Unusual Urban Farm Appears in New York City Center

Image by: t_a_i_s

Living within the depths of a massive urban sprawl can offer excitement, diversity and sometimes chaos. It’s great most of the time but when you want to step down a gear or two and unwind, where is there to go? Unless you set off out of town it’s difficult to find anywhere that offers a chance of solitude and escape from the concrete jungle. That is, until recently.

Image by: t_a_i_s

Design collective, WORK Architecture Company, create installations within urban spaces, providing R&R areas for city folk keen to get away from it all without having to leave town.

In June this year, the creative team set up an urban farm, called Public Farm One, in the heart of New York. Large cardboard tubes were joined together to produce one large formation and suspended above a communal courtyard. The tubes were then filled with soil and fruit, vegetables and plants were grown to recreate a temporary nursery.

Urban Farm

The installation was set up to bring the qualities of the countryside into the big smoke, challenging the idea that farms should only be in the country while analyzing the relationship between urbanism and ecology.

WORK Architecture Company said:

“As cities have finally proven their superiority to their suburban counterparts – in everything from quality of life to environmental impact – they should again become our much needed laboratories of experimentation: opening our minds and senses towards better living with each other and the world.

Channeling the last utopian architectural projects about the city that examined its potential, represented its promises of liberation, and captured its pleasures – from Superstudio’s continuous monument to Koolhaas’s Exodus – Public Farm 1 (PF1) is an architectural and urban manifesto to engage play and reinvent our cities, and our world, once more.”

Public Farm One announced as the winning finalist of the Young Architects Program, run by MoMA and P.S.1.

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