Public Farm 1 by WORK

Each year, P.S. 1, a contemporary art museum in Queens, New York, chooses one promising young architecture firm to turn their sparse concrete courtyard into an innovative summer party space. The only requirements are that the designs include seating, shade, and water, and fit within the $70,000 budget.

This summer, P.S. 1 will become Public Farm 1, a garden of vegetables, fruits, and herbs proposed by New York City-based WORK Architecture Company.

Cardboard tube planters attach to each other forming a sloping plane from the pavement of the courtyard and up over the wall, creating a "flying garden" that reaches 30 feet in the air. The garden itself provides shade for visitors below, with areas of different heights being specified for different purposes. The lowest area is reserved for kids. Some tube spaces are left open so that not only can community gardeners go up through them to care for the plants, but the shadow cast by the elevated farm has a more dappled, organic feel. The sloped angle lets the garden act as both shelter and surface, literally intersecting nature with the built environment.

Previous Young Architects Program designs have focused on the inventive use of materials and technology to create unusual atmospheric spaces. Not only are the living plants in WORK's project absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and controlling heat buildup through water evaporation from the soil, but the design explores the possibilities of public space by providing a sustainable community garden with edible foods.

Translucent Concrete

A mesmerizing new material: LiTraCon transparent concrete. Instead of the normal concrete aggregate material of small rocks, fiber optic cables run the width of the concrete blocks. Not only do they hold the material together, but they allow light to pass uninhibited from one side of a concrete wall to the other.

Standing on the brightly lit side of the wall, it appears to be normal concrete, but once backlit, all sorts of shadows and images from the other side of the wall become clear.

There is a strange coexistence of heavy solidity of the stone-like concrete material with the ethereal lightness of the glowing backlit wall, giving the strange sense that the solid wall could be made insubstantial and penetrable.

I'd love to see a building made completely out of concrete blocks, with these transparent blocks in a pattern on the wall, in such a way that at certain times (when it's dark outside), the walls would appear to be solid and imposing, while during the day, with the lights dim inside, shadows of people walking outside and the placement of the sun would permeate the interior space. The effect reminds me of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale, with its thin translucent stone walls.

Ice Dreams

I am totally mesmerized by this light installation by artist Kiki Smith and architect Lebbeus Woods for the Snow Show in Finland. The glowing lights emanating from underneath the thick ice are surreal. Strange illuminated patterns from the frozen surface intersect shadowy figures to create an incredible winter vision.

The artists used fiber optic lighting buried deep under the ice in the extreme cold of the Finnish winter to achieve this eerie effect. They take advantage of the ability of the ice to diffuse light. Wish I could have been out there to see it in person.

Welcome to Dreams in Spaceland

Dreams in Spaceland is a blog about Ultra Living. It will be filled with delightful things I've found around the web that I dream of bringing into my space. Instead they will exist in Spaceland. I'm interested in retro-fabulous, vintage, handmade, eco-friendly, and fresh designs. Dreams in Spaceland are exaggerated and intense more than subtle or restrained.

I have a background in Architecture and design, and I am the designer/maker behind prix-prix, a shop for handmade refashioned eco-friendly accessories.