Value of an Apple

From a conversation over Christmas with my good friend Nick Wiggs.

“Design by conversation is fine, but you need to quantify that conversation through notes and drawings.”
                                                                                                                                                                     – David Britch.

Henderson’s Bottle Bar

The Sheffield School of Architecture is celebrating it’s Centenary this year. As part of the celebrations, an open competition to design the bar for the event was announced. With a fabrication cost of £15,000, there is plenty of scope for fairly complex schemes. Below is my entry.

The text reads:

Celebrating 100 years of Architecture in Sheffield.
The Sheffield School of Architecture over the last century has
established itself as a world class institute educating generations of
aspiring architects. It has in its time been at the forefront of teaching
and research and has its own unique ethos. The twin issues of sustainable
design and social responsibility are embedded into the collective
conscience of the teaching staff and the students; it is this responsibility
that will become one of the most important issues in the future of the
profession.

Identity.
The idea for the centenary competition is to distill the essence
of what the Sheffield School of Architecture is about and place it in the
unique context of our well loved city of Sheffield. What better to celebrate
our identity as a school than to combine with something else that
is distinctly Sheffield? Making the entire bar almost entirely out
of Henderson’s Relish. Henderson’s Relish is the perfect choice.
Nothing says made in Sheffield better than the most popular condiment
to ever come out our city. It is made from a number of components
that together enhance a whole – this is how we do things as a school.
Collaboration that enhances the whole. The aim is to convince the Henderson’s
Relish Company to make a one off batch of Henderson’s Relish
with a re-designed label celebrating 100 years of the school specifically
for the bar.

Construction & Consumption.
The bar consists only of two materials; the Henderson’s Relish
bottles and the bar form made of laser cut silicone rubber. The bottles
are inserted into the numerous cavities of the bar form and the resulting
rigidity allows the bar to ‘inflate’ into the desired shape. The bottles
become the structure of the bar, with the silicone defining the shape,
holding the bottles in place. Cedric Price promotes the notion of construction
that acknowledges it’s own redundancy. This is an important
concept of knowing when an intervention fulfills its own function and
then ‘self-destructs’, leaving only a trace of the service it provided. With
this in mind, the entire batch of the special 100th Anniversary Henderson’s
Relish will be given to everyone in the school; staff, students,
friends, family, whatever after the main event. The bar ‘dissolves’ and
is quite literally consumed by it’s users. Design. Construction.
Event. Consumption. Of course, the form can then be filled back up
with similar sized/empty Henderson’s bottles and be reused for different
events, or as an attractive screen in the studios.

Sustainability.
Sustainability isn’t just about new technologies and new
systems; we have a social responsibility to build sourcing local materials
and local labour. The Henderson’s Relish factory is literally 500 meters
away from the Arts Tower.

Meeting with Grow Sheffield

14.01.08 | 1500hrs | Grow Sheffield HQ | Heeley | Sheffield

So yesterday I was invited to go round Grow Sheffield HQ for a discussion about the Abundance project. I met up with Anne Marie Culhane and her husband Jo, with Stephen Watts (co-coordinator of Abundance).

The topics of discussion were many and varied with a vague focus on all aspects of everything to do with the Abundance Project for 2008. After showing the Pantry drawing* to Stephen, Anne-Marie and Jo, discussion turned to the complexity of storing fruit correctly. The key points were:

• Single layer box stacking: This entails shallow crates where only a single layer of fruit can be placed. This allows checking the fruit for signs of decomposition much easier, as it is a labour intensive process.
• Cool temperatures: About 10 degrees is ideal, but it depends on the variety.
• Seperations: Crucially, consecutive waves of harvesting need to be managed consistently, for example Month 1 harvesting needs to be different from Month 2. As a general rule of thumb, the longer the fruit is left on the tree, the longer it will store. In addition, the numerous varieties (‘around 30 in Sheffield’) also need to be catered for.
• Juicing: Abundance aims to ‘juice’ roughly half of their harvested yield. Half of which again will be devoted to producing cider (I tried some, it was *very* dry).
• Checking for rot: This is especially important if being redistributed to the public. The fruits need to look perfect on the day(s) of distribution.

Incidentally, when asked about the nature of last years storage, lack of dedicated storage resources meant that much of the fruit was stored in the front room. Table drawers were good for storing fruit. The discussion also focused on other kinds of storage constructions, from acquiring warehouse space to converting pre-fabricated sheds to house the crate drawers.

*Curiously, Jo brought me a copy of a book with table projects in it.  It was none other than Studio 6’s Interdependence document from last year.  Small world!

Key points on harvesting fruit:

• Correct pruning during the winter months in the lead up to spring allows the tree to yield better quality fruit.
• Fruit picking devices: Due to the large variation in trees that yield fruit, there are several methods for picking fruit. There are:
  • Using a harvesting rod: Devices vary but are expensive for what they are. They are essentially a grabbing mechanism attached to a telescopic rod. A wind sock allows the fruit to tumble to the crate/basket. The main problem with the design is making sure that the fruit is not bruised at the collection point. Suggestion: Look into making rods for volunteers using recycled materials.
  • Hand picking: Self explanatory, however the point must be made that although preferable, this is the least practical method of picking fruit. A sack of some sort is slung on the volunteer where the fruit is deposited. These are on the back, with a rigid ring keeping the sack open. I made a suggestion to switch this to having the sack across the front to make picking easier. A natural material with the Abundance logo could work here.
  • Shake: Shaking the tree vigorously has the fastest results but increases the risk of bruising, fruit falls onto a large piece of tarp held by volunteers at the bottom. Suggestions: Attaching the tarp to varying levels in the tree which can be easily tied up and carried back down by the volunteer. Allows an impromptu picnic to occur.

• Harvesting occurs on a weekly basis, with a distribution day the following day. Last years Abundance project had collection on Thursday with a redistribution on Friday, over a period of 8 weeks.
• Suggested drawing: A generic fruit tree with the ways of correctly harvesting fruit illustrated for new volunteers.

Organising this years project:

• Abundance identity logo already existing but education and awareness needs to occur long before harvest season. With this in mind, some flyers with vague but provocative statements need to be produced, such as Food Miles for an apple from Waitrose vs. Abundance.
• Approaching Abundance, not from a ‘pointing out the problems’ ethos, but rather celebrating local food.
• With this in mind, a more organised calender needs to be implemented for awareness and the call for volunteers etc. – possible tie in with the numerous cultural events in Sheffield during the summer and autumn period. Proposing a calender of events that revive old seasonal celebrations in agriculture now lost in todays urban conditio.
• Mapping the fruit trees. SW and JL to go out an map fruit trees. Given the scale of the gargantuan amount of trees involved, mapping will only occur in a 2 mile strip to begin with. SW to prioritise grades of trees (i.e ones that are easy to harvest, or have the best fruit etc.) before committing to maps. Sites for project to be identified during this exercise.
• After harvest: Capitalising on making the most of turning excess fruit into product.

AMC mentioned that she would like space to administer all the food growing projects in a small office space. Could this be integrated into a design project?

Correspondence [1]

From my continuing email correspondence with David Mason, an international authority on Urban Agriculture;

***

from Jordan J. Lloyd <jordan.lloyd@gmail.com>
to dwmason@bigpond.com,
date Dec 31, 2007 2:06 PM
subject RE: Systematic Representation of Urban Agriculture

Hi David,
My name is Jordan Lloyd and I am a masters student in Architecture at the University of Sheffield in the UK. My interest for the forthcoming academic year is the interdependence of food and I am collaborating with several organic food growing collectives locally. To give me a greater depth of understanding of the issues from an architectural point of view, my research has led me to your Churchill report. I found your systematic representation of urban agriculture very interesting, and I have taken the liberty of redrawing it (I hope you don’t mind) in a way I hope my fellow collaborators will find useful. If you wish me to add any additional information such as the specific sources of information please let me know. With your permission, I hope to send the drawing to www.visualcomplexity.com, an excellent resource that maps all kinds of data. Please enjoy!

Best wishes,
Jordan Lloyd

***

from David Mason <dwmason@bigpond.com>
to Jordan J. Lloyd” <jordan.lloyd@gmail.com>,
date Jan 1, 2008 12:27 AM
subject Re: Systematic Representation of Urban Agriculture

Hi Jordan,
Your email was the first I opened in 2008 – a great way to start the new year and I take it as a very positive omen. I like your representation of my urban agriculture mind map and I look forward to seeing it on the ‘visual complexity’ web site. I regard urban agriculture as the new frontier. We have conquered virtually everything on earth. It is now time to go back to the centres of our civilisation – our cities – and remold them to cater for the third leg of our basic survival requirements – food – the others being shelter and water, all standing on the foundation stone of ecological and human health. In 2005 I initiated and co-wrote a paper titled ‘Urban Agriculture – the new frontier’. If interested you can Google it.

Good luck with your project and lets keep in touch. Comparatively I am an old (but still young) ‘bloke’ with 42 years experience in agriculture in Australia and the Developing World starting out as a Jackaroo on a 64,000 acre farm in NW NSW in 1966. Many of the food producing areas I am associated with now are only a couple of acres or less. I am sure I can learn a lot from you and your young friends/colleagues and I will follow your blog and asssociated networks with interest.

Best wishes,
David

***
from Jordan J. Lloyd <jordan.lloyd@gmail.com>
to David Mason <dwmason@bigpond.com>,
date Jan 1, 2008 12:15 PM
subject Re: Systematic Representation of Urban Agriculture

Happy New Year David,

I am pleased that you liked the drawing, and I have now submitted it to the Visual Complexity website, so we will see what happens! Thank you for the link to your Frontiers paper, I have read it once through and I am shocked at the statistic of food being resourced within 20 km of homes would save £2.1 billion. This is indeed good news for supporting locally grown food. However, my question is this: If everyone were to switch to locally produced food (or supermarkets were to actually take social responsibility and stock local produce), then who loses out? My guess is developing nations (particularly Africa from one of your pie charts) would be losing a valuable source of their national income. In your experience, what strategies would there for (financial) damage limitation for the global farmers potentially losing out?

I suppose I should fill you in a little more about where I stand; My project runs until about June this year. At the Sheffield School of Architecture, I suppose the ethos instilled in all students is social responsibility for our actions and seeing things beyond producing building information (after all, building things is actually pretty unsustainable!). My studio group in particular is interested in two themes, interdependence (in my case, of food) and the idea of provisional construction ( http://jaylloyd.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/what-is-provisional-construction/).

At the beginning of every academic year, all masters students take part in a 6 week program called a live project, essentially a real project dealing with real clients, with a real time scale and budget. So for example, one group looked into using urine as a binder for mud bricks, the application being for building semi permanent shelters in areas such as Dafur where water is scarce. Another group erected a small shelter in the middle of Sheffield fabricated from recycled construction waste. (More: http://01liveproject07.wordpress.com/ and associated links)

I have decided to make my studio project a year long ‘live project’ as it were by involving myself with local food growers, as I feel the issue of food is not going to have the desired result if I designed in isolation. There are several collectives in Sheffield, as well as several food cooperatives/retail outlets, who are all connected in a social/specialised network. The umbrella collective that posts all things food related in Sheffield can be found at http://www.growsheffield.com/

As I cannot possibly tackle such a large issue in one project, I will focus my efforts working with one particular collective, called Abundance Project. Essentially, there are hundreds of fruit trees in Sheffield. Volunteers ask the necessary permissions and harvest all the fruit from all the known fruit trees in Sheffield, and then redistribute them to the public for free (in the city center). The remaining fruit in theory is then processed into food products such as jam/cider/whatever. The project is keen to expand on the success of last years harvest, and there is substantial interest to franchise the idea to other cities. My involvement is to essentially help implement strategies and events from a creative point of view, in addition to coming up with some small provisional constructions to help with the process, such as storage (and probably fabricating a horse driven cart for next years project). The initial task is to draw a fruit map of Sheffield based on the data one of the guys has collected over several years.

http://www.growsheffield.com/pages/groShefAbund.html

Sorry to ramble on!
Jordan

PS I have attached a paper you may find of interest, Chapter 5 being of particular relevance.

***
from David Mason <dwmason@bigpond.com>
to Jordan J. Lloyd” <jordan.lloyd@gmail.com>,
date Jan 1, 2008 9:07 PM
subject Re: Systematic Representation of Urban Agriculture

Happy New Year to you as well Jordan

My response to your question in the first paragraph is ‘balance’ – a balance of local, regional and international foods. It comes down to an ethic of responsibility as a world citizen. People power is also an ingredient ie. people/communities take responsibility on how things work rather than just leaving it up to government which tend to polarised ideologies eg economic rationalism (Thatcherism/Reganism/Howardism). Communication technology developments are providing people with an increasing capacity to crystallise, disseminate and activate their ideas. It is estimated that by the middle of 2008 every second person on earth will have access to a mobile phone – this supports the concept of ‘mob rules’ – blog.futurestreetconsulting.com and www.rheingold.com. As I said in my report there is a trend in Europe and North America to a consumer driven food chain. Awareness and education is playing a large part in this and the same would apply to a food system that provides equity based on sustainability principles and practices across the local/international spectrum. One of my New Year resolutions is to develop my capacity of ‘story telling’ as a mechanism of awareness, education and change starting this year and to come to grips with technology to maximise my capacity to bring about the sustainable food system changes I (and others) seek to bring about. I am not a researcher – rather a communicator – that is why I am never the lead author in a research paper.

I note your passion – a vital ingredient for success in your venture particularly with the Abundance project. In 2000 I facilitated a project called Hawkesbury Harvest and was its foundation chair for the first 3.5 years (until I burnt out) and am currently a board member – www.hawkesburyharvest.com.au – I estimate it will be a self supporting sustainable organisation by 2010. I have attached the ‘HH Story’ with its classic drama triangle of victim, perpetrator and hero (HH) which I gave at a conference in Brisbane at the end of last year – some bedtime reading for you – you will note I am the lead author of the story.

Keep in touch – I am enjoying the conversation

Best regards,
David

The Pantry [2]

The drawing continued over a number of days, with progressively more detail being added. About half way through the drawing I realised that some sort of narrative was going to be needed, so I knocked through the wall and created another space which is suggested in the background. The figure in the visual ties together the elements in the composition; the bike, the cards. I envisage one of the volunteers has gone to the back room to get something, leaving the card game half way through on the make shift table.

Final Drawing

The Pantry [1]

In this piece, I am going from the holistic of urban agriculture as a system to the very particular. In this imaginary setting, we have been asked to look at a table in a setting that is relevant to our projects. Pre-empting the harvest this year, I have been thinking about storage without the use of building services. The dimensions within the drawing are all related – looking at the size of a wooden fruit crate to using brick coordinating sizes to span the depth of the room.

Original Sketch

Tonal Thumbnail

Sketchup Model

Basic Paintover

I did some thumbnails in the sketchbook about the type of thing that would be appropriate for fruit storage. Basically it equates to low temperature and high humidity. After looking at several scales of buildings and the kind of thing that the group *could* get hold of I settled on a refurbished stable like setting. The table is a makeshift affair made up of a spare bit of wood on top of two fruit crates. I’ll probably stick some playing cards on there as I imagine the setting is that the harvesters have popped out of the storage area for an errand leaving their game mid way through.

Urban Agriculture: The System

David W. Mason, an Urban Agricultural specialist was commissioned by the Churchill Fellowship in 2006 to make several trips overseas to attend various conferences on the increasingly political issue of Urban Agriculture and it’s role in urban communities.
Found in the appendix of his Churchill Fellow report is a systematic representation of Urban Agriculture on a holistic scale based upon his expertise in the field, redrawn here. As illustrated, there are a great deal of issues that cover a large spectrum of fields, from economics to architecture. Mr. Mason’s website is intended to be a point of reference
for anyone who is interested in Urban Agriculture, and it can be found at:
http://www.urbanagricultureworldwide.blogspot.com/

Works | Archive

I have decided to upload previous work and photographs taken on various trips. I will eventually throw on whatever I can be bothered to put up, from record sleeve artwork for various bands to random photographs. You can view the albums by clicking on the Pages > ‘Works | Archive’ link on the bottom. – Jay

Basel | October 2007	Munich | December 2006	UEL | 2006 – 2007
Digital Matte Work

Quote of the Day

“The ideal project is one where people don’t have meetings, they have lunch. The size of the team should be the size of the lunch table.”

- Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems

Studio 6 Cross Studio Review

The premise Two films synchronized together playing simultaneously. The idea was to give the rest of the school a flavour of what Studio 6 was about in 20 minutes. We tried to convey the sense of the collective group experience through the tasks that were set, which on a personal note I feel was done successfully.

General feedback Although there was a general sense of satisfaction from the audience, the main line of questioning was focused on how we would then use our collective research to influence our projects, in addition to explaining several areas of the films which were not made explicit. Explaining in further detail how the exercises have directly led on to leading project work has allowed us to explain how we have quantified our collective research whilst still retaining a sense of fun.