As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 08.2021), via all its tags!
FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:
(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)
--
Note that we had to hit the "pause" button on our reblogging activities a while ago (mainly because we ran out of time, but also because we received complaints from a major image stock company about some images that were displayed on | rblg, an activity that we felt was still "fair use" - we never made any money or advertise on this site).
Nevertheless, we continue to publish from time to time information on the activities of fabric | ch, or content directly related to its work (documentation).
Note: some progressive news... Published almost two years ago ((!) I find it interesting to bring things back and out of their "buzz time", possibly check what happened to it next), the article present some advances in "bionic-leaf". One step closer to the creation of artificial leaves so to say.
The interesting thing is that the research has deepened and continues towards agriculture, on-site soil enrichment to boost growth rather than treating it with fertilizers and chemicals to be transported from far. Behind this, some genetic manipulations though (for good? for bad?): "Expanding the reach of the bionic leaf".
Daniel Nocera, a professor of energy science at Harvard who pioneered the use of artificial photosynthesis, says that he and his colleague Pamela Silver have devised a system that completes the process of making liquid fuel from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. And they’ve done it at an efficiency of 10 percent, using pure carbon dioxide—in other words, one-tenth of the energy in sunlight is captured and turned into fuel. That is much higher than natural photosynthesis, which converts about 1 percent of solar energy into the carbohydrates used by plants, and it could be a milestone in the shift away from fossil fuels. The new system is described in a new paper in Science.
“Bill Gates has said that to solve our energy problems, someday we need to do what photosynthesis does, and that someday we might be able to do it even more efficiently than plants,” says Nocera. “That someday has arrived.”
In nature, plants use sunlight to make carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. Artificial photosynthesis seeks to use the same inputs—solar energy, water, and carbon dioxide—to produce energy-dense liquid fuels. Nocera and Silver’s system uses a pair of catalysts to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and feeds the hydrogen to bacteria along with carbon dioxide. The bacteria, a microörganism that has been bioengineered to specific characteristics, converts the carbon dioxide and hydrogen into liquid fuels.
Several companies, including Joule Unlimited and LanzaTech, are working to produce biofuels from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, but they use bacteria that consume carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, rather than hydrogen. Nocera’s system, he says, can operate at lower temperatures, higher efficiency, and lower costs.
Nocera’s latest work “is really quite amazing,” says Peidong Yang of the University of California, Berkeley. Yang has developed a similar system with much lower efficiency. “The high performance of this system is unparalleled” in any other artificial photosynthesis system reported to date, he says.
The new system can use pure carbon dioxide in gas form, or carbon dioxide captured from the air—which means it could be carbon-neutral, introducing no additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “The 10 percent number, that’s using pure CO2,” says Nocera. Allowing the bacteria themselves to capture carbon dioxide from the air, he adds, results in an efficiency of 3 to 4 percent—still significantly higher than natural photosynthesis. “That’s the power of biology: these bioörganisms have natural CO2 concentration mechanisms.”
Nocera’s research is distinct from the work being carried out by the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded program that seeks to use inorganic catalysts, rather than bacteria, to convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide to liquid fuel. According to Dick Co, who heads the Solar Fuels Institute at Northwestern University, the innovation of the new system lies not only in its superior performance but also in its fusing of two usually separate fields: inorganic chemistry (to split water) and biology (to convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide into fuel). “What’s really exciting is the hybrid approach” to artificial photosynthesis, says Co. “It’s exciting to see chemists pairing with biologists to advance the field.”
Commercializing the technology will likely take years. In any case, the prospect of turning sunlight into liquid fuel suddenly looks a lot closer.
Note: the workshop continues and should finish today. We'll document and publish results next week. As the workshop is all about small size and situated computing, Lucien Langton (assistant on the project) made a short tutorial about the way to set up your Pi. I'll also publish the Github repository that Matthew Plummer-Fernandez has set up.
The Bots are running! The second workshop of I&IC’s research study started yesterday with Matthew’s presentation to the students. A video of the presentation might be included in the post later on, but for now here’s the [pdf]: Botcaves
First prototypes setup by the students include bots playing Minecraft, bots cracking wifi’s, bots triggered by onboard IR Cameras. So far, some groups worked directly with Python scripts deployed via SSH into the Pi’s, others established a client-server connection between their Mac and their Pi by installing Processing on their Raspberry and finally some decided to start by hacking hardware to connect to their bots later.
The research process will be continuously documented during the week.
| rblg note: following my previous post about the design research project we are leading with Nicolas Nova, a workshop is going on this week at the ECAL with our guest contributor Matthew Plummer-Frenandez (aka #Algopop). I'll reblog here during the coming days what's happening on our parallel blog (iiclouds.org)
Note: I publish here the brief that Matthew Plummer-Fernandez (a.k.a. Algopop) sent me before the workshop he’ll lead next week (17-21.11) with Media & Interaction Design students from 2nd and 3rd year Ba at the ECAL.
This workshop will take place in the frame of the I&IC research project, for which we had the occasion to exchange together prior to the workshop. It will investigate the idea of very low power computing, situated processing, data sensing/storage and automatized data treatment (“bots”) that could be highly distributed into everyday life objects or situations. While doing so, the project will undoubtedly address the idea of “networked objects”, which due to the low capacities of their computing parts will become major consumers of cloud based services (computing power, storage). Yet, following the hypothesis of the research, what kind of non-standard networked objects/situations based on what king of decentralized, personal cloud architecture?
The subject of this workshop explains some recent posts that could serve as resources or tools for this workshop, as the students will work around personal “bots” that will gather, process, host and expose data.
Stay tuned for more!
Botcaves (by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez)
Algorithmic and autonomous software agents known as bots are increasingly participating in everyday life. Bots can potentially gather data from both physical and digital activity, store and share data in the ‘cloud’, and develop ways to communicate and learn from their databases. In essence bots can animate data, making it useful, interactive, visual or legible. Bots although software-based require hardware from which to run from, and it is this underexplored crossover between the physical and digital presence of bots that this workshop investigates.
You will be asked to design a physical ‘housing’ or ‘interface’, either bespoke or hacked from existing objects, for your personal bots to run from. These botcaves would be present in the home, workspace or other, permitting novel interactions between the digital and physical environments that these bots inhabit.
Raspberry Pis, template bot code, APIs, cloud storage, existing services (Twitter, IFTTT, etc) and physical elements (sensors, lights, cameras, etc) may be used in the workshop.
Bio
British/ Colombian Artist and Designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez makes work that critically and playfully examines sociocultural entanglements with technologies. His current interests span algorithms, bots, automation, copyright, 3D files and file-sharing. He was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for the project Disarming Corruptor; an app for disguising 3D Print files as glitched artefacts. He is also known for his computational approach to aesthetics translated into physical sculpture.
For research purposes he runs Algopop, a popular tumblr that documents the emergence of algorithms in everyday life as well as the artists that respond to this context in their work. This has become the starting point to a practice-based PhD funded by the AHRC at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also a research associate at the Interaction Research Studio and a visiting tutor. He holds a BEng in Computer Aided Mechanical Engineering from Kings College London and an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art.
BrightFarms CEO, Paul Lightfoot is obsessed with efficiency. Spending most of his career improving market supply chains he has now turned his attention to the market supply chains of America’s produce. BrightFarms is an innovative and straight forward program whose goal is to eliminate the wasted energy expended on travel times between the farm and the shelf, to provide more nutritious and safer produce that is grown for the table and not for the endurance of days and weeks of transport, and to create a local market where consumers know their farmers and where the food is coming from and who is responsible for growing it. Littlefoot describes the blatant problems with the food industry today – efficiently factory farming and preserving produce that moves from one and end of the country to the other and inefficiently providing nutritious and tasty produce.
The challenge is to create a model that ensures quality while keeping costs down and BrightFarms appears to have found a strategy that works: hydroponic rooftop gardening near supermarket distribution centers or local markets. The newly renam520/500 ed Federal Plaza #2, soon to be known as Liberty View Industrial Plaza to be developed by Salmar Properties, in Brooklyn, NY is set to be the world’s largest rooftop garden which will reportedly grow “1 million pounds of local produce per year, including tomatoes, lettuces and herbs”. Find out how it works after the break!
BrightFarms business model seems simple – and too good to be true. The company is essentially a middle man – connecting experienced and reliable local farmers with credited grocery stores – that finances, develops and builds the BrightFarm operation. BrightFarms ensures that both parties enter into individual agreements with the program. The grocery stores are obligated to purchase the output of the farms for a 10-year period, while farmers must guarantee the volume and quality of output. And of course the key ingredient to making this operation distinct from the trends of the country is the proximity of the farms, farmers and grocery stores. Community is essential.
Aside from providing goods that are fresher and more nutritious, BrightFarms hydroponic system also reduces carbon output drammatically. Hydroponic farming delivers nutrients to plants directly through the water without soil. These systems can be trays or columns made of PVC that expose the roots to the nutrient and mineral filled water. No soil means no land use and no heavy, gas-guzzling equipment. The water in the system can be reused, There is greater control of the nutrients which means reduced waste and the water stays in the system and can be reused which greatly reduces the agricultural runoff. It also consolidates space, which makes maintenance and harvesting much easier.
The system is perfect for urban rooftop applications, which is why Liberty View Industrial Plaza is set to be the model for urban agriculture covering the rooftop of an 8-story 1.1 million-square-foot warehouse building along Brooklyn’s Industrial Waterfront in Sunset Park. The project will provide innumerable benefits for the city. It will provide enough produce to feed 5,000 New Yorkers, will create an anticipated 1,300 permanent industrial jobs and 400 construction Jobs, and will relieve the over-burdened sewer system of 1.8 million gallons of storm water from entering the waterways. It is also a plan that is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative to revitalize Brooklyn’s waterfront – which is already underway at the Brooklyn Navy Yard aka Navy Hill.
Everyone is optimistic that the project will not only bring fresh and healthy food and revitalized attitude toward local farming, but will also push the long-dormant industrial buildings into a new territory of sustainable development for cities. Follow this link to see other projects by BrightFarms.
While I also definitely think that producing food closer to the place where it will be eaten is a necessary thing (but guess what? this was still the way we were producing and eating food, at least in my neighboorhood, when I was a very young kid --i.e. my grandfather was selling the excedent products of his garden to the local shop, which means: we need local shops again, as well as a different economic and consumption model--. We didn't need either to take a car to buy a few tomatoes so to say), I also question this whole idea of urban farming: how much energy does it really need to grow products? At least on rooftop and exposed platforms seems a good direction, on the contrary, to build skyscapers that need artificial lighting and air conditioning to produce food not really.
But it looks like that there will be a "competition" about the use of rooftops in the close future: will we use them to produce clean electricity (solar or by other means), locally, should we use white rooftops to reduce the global albedo index of our cities (the albedo index of soil and green plants is not good) and therefore artifically replace the solar reflexion of disappearing glaciers and ice cap, should we collect waterfrom the roofs instead, or should we use them to grow plants (and eventually capture CO2 locally too, and particles of pollution as well that we'll then eat...)?
I have the feeling that we need a more general view (systems theory?) that help take more parameters into consideration.
Maybe the solution will look like this: to bioengineer new white algae plants that we can eat, that need few enery and water to grow under a minimal amount of natural light and that help produce biocarburant... (but they will still eject C02 when you'll use that carburant... damn...)
The inside of the greenhouse will be anything but ordinary. Four-metre-high stacks of growing trays on motorized conveyors will ferry plants up, down and around for watering, to capture the sun’s rays and then move them into position for an easy harvest. The array will produce about the same amount of produce as 6.4 hectares (16 acres) of California fields, according to Christopher Ng, chief operating officer of Valcent.
(...) -- Taken out from a longer post about food and architecture by Nicola Twilley --
This vertical greenhouse from 1966 was apparently "a space-saving sensation," with a built-in automatic elevator to rotate crops. Eat your heart out, Dickson Despommier!
(...)
Personal comment:
I just saw this picture in an article from Nicola Twilley that makes me think of a project we did back in 2008, Tower of Atmospheric Relations (and that in some other ways retro-confirm the project's hypothesis of a vertical greenhouse building / climate exhibition and clock).
Big computing providers are developing energy-saving strategies for new server farms.
By Cindy Waxer
When it came time for Hewlett-Packard to decide on a location for its new data center, the company could have considered variables like network connectivity, local talent, or proximity to corporate headquarters. Instead, a 100-year weather report convinced HP to build its new 360,000-square-foot facility in breezy Billingham, England.
Server farm: Yahoo’s data center in Lockport, New York, was inspired by a chicken coop and lets air naturally vent through the top.
Credit: Yahoo
"You get a lot of cool and moist winds coming over the northeast coast of Britain," says Ian Brooks, HP's European head of sustainable computing. By harnessing these winds with massive fans, Brooks says, HP has created a system that uses 40 percent less energy than conventional methods of keeping data centers cool.
HP isn't the only company taking its cues from nature when it comes to the design and construction of data centers, clusters of server computers that run Internet services and store and crunch data. These facilities have been the smokestacks of the digital era because they use so much electricity: not only does it take a lot of power to run the machines themselves, but data centers are heavily air conditioned because servers generate a lot of heat and don't run well in environments much warmer than 25 ºC. As demand for online services skyrockets, the EPA predicts, U.S. data centers could nearly double their 2006 levels of energy consumption by 2011, reaching 100 billion kilowatt-hours per year—enough to power 10 million homes. By 2020, data centers will account for 18 percent of the world's carbon emissions, according to the Smart 2020 report released by the Climate Group, a nonprofit organization.
To reduce the environmental—and financial—burdens, more and more companies are trying innovative designs for data centers. For instance, at the HP center in Britain, known as Wynyard, fans more than two meters in diameter pull the North Sea winds into a mixing chamber, where they cool the warm air given off by the center's servers. That air is funneled into a large cavity beneath the servers, directed through vents in the floor, and then circulated throughout a series of aisles to chill the computers. The resulting warm exhaust is extracted, mixed with the incoming fresh air, and recirculated.
By eliminating the need for energy-intensive cooling equipment, the Wynyard facility cuts 12,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the total generated by the industry-standard data center. That is the equivalent of taking nearly 3,000 midsize vehicles off the road.
Another innovative data center is one that Yahoo opened in September 2010 in Lockport, New York. In this case, the inspiration came from chicken coops rather than coastal winds. "Chickens throw off a fair bit of heat; servers throw off a fair bit of heat," says Christina Page, Yahoo's director of climate and energy strategy. "So we built a long, tall, narrow building with a coop along the top to vent the air."
Drawn in: At Hewlett-Packard’s data center in Billingham, England, large fans pull in fresh air.
Credit: HP
The 155,000-square-foot facility mimics the narrow design of a chicken coop and features louvers along the sides of the building so that prevailing winds can flow freely throughout the halls. On particularly hot days, the center can activate an evaporative cooling system, which uses less energy than traditional chillers. That means the facility uses at least 95 percent less water than a conventional data center, and 40 percent less energy—enough to power more than 9,000 households annually. What's more, with its preconstructed metal components, the chicken-coop structure can be assembled in less than six months.
"There's a good case to be made for the return on investment on a lot of green practices," says Page. "This data center was cheaper and faster to build, in addition to being more efficient on the operating-expenditure side."
The information-management company Iron Mountain, meanwhile, is taking advantage of natural geothermal conditions to slash energy consumption by locating a data center in a former limestone mine, 22 stories below ground. Iron Mountain's storage facility in Butler County, Pennsylvania, houses Room 48, whose racks of servers rely on the natural cooling properties of the limestone walls to remain at 13 ºC. Iron Mountain also developed a high-static air pressure differential cooling system that relies on high-velocity ducts, located in the cold aisles separating rows of servers, and linear return ducts in its hot aisles. The system creates winds that naturally cause cold air to sink and hot air to rise and exit the room through perforated ceiling tiles. The absence of air conditioners not only freed up about 30 percent more space in Room 48 but cut energy consumption for cooling by 10 to 15 percent compared with traditional data centers.
These are the kinds of unheralded changes that can really make a difference, says Mark Lafferty, director of strategic solutions at technology services provider CDW. "The really basic, non-glamorous, non-sexy stuff companies do can have a dramatic effect on the amount of resource consumption in a data center," he says.
Dr. Dickson Despommier, a former professor at Columbia University and champion of vertical farming, has released a new book on The Vertical Farm Project. The book puts forth his argument about the future of urban agriculture through vertical farms.
The video below shows Despommier introducing his ideas about vertical farms as a "closed loop agricultural cycle" that provides safe food and water to growing urban population:
See these stories in the Worldchanging archives for more on the worldchanging potential of vertical farms, an actual small scale application, and some of the criticism the concept must address to really be brought to scale:
Since moving into the Los Angles half-way house two years ago, residents of the Rainbow Apartments have been devising a plan to start their own urban garden. After a few trials and errors, the novice gardeners have now succeeded in creating a 34-foot-long plot bursting with strawberries, tomatoes, basil and other herbs and vegetables, which grow vertically against their cinder block building. ¶ In addition to providing them with fresh, nutritious food, the residents have found that the garden has given them a way to connect with each other and build a supportive community...
Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for "vertical farms," stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would -- theoretically -- supply fresh produce for city residents year round. The New York Times showcased outlandish artists' conceptions of what such farms might look like. Colbert did his shtick. Twelve pilot projects are supposedly under consideration, in locations as far-flung as China and Dubai. ¶ The concept has captured the imagination of at least the sliver of the public (including the editors at Worldchanging), who laments the enormous resource demands of our food production system and yearns for something easier on the land, easier on our aquifers, and less demanding of fossil fuels. Vertical farms seem to promise all that. ¶ Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable. ¶ Perhaps those costs pencil out (although they almost certainly do not), but the plausibility of the idea itself is in some ways beside the point. Whatever the merits of vertical farms, the enthusiasm with which this idea has been received suggests that we're becoming mightily reductive in the way that we think about sustainability...
...to focus on just one technology, let's look at the potential impact of vertical farming. ¶ There's a great site introducing the concept called, logically enough, the vertical farm project. This site will give you an extensive introduction to the idea of doing intensive hydroponics agriculture in urban hi-rises, and it includes a lot of architectural plans, systems analyses and hard numbers. Cost is somewhat skirted-around, but doesn't appear to be prohibitive when you factor in the fertilizer, pesticide, transportation and storage costs of our current mode of production. ¶ It seems crazy to talk about farming in a hi-rise; the vision it gives rise to is of a kind of student-residence crammed with pot-smoking hippies who've traded their carpets for wheat. In fact, the approach is pretty hard-nosed and industrial, with very high outputs as its aim. And here's where it gets interesting from the point of view of our ambition to rewild the country: in the study entitled "Feeding 50,000 People, Anisa Buck, Stacy Goldberg and others conclude that a single building covering one city block, and up to 48 stories high depending on the design, can grow enough food to sustain 50,000 people. This calculation doesn't require any magical technology; there's no fairy-dust being evoked here, we could build such a structure now. ¶ So, let's do the math...
It's hard to tire of projects that involve wallpapering, paneling, and roofing urban structures with plant life. Though it's becoming a more common design approach for enhancing air quality, catching runoff, highlighting the "green" aspects of a building, and sometimes even providing food, it always has an unexpected effect, accustomed as we are to surfaces made with impermeable and dull materials...[the concept of vertical farming] had a recent update in New York Magazine.Since we discussed the concept, developed by Dickson Despommier, who teaches environmental science and microbiology at Columbia, a whole lot more people are on board with the climate change issue. So his proposal to put agriculture into skyscrapers and reallocate land to forests in the interested of sequestering carbon and slowing global warming now has the attention of more than just design junkies and eco-imagineers. It's become an attractive possibility to venture capitalists from all over the world. The idea factors in not only the climate aspect, but also impending population explosions, looking at taking food cultivation upwards instead of outwards as it grows to accommodate greater numbers of people .
On an urban planet, closing urban resource and energy loops -- creating zero-waste systems for meeting the needs of people who live in highly dense cities -- floats in front of us, grail-like, as a goal. ¶ No one quite knows how to get it done, yet. But more and more interesting pieces of the puzzle are piling up, like smart places, smart grids and product service systems...Here's another piece of the puzzle -- vertical farming:...it's a provocative idea, and might fit together with some of the innovations discussed above in novel and worldchanging ways.
Shiitake logs on racks in the Mittagong mushroom tunnel. All photos in this post taken by the author.
As Geoff Manaugh has already mentioned on BLDGBLOG, we spent our last full day in Australia touring the Li-Sun Exotic Mushroom Farm with its founder and owner, Dr. Noel Arrold. Three weeks earlier at a Sydney farmers’ market, we were buying handfuls of his delicious Shimeji and Chestnut mushrooms to make a risotto, when the vendor told us that they had been grown in a disused railway tunnel in Mittagong.
The mushroom tunnel, on the left, was originally built in 1886 to house a single-track railway line. By 1919, it had to be replaced with the still-functioning double-track tunnel to its right, built to cope with the rise in traffic on the route following the founding of Canberra, Australia’s purpose-built capital city. The tunnel is still state property: the mushroom farm exists on a five-year lease.
The idea of re-purposing abandoned civic infrastructure as a site for myco-agriculture was intriguing, to say the least, so we were thrilled when Dr. Arrold kindly agreed to take the time to give us a tour (Li-Sun is not usually open to the public).
Dr. Arrold has been growing mushrooms in the Mittagong tunnel for more than twenty years, starting with ordinary soil-based white button mushrooms and Cremini, before switching to focus on higher maintenance (and more profitable) exotics such as Shimeji, Wood-ear, Shiitake, and Oyster mushrooms.
Dr. Arrold with a bag of mushroom spawn. He keeps his mushroom cultures in test-tubes filled with boiled potato and agar, and initially incubates the spawn on rye or wheat grains in clear plastic bags sealed with sponge anti-mould filters (shown above), before transferring it to jars, black bin bags, or plastic-wrapped logs.
Shimeji (above) and pink oyster (below) mushrooms cropping on racks inside the tunnel. Dr. Arrold came up with the simple but clever idea of growing mushrooms in black bin bags with holes cut in them. Previously, mushrooms were typically grown inside clear plastic bags. The equal exposure to light meant that the mushrooms fruited all over, which made it harder to harvest without missing some.
A microbiologist by training, Dr. Arrold originally imported his exotic mushroom cultures into Australia from their traditional homes in China, Japan, and Korea. Like a latter-day Tradescant, he regularly travels abroad to keep up with mushroom growing techniques, share his own innovations (such as the black plastic grow-bags shown above), and collect new strains.
He showed us a recent acquisition, which he hunted down after coming across it in his dinner in a café in Fuzhou, and which he is currently trialling as a potential candidate for cultivation in the tunnel. Even though all his mushroom strains were originally imported from overseas (disappointingly, given its ecological uniqueness, Australia has no exciting mushroom types of its own), Dr. Arrold has refined each variety over generations to suit the conditions in this particular tunnel.
Since there is currently only one other disused railway tunnel used for mushroom growing in the whole of Australia, his mushrooms have evolved to fit an extremely specialised environmental niche: they are species designed for architecture.
Shiitake logs on racks (Taiwanese style) and mounted on the wall (Chinese style) in the tunnel.
Wood-ear mushrooms grow through a diagonal slash in plastic bags filled with chopped wheat straw.
The tunnel for which these mushrooms have been so carefully developed is 650 metres long and about 30 metres deep. Buried under solid rock and deprived of the New South Wales sunshine, the temperature holds at a steady 15º Celsius. The fluorescent lights flick on at 5:30 a.m. every day, switching off again exactly 12 hours later. The humidity level fluctuates seasonally, and would reach an unacceptable aridity in the winter if Dr. Arrold didn’t wet the floors and run a fogger during the coldest months.
In all other respects, the tunnel is an unnaturally accurate concrete and brick approximation of the prevailing conditions in the mushroom-friendly deep valleys and foggy forests of Fujian province. This inadvertent industrial replicant ecosystem made me think of Swiss architecture firm Fabric’s 2008 proposal for a “Tower of Atmospheric Relations” (pdf).
Renderings of Fabric’s “Tower of Atmospheric Relations,” showing the stacked volumes of air and the resulting climate simulations.
Fabric’s ingenious project is designed to generate a varying set of artificial climates (such as the muggy heat of the Indian monsoon, or the crisp air of a New England autumn day) entirely through the movements of the air that is trapped inside the tower’s architecture (i.e. by means of convection, condensation, thermal inertia, and so on).
If you could perhaps combine this kind of atmosphere-modifying architecture with today’s omnipresent vertical farm proposals, northern city dwellers could simultaneously avoid food miles and continue to enjoy bananas.
Li-Sun employees unwrapping mushroom logs before putting them on racks in the tunnel. The logs are made by mixing steamed bran or wheat, sawdust from thirty-year-old eucalyptus, and lime in a concrete mixer, packing it into plastic cylinders, and inoculating them with spawn.
Fruiting Shiitake logs on racks in the tunnel. Once their mushrooms are harvested, the logs make great firewood.
The Shiitake log shock tank – Dr. Arrold explained that the logs crop after one week in the tunnel, and then sit dormant for three weeks, until they are “woken up” with a quick soak in a tub of water, after which they are productive for three or four more weeks. “Shiitake,” said Dr. Arrold, in a resigned tone, “are the most trouble, and the biggest market.”
Outside of the tunnel, Dr. Arrold also grows Enoki, King Brown, and Chestnut mushrooms. These varieties prefer different temperatures (6º, 17º, and 18º Celsius respectively), so they are housed in climate-controlled Portakabins.
The paper cone around the top of the enoki jar helps the mushrooms grow tall and thin.
Chestnut mushrooms grow in jars for seven weeks: four to fruit, and three more to sprout to harvest size above the jar’s rim.
Thousands of mushroom jars are stacked from floor to ceiling. Dr. Arrold starting growing these mushroom varieties in jars two years ago, and hasn’t had a holiday since.
Empty mushroom jars are sterilised in the autoclave between crops, so that disease doesn’t build up.
The clean jars are filled with sterilised substrate using a Japanese-designed machine, before being inoculated with spawn.
The fact that the King Brown and Chestnut mushrooms only thrive at a higher temperature than the railway tunnel provides makes their cultivation much more expensive. Their ecosystem has to be replicated mechanically, rather than occuring spontaneously within disused infrastructure.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether there might be another tunnel, cave, or even abandoned bunker in New South Wales that currently maintains a steady 17º Celsius and is just waiting to be colonised by King Brown mushrooms growing, like ghostly thumbs, out of thousands of glass jars.
Temperature map of the London Underground system (via the BBC, where a larger version is also available), compiled by Transport for London’s “Cool the Tube” team.
In the UK, for instance, Transport for London has kindly provided this fascinating map of summertime temperatures on various tube lines. Most are far too hot for mushroom growing (not to mention commuter comfort). Nonetheless, perhaps the estimated £1.56 billion cost of installing air-conditioning on the surface lines could be partially recouped by putting some of the system’s many abandoned service tunnels and shafts to use cultivating exotic fungi. These mushroom farms would be buried deep under the surface of the city, colonizing abandoned infrastructural hollows and attracting foodies and tourists alike.
A very amateur bit of Photoshop work: Li-Sun Mushrooms as packaged for Australian supermarket chain Woolworths, re-imagined as Bakerloo Line Oyster Mushrooms.
Service shafts along the hot Central line might be perfect for growing Chestnut Mushrooms, while the marginally cooler Bakerloo line has several abandoned tunnels that could replicate the subtropical forest habitat of the Oyster Mushroom. And – unlike Dr. Arrold’s Li-Sun mushrooms, which make no mention of their railway tunnel origins on the packaging – I would hope that Transport for London would cater to the locavore trend by labeling its varietals by their line of origin.
Shiitake logs on racks in the Mittagong mushroom tunnel.
Speculation aside, our visit to the Mittagong Mushroom Tunnel was fascinating, and Dr. Arrold’s patience in answering our endless questions was much appreciated. If you’re in Australia, it’s well worth seeking out Li-Sun mushrooms: you can find them at several Sydney markets, as well as branches of Woolworths.
[NOTE: This post was simultaneously published at Edible Geography's sister-site BLDGBLOG.]
Surprenante culture de champignons en climats déplacés. Carte climatique du métro londonien y suggérant également l'idée de climats déplacés (!) et intéressante idée de Nicola Twiley (éditrice du blog Edible Gography) d'utiliser notre Tower of Atmospheric Relations pour du "vertical urban farming".
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
