Amale Andraos

Dan Wood

In the summer of 2008, exactly forty years after French student activists took to the streets with their rallying cry of "Under the pavement, the beach!" a new vision of liberation took shape in the courtyard of MoMA's P.S.1. Designed and built by WORK Architecture Company in 2008 for the museum's Young Architects Program, the installation Public Farm 1 (PF1) consisted of a large cluster of cardboard tubes topped with more than four dozen species of plants and vegetables. Conceived as a medium for educating citizens about sustainable urban farming techniques, the fully functioning, produce-growing design emphasized local intervention over mass production and pointed the way toward a more holistic, integrated approach to urban life. Leaving behind the urban beach, the updated slogan "Abovethe Pavement, the Farm!" embodies the current generation of young architects preoccupations and hopes for the city of the future. Using the PF1 installation as an ideal model for a new breed of architectural experimentation, Above the Pavementthe Farm! is an urban manifesto designed to reinvent our cities as much-needed laboratories of experimentation and learning. Keeping in mind our society's gradual shift from being industrial to postindustrial, Above the Pavementthe Farm! proposes an agriculture-based approach to city planning, envisioning fully functioning farms located atop roofs and situated within city blocks as a means for providing new sources of locally grown food to urbanites. Through visually dynamic narratives documenting the development of the project from conceptualization to on-site building, Above the Pavementthe Farm! provides ahow-to guide, including do-it-yourself plans and diagrams, for implementing urban farms on lots and rooftops in metropolitan regions across the country. Inspired by the highly visual mass-market paperback "idea books" popularized by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, Above the Pavementthe Farm! is a critical yet playful look forward into the future of our cities.

Architectural Agriculture at Public Farm 1

Above the Pavement, the Farm

Moving beyond reductive notions of identity, myths of authenticity, fetishized traditionalism, or the constructed opposition of tradition and modernity, The Arab City: Architectural and Representation critically engages contemporary architectural and urban production in the Middle East. Taking the "Arab City" and "Islamic Architecture" as sites of investigation rather than given categories, this book reframes the region's buildings, cities, and landscapes and broadens its architectural and urban canons. Arab cities are multifaceted places and sites of layered historical imaginaries; defined by regional and territorial economies, they bridge scales of production and political engagement. The essays collected here investigate cultural representation, the evolution of historical cities, contemporary architectural practices, emerging urban conditions, and responsive urban imaginaries in the Arab World. With contributions from Ashraf Abdalla, Senan Abdelqader, Nadia Abu ElHaj, Su'ad Amiry, Amale Andraos, Mohammed al-Asad, George Arbid, Mohamed Elshahed, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Rania Ghosn, Saba Innab, Adrian Lahoud, Lila Abu Lughod, Ziad Jamaleddine, Ahmed Kanna, Bernard Khoury, Laura Kurgan, Ali Mangera, Reinhold Martin, Timothy Mitchell, Magda Mostafa, Nasser Rabbat, Hashim Sarkis, Felicity Scott, Hala Warde, Mark Wasiuta, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, and Gwendolyn Wright.

Amale Andraos

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