also means our annual outing to an apple orchard. This is when we would stock up on as many bags of apples as we could carry out of the orchard to be stored in our “cantina” (or cold-room) for the Fall and Winter.

This year was no exception except for the fact that it was Fei’s first time! We grabbed our dogs and our neighbors and packed into a couple cars and headed out West.

View Apple Picking 2010 in a larger map

After experimenting with a few different orchards when I used to live in Brampton my family settled on an orchard we thought wasn’t too crowded, offered a decent apple selection, and of course was fair priced…which lead us to Carl-Laidlaw Orchard on Heritage Road in the rural outskirts between Brampton and Georgetown.

My 1 year old Beagle "Luna" ready for apples.

However, despite our scouting for quieter places today the place was completely packed! The Corn Silo seamed to be the place with the most action…kiddy zones and hot-dog stands were the real magnets.

The Silo is where most of the crowd rested after their pickings.

Kiddy Zone: "The Corn Pit"

While the beautiful Sunday weather probably had a big role in filling the place, after a quick chat with a few of the farm-hands we discovered that apple-picking in the Brampton area has steadily increased over the years to the point where the orchards usually were picked clean by mid-October. For me this is a pretty significant factoid considering that when I used to pick apples at this orchard as a kid we could revisit the orchard later in the month for Winter baking apples and still have quite a number to pick from. With the orchard so full we knew some of our favorite apples would be hard to find. But, because of some of the slim pickings we also started trying a few types we’ve never tasted before; Empire (Red) and Mutsu (Green/Yellow) are actually really good!

Here is what an average 'apple-aisle' looks like, and here was our competitor pickers.

This year however, both Fei and my family had a pretty important sub-mission in the orchard. We were determined to discover and collect apples meant for baking. This meant along with the usual snacking apples we were going to find some apples good for pies, cakes, dumplings, and other baked-sweets. The information huts at the orchard entrance were a great place to learn about what apples they had in the orchard and which ones were good for what kind of baked goods, and how long they could last. For example we learned the Ida-Red Apples were considered more of a “Winter Baking Apple” and could last until mid-December, which made them great for Christmas baking. Granny-Smith Apples are always an excellent choice for baking even well into January/February as their crispy flesh retained texture even after baking. Snowdan is perfect for apple sauce, from a practical home-making perspective, because it can easily be ground by hand if need be. However, the favorite apple for baking out in these parts of the GTA is the McGowan. You might have noticed that some of these apple varieties are not familiar, I had the same impression as well, and I have concluded that some of these must be of a very local variety.

The apple varieties we picked on the orchard.

Fei at Information Stand

Free Samples!

On the topic of apple varieties, some of their histories are pretty interesting examples of agricultural selective breeding. The Ida-Red for example was scientifically developed developed in 1942 at the University of Idaho Agricultural Experiment Station. The Ida-Red was selectively cross-bred between a Jonathan and a Wagener to sufficiently last through the Winter while maintaining a crisp textured flesh and tart flavor, intended as a general purpose apple for food products like pies, apple-sauce, and apple-butter. After researching about some of the apple-variety genealogies it was a bit of a let-down to know that even though the Carl-Laidlaw Orchard seemed to have some unique-local varieties (that even some of the neighboring farms did not have), there was no way the visitor could have learned about the development of such a type. And after overhearing some stories about how the Snowdan variety was developed specifically for sauce making I think it would have been a really interesting experience to see how such experimental agriculture was being conducted. I think it would be a very interesting idea to have a miniature-type Agricultural Research Station at every farm. They would start off as pretty generic and humble, but over time could really begin exploring the specificness between the land and the farmer, and of course their visitors. Farmers like at the Carl-Laidlaw Orchard could really offer their visitors more than just a hand-stamp for their now mandatory entrance fee of $3/person. Let’s see how the Snowdan was made, whats coming up next, and a visitor suggested apple-variety contest.  It would be a great design opportunity, and one that would need to address a big challenge when working with landscapes and their produce, which is time. (I’ll have more on a post regarding landscapes, time, produce, and hibernating interactive systems soon!

NY-State Experimental Agriculture Station: How can we make places like this more experiential and ubiquitous?

Maybe we should start thinking about our Agricultural Experiment Stations as places where groups can meet...can we learn something from WORK Architecture Company from New York?

Anyways after trekking up and down the orchard, and clambering up a few trees, we were able to fill 10 bags! Each bag weighing in around 10kg’s which puts our total at 100kg’s! Of course we would divide this between the three of our families and after realizing how many apples can go into a simple apple pie (after visiting the pie-making workshop at the orchard-farm) I think the quantity will be put to good use.

The annual event of Nuit Blanche has come and gone, with much praise and pat on backs. Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star called it “one of the best to date“! Despite the optimism though, there is plenty of room for improvement. Through our shared experience of Nuit Blanche 2010, we compiled a list of ten points, big and small, that we believe will improve future Nuit Blanche events in Toronto.

1. More garbage cans.
Not to mention the total uselessness of Toronto’s newly-deployed garbage cans (the pedal doesn’t work on half of them, meaning we manually have to pry open the flaps to dispose of trash… ugh), events such as Nuit Blanche generate large amounts of garbage, more than what the current system can handle anyways. The City should place additional large, open bins next to existing bins, especially on thoroughfares like Queen, Yonge and Bloor that are expected to have more traffic. In this way, at least some of the garbage gets diverted from floating on the street.

2. Make it a non-smoking event.
With consideration to the fact that Nuit Blanche should be open and accessible to everybody, we think that it should officially proclaim itself as a non-smoking event. People who are sensitive to smoke and who generally don’t like smoking should not have to inhale second-hand fumes from fellow pedestrians if they’re not to keen on it.

3. Upgrade Scotiabank tents to include lounge and designated drinking areas.
Let’s stop the covert alcohol consumption on the streets and instead create designated drinking areas in parks and closed off streets, which will have bars and places to lounge or seek refuge from the bustle of the event. A good example of having a controlled drinking area can be found in places like Millennium Park, Chicago.

4. List opening and closing times for individual works.
As the night stretches out, one of the most frustrating things is to arrive at a destination, only to find that the work you wanted to see is gone. This can be solved very simply if all artists were required to list beforehand when they would be planning to pack up for the night, and if this was listed in the program. Or, just require all works to be present until dawn. Simple.

5. Manage line-ups better.
For foodstands and popular exhibits (like the one running at the Royal Conservatory), the lineup was a dense wall of individuals that protruded perpendicular to the massive flow of traffic. If queues and overflow crowds really must exist, it should be planned properly. For example, volunteers can organize queues or drawing lines on the ground can guide people as they stack up in queue.

6. More control of incompatible traffic flows.
Several times during our walks we observed dangerous situations between pedestrians and cars (one area in particular was the University and Bloor crossing). Such risky intersections should be supervised by traffic police or by clear signage and signalling for pedestrians.

7. Improved wayfinding tools.
This was a huge point for us. The provided maps and outdoor signs were not too helpful if the works weren’t obvious and immediately visible. As an example, identifying the placement of individual works by looking at the official map of the Distillery District area was quite futile, especially for those of us who don’t often frequent the area.

The not-so-helpful map showing the Distillery District

Or take work nr 23 of Zone C that had no sign at the front of the Gladstone that acknowledged its existence from the outside. Or signs that would indicate that you’re at the right spot, but installation is nowhere to be seen from the sign, such as the one we found of nr 12 of Zone B, on Victoria Avenue.
A hierarchy of signage would help people navigate to their precise location. The “entrances” into zones such as subway stations or beginning of pedestrian streets could have a stationary board with a detailed map of the zone that shows the location of works, plus also the recommended routes to get to them. If several works find themselves within a building, a larger poster should be on the front of the building, listing all the works within it and where precisely (floors, rooms etc.) they can be found. Even just simple arrows on the signs would help a lot.

8. Designate specific TTC routes as “official” routes of travel between zones and areas.
Nuit Blanche in Toronto is divided up into several zones, and within zones there can be several areas of concentrated activity. Organizers should highlight the quickest and most efficient way of navigating between areas by suggesting most common routes and transfers via TTC. All maps provided by the organizers were of the subway, which is pretty one-sided given that for example the whole of Zone C is only servicable via streetcar. And again, bringing the Distillery District up as an example, it would have been great to know what TTC serices would have brought us closest to this rather remote area of Zone B.

9. Offer large thoroughfares as art corridors.
Major thoroughfares and pedestrianized streets between artworks are the perfect backdrop for larger-scale ambient works, which would help make Nuit Blanche a more continuous experience where even the walks from A to B are interesting. Artists should be encouraged to intervene on these corridors as much as possible.

10. Where did the big hits go?
Our five hour attendance from 10pm to 3am was a bit of a disappointing and frustrating experience. Between facing crazy line-ups, misleading signage, and poorly managed pedestrian flow, these largely logistical issues shouldn’t overshadow a greater criticism of the evening: most people on the streets use Nuit Blanche as yet another excuse to party, not to check out the art. And with good reason: there was nothing really eye-popping, enchanting, inspiring, enlightening or even satisfying about what we saw yesterday. Compared to the early years, many of the curated exhibition pieces where in closed rooms and required crowd control to a high degree, which led to long lineups. We would like to see more large-scale works that address its context and that a crowd can easily experience without lining up. Perhaps this is a curatorial issue, but it seems like the wonderful idea of transforming the city through provocative and engaging art has been lost in translation. Very few artists seemed to consider the environmental context of their works. With the majority of artists not addressing Toronto specifically, they were not really transforming the city either. Toronto was a huge art gallery, but remained unchanged by artists as such.

Nuit Blanche is a great event for Toronto to host, but its reputation has faltered somewhat. We truly hope to see improvements to next year’s program, with a greater amount of work addressing open public spaces and better integration with the unique urban qualities that Toronto has to offer. The event should try to live up to the wonderful spectacle that a name like Nuit Blanche seems to promise, which Toronto really shouldn’t have any problems achieving.

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Update 2010/10/03 23:27
Found another list of improvements for Nuit Blanche, by Amber Waves. Good to know we’re not alone on this side of the fence.

There is no more roundabout way of talking about the perfect client than having 7 designers and architects on the spot in Pecha Kucha style.

The list of talkers on the 24th of September @ the Harbourfront Centre:
-
Paul Raff – Paul Raff Studio
Kathryn Walter – FELT Studio
Alissa North – North Design Office
Brian Rudy – Moriyama & Teshima Architects
Davide Tonizzo – designD
Philip Hastings – Gow Hastings Architects
Tania Bortolotto – BORTOLOTTO architecture interior design

-
Apart from Alissa North who took the task the most earnestly of all (not too surprisingly given that academic environments not unlike the place she teaches at value the art of actually answering the assignment that is given), most speakers were rather tame about answering the question! Anyways, some takeaway messages and personal thoughts from each of the presentations:

Paul Raff
Kids are the perfect client! Although a bit tame on emphasizing the importance of children and their unparalleled playfulness and true wear-and-tear usage of space (i.e. kids jumping on mom and dad’s too-expensive bed) except for in his first slide, he hit an unknowingly passionate part of me… to tangentially add to his argument,

// begin rant

I believe that children also are one of the most overlooked, undervalued clients of today. There’s a real “gap” that I sense, at least here in Toronto: most of all our collective investments into the built environment are focused on adult usage, as if we (adults, that is) are the only people who matter in the grander scheme of things (more on how child-friendly your country is in this pdf from UNICEF, page 2). The voice of children over at council or at the planning department is non-existent, because guess what, children don’t put forward large and greedy development proposals that need public approval like adults do, neither can they leverage any of their interests with private moneys as efficiently like we do. We love proposing shopping malls, highways, luxurious condos and office towers aplenty, with little thought left over for others who might not share the same kick out of these things like most emancipated adults do. No wonder it seems a daunting task for children to grow up in our world, where all we have for them is a forbidden adult world that they feel very displaced in until they grow up and “become like us”. The “becoming” happens through a type of conditioning in the form of our mandatory mass-education system that basically teaches them to know what we think they should know, to think like we think, to understand the world like we understand the world, and to value life like we value life. And once they learn and embody all these things (with huge bonus if they get their driver’s license) they become accepted as adults and can finally begin “living” without feeling like overlooked, ill-fitting individuals in society.

// end rant

Excuse the super-rant, but Paul was almost there when he (a bit jokingly?) proposed to the audience that kids were the perfect client. Children should be more frequently on our list of clients. Aside from that, he presented samples of his work, occasionally chiming in for thinking about design in a “minimal form maximum function/per-formance” way, or in other words, what most people contemporarily label “sustainable design”.

Kathryn Walter
Specializing in industrial felt, she talked about her clientele as they neatly were divided into two camps: architecture firms and non-architectural firms. She felt that many advances in felt design were headed by demand from architects, which represents a great client relationship if your client demands that you innovate and break boundaries for them, while they give you the space and money to do so.

Alyssa North
I enjoyed Alyssa’s straight-forward answer to the question, so much so that I’m simply going to list her main points here:
The perfect client…

• has lots of money (so you can build them a wicked design)
• understands that results take time
• thinks big (avoiding the pitfall of a too narrow site and project definition)
• generates more work for the firm (through the awesomeness of a completed project and its and/or the client’s ability to promote you)
• is willing to experiment (for the benefit of both of you)
• fosters a strong design team (translates into projects that ask for multidisciplinary approaches)
• enjoys celebration!

Brian Rudy
Presented a current project in Waterloo, ON called the Region of Waterloo Historic Museum (scroll down to find it on the page) to demonstrate the idea that a perfect client is double as great when paired with the perfect project. Unfortunately, this is so rarely the case for us mere-mortal designers, and hardly a productive ground to highlight the theme of the night. Seems like a fun project to have been involved in though, and Waterloo is lucky to have had so much thought and composition put into that building. Definitely anti-Libeskind/ROM.

Davide Tonizzo
One of the more flashy and charismatic presenters of the evening, he discussed the most desirable traits of a client while leading us though each step of his usual design process. Emphasis was laid on constant communication with the client, and also patience to experiment and test design components. I kind of wished he would talk about his background in the automobile sector in Europe, as he seemed to have a rather impressive list of firms on his CV, and it would have been interesting to hear his opinion about the perfect client from a car mass-production point of view.

Philip Hastings
I have to say I really admire firms that show design as a reciprocal process. To design spaces for the educational excellence of other professions is one way of showing this. The designer in this case must truly get to know the specialized need of the client in order to help them build the space that will help them excel in their task, while the client/professionals must present the best and most exemplary version of themselves for the designer to study and comprehend. Imagine if this would happen on a residential level, where for example the average homeowner would be interviewed about their habits and use of spaces before a house would be built for them. It almost never happens nowadays, rendering the combination of hyper-calibrated spaces together with their intended users such rarities.

Tania Bortolotto
I’m almost relieved to hear someone talk about design excellence in Toronto (or the absence of, although it is a rather roundabout answer to what qualities the perfect client embodies). Tania’s plea about design excellence truly struck a chord with me, as both myself and so many of my fellow (ex-)colleagues at school have beleaguered this in the past: “Where is Toronto’s back-friggin-bone??” Although many of us dream and aspire towards design excellence in this city, it is thoroughly thwarted if a culture of design excellence doesn’t exist to leverage such thinking on a significant scale. Design excellence can only succeed where it permeates the collective consciousness of society. Tania ends it off by highlighting that great spaces must be embraced as essential in our society, and how easy it is to forget that we as designers have the ability to leverage this. Amen to that!

Definitely interesting presentations and equally interesting speakers and topics, although the quest for the perfect client continues…

I have no idea why I am so excited, but I am, and I would like to share my excitement with you about a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) that my brother just joined via OCADSU (OCAD’s Student Union that is). The program has a bi-weekly pickup, and this week we bought the family-sized version ($17). I just brought home the spoils in a big bag and unpacked it onto the kitchen table.

Broccoli, onion, potatoes, beets, strawberries... you name it!

A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farming operation where the growers and consumers share the risks and benefits of food production. CSAs usually consist of a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit, in a vegetable box scheme, and sometimes includes dairy products and meat.

For Ontario, websites such as the Ontario CSA Farm Directory and Greenbelt Fresh (directed towards the Greater Toronto Area) help farmers and locals hook up to create new CSAs or join already existing ones. Together with the food, we also received some information on paper…

Information that came along with the food

The pink sheet comes with a small disclaimer, saying that if any of the items on the list are missing or replaced, it could be due to a number of reasons such as there being unexpectedly little supply of that item, or if the quality of the item was compromised somehow. In the real world of agriculture, this should be EXPECTED, not the exception of the norm. We are too used to getting everything we want and need in the supermarket, at any season possible – we forget that food was largely a seasonal ordeal before globalization put all geographic, biological and seasonal barriers to the wind. Our global demand for a variety of off-season foods puts stresses on landscapes we’ll probably never see in our lifetime.

The accompanying recipe book is great! My mouth is already watering from the “Dilled Beet and Potato Soup”… for those of you who don’t know me, I’m a huge fan of potatoes, beets and soups in general… what better combination?? It’s also interesting to read small factoids and tidbits about our greenbelt here – the pamphlet is obviously a vehicle to promote Greenbelt produce, but I can potentially see a full-out monthly Greenbelt magazine being published on the subject, full with in-depth articles about Ontario farmers, the soils, the techniques, the unique “Great Lakes” climate, provincial policy reviews of agricultural interest… would be a great way to gather a community and to promote awareness about the challenges of farmers, families and food-lovers alike.

The white sheet of paper which is the Good Food News (as it is officially called) is a double-sided sheet of information with a bit of information regarding current events and also sporting two more recipes on the back together with a fact-sheet of one of the foods you received, this time about the Broccoli. “Broccoli is an excellent (!) source of the vitamins K, C, B6, E and A, as well as Folate and fiber. Broccoli is also a very good source of Phosphorus, Potassium, and Magnesium.” Did you know that Broccoli had its roots from Italy? I didn’t.

So, all in all, a great reception of foods during our first unpacking of the GoodFoodBox! Looking forward to many exciting unpackings in the future.

..and it all smells so deliciously earthy!

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More on the Good Food Box program here.