PHILADELPHIA,
June 20, 2013

Alexandria Imbesi (right) instructs Moore students on how to install the sustainable urban garden she designed

A “self-sustaining urban oasis” designed by Alexandria Imbesi, a student in the Interior Architecture + Design graduate degree program in Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts Design, was recently implemented at Moore College of Art Design.

Imbesi’s plans for the revitalization of Moore’s south courtyard included a variety of seating options and raised gardens featuring herbs, evergreen perennials and ornamental grasses.

The sustainable design utilizes 100 percent repurposed lumber, and incorporates a downspout collector, which can be used to water the garden, and a trash/recycling station.

“I grew up on a farm and wanted to bring some of that sensibility to the city,” said Imbesi. “Growing up, it was always essential not to let things go to waste. In that spirit, I wanted to reuse as much material as possible. All of the lumber used in the courtyard was re-purposed from fencing.”

 

The installation took place on June 1 and was completed in one day. According to Imbesi, the structure was built off-site, disassembled and then reassembled on-site. Students from Moore worked with Imbesi to build and install her design.

 

Imbesi said that her experiences at Drexel were essential for preparing her for this undertaking.

“I started the construction phase of the project this spring as I was taking a construction documentation course,” said Imbesi. “I had the opportunity to apply everything I was learning to the project. I also developed a deeper understanding of just how important construction drawings are to communicating with the builders to create the final product.”

According to Debra Ruben, director of Drexel’s interior design program, “At Drexel, all Interior Architecture + Design master’s degree candidates are required to find and enter at least one competition while they are studying at Drexel. Many of our talented students win or place in competitions, but it is not often that students have the opportunity to realize their design in full scale.

“It’s very rewarding for us as faculty to see our students implementing all they are learning in the classroom to a real world project.”

Imbesi’s design was based on her winning submission for Moore’s network: Designing Green event last fall, which sought parklet – or small urban park – designs to occupy parking spaces on Race Street between 20th Street and the Parkway. The network: Designing Green event, which was hosted by The Galleries at Moore College of Art Design, welcomed the region’s emerging artists and designers at the forefront of Philadelphia’s urban design and green movements. 

Four teams of designers were chosen to construct the parklets on Race Street. In addition to Imbesi, two additional designs by Drexel students were also selected for implementation and included team members Katie McHugh and Megan Mitchell, and Missy Halberstadt, Anne Lapins, Megan Place and Kristen Stephen, all students in Drexel’s Interior Architecture + Design graduate program, as well as Seqouyah Hunter-Cuyjet, a graduate student in interior design at Moore.

News Media Contact

Alex McKechnie

News Officer, University Communications

amckechnie@drexel.edu
Phone: 215-895-2705
Mobile: 401-651-7550

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Around solstice each year, the Association of Northwest Landscape Designers (ANLD) organizes a garden tour to showcase some of their members’ best designs of the past year. For 2013, there are seven gardens, all on Portland’s west side. As always, the tour is self-guided (you receive a map and directions upon registering) and you toodle from one garden to another, admiring the layout, materials and plants and gathering ideas of your own to take home.

These tours also provide a superb opportunity to talk with the designers and homeowners about the gardens, plant choices and conditions, as well as hardscape materials and art work. Learn about the decision-making process designers go through and the solutions they adopt for problems both common and unusual. Poke around the ANLD website a bit for answers to such common questions as why hire a landscape designer and to access a list of ANLD member designers.

This year’s gardens range from modern to naturalistic, with a nod to Mediterranean and tropical plant aesthetics. Low-maintenance gardens are increasingly popular, and there are also some creative outdoor entertaining spaces. Needless to say, there are edible gardens and gardens that integrate chickens. This is Portland, after all!

If you’re considering hiring a designer for your own garden, seek out some of the designers and homeowners and talk with them about how the process works.

WHAT: 9^th Annual Designers Garden Tour
WHEN: Saturday June 22, 2013 from 10 am to 4 pm
WHERE: A self-guided tour of seven of Portland’s west side gardens
COST:  $20 per person for seven gardens. Purchase tickets. Proceeds from the sale of the tickets help fund scholarships for landscape design students at PCC and CCC.

Designers featured this year:

Vern Nelson, The Hungry Gardener; Laura Crockett, Garden Diva Designs; Lori Scott, Lori Scott Landscape Design; John Gawlista and Izzy Baptista, Lapiz Lazuli Tile and Garden Design; Debbie Brooks, Creative Garden Spaces; Adriana Berry, Plant Passion Design; and Alyse Lansing, Joy Creek Nursery.

The annual Dwell on Design show returns to Los Angeles this weekend with some familiar features: prefab houses, Airstream trailers, the latest in green cars. But we’re pleased to report the contemporary design expo has some new faces too — furniture and accessories we spotted last month while covering New York Design Week.

If you missed them the first time around, you can see the colorful stainless steel indoor-outdoor furnishings by the Salvadoran manufacturer MarkaModerna, inventive accessories by up-and-coming Norway design students, experimental furnishings in surprising materials by the Guatemala-based Fabrica, stunning blankets by Mandal Veveri and, at the end of the day, rest in a prototype of the comfortable reclining leather VAD AS chair. 

This year’s Dwell on Design Artist in Residence is Tanya Aguiñiga, who will be assembling and making furniture and accessories on site for people living in transitional housing. Attendees can join Aguiñiga and others as they repurpose and apply their craft to donated chairs, tables and blankets before donating them to shelters.

The Dwell on Design schedule also includes a Google Glass demonstration, a Twitter Wall where attendees can post and see their responses in real time, an interactive Pinterest Pavilion, a tech lounge, live cooking demonstrations and a student design gallery. The show promises the exhibition of more than 2,000 products from 400 vendors, plus 200 speakers on three stages.

Show hours: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Among the ticket options: A three-day pass is $50 to $60, a two-day pass is $30 to $40, and a one-day pass is $25 to $35. Students can get a discount.

The event takes place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa St. You can register in advance for the show and check availability of tickets for the Dwell on Design home tours.

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Near my home in Arkansas sits an old commercial greenhouse that has been vacant for years. Vines wrap and weave around and through the skeleton of the broken window frames. Every time I go by I wonder what kind of jungle-like ruins must exist inside the tangled mass of vegetation and decomposing structure. Piles of broken terra cotta pots? Coils of garden hose now lost to decomposed leaves and underbrush? The bones of a long lost gardener? The mystery!

© act_romegialli

I found myself having similar thoughts when I saw “Green Box” by Italian architects act_romegialli. While visually similar in its outward appearance, what’s nice about this design is that instead of this being another forgotten building that is slowly being taken back by nature, inside Green Box is a modern and handsome interior.

© act_romegialli

Green Box is located behind a vacation home in the Raethian Alps. It utilizes the old stone wall of an old garage with new roofing and carefully planned landscaping.

© act_romegialli

The structure is used primarily as a garden shed (!) but with an interior kitchen and ample open space, it can also be used for entertaining.

© act_romegialli

I first learned of it via Fast Co Exist, but I see now it has been featured on many design sites, including Dezeen, DesignBoom, The Rayograph, Interior Design Arcade and Inhabitat, just to name a few. When I see an idea or design featured on so many sites like this, I am always curious to about what has made it so resonate with so many people.

© act_romegialli

In this case, I think the ubiquity of the scenes of overgrowth like this make it easy to imagine having your very own wild garden shed in whatever region of the world you call home. So much in the design world is controlled and ordered that it is refreshing to see something this wild and natural, while also being so modern. It is an intriguing juxtaposition of controlled chaos on the exterior and elegantly designed simplicity inside.

While most of us won’t be fortunate enough to have a place like this of our own, I think the lesson here is to remember that good design doesn’t necessarily mean perfect symmetry or control over the elements. Sometimes letting things run a little wild can lead to beautiful results.

© act_romegialli

© act_romegialli

Anderson Gardens curator to present lecture June 20

Online Staff Report

Anderson Japanese Gardens Curator and Head of Horticulture Tim Gruner will present a lecture, “Patterns and Rhythms of Nature that Inspire Japanese Garden Design,” at 7 p.m., Thursday, June 20, at the gardens’ Visitor Center.

Gruner will present the guiding principles of Japanese garden design and how they are derived from patterns and rhythms found in nature. At their best, Japanese gardens induce the positive emotional response that one would experience in a place of natural beauty. The general pattern formed by trees growing along streams and slopes, the nature of a stream winding through a meadow and the gradual transition of the seasons marked by ephemeral blooms inform the designer of a Japanese garden. The ultimate goal of the garden is to create a place of peace, calm and tranquility that provides the opportunity for fresh and clear thought.

All lectures are free to Anderson Japanese Gardens members and are $5 for non-members. Reservations are requested and can be made by contacting Sara at (815) 316-3307 or sjohnson@andersongardens.org.

Posted June 19, 2013

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Created for an artist and photographer living in East London, the 12 square metre garden studio has been designed by Mike Dye from MDA Design. The cuboid-shaped studio’s entire surface has been left uncoated, prompting the name ‘Raw.’

Made of a new innovative waterproof MDF material, the studio’s exterior is clad in the FSC-approved Medite Tricoya 18mm MDF available with a 50-year guarantee. The material has been used to create an experimental design that hints at the workshop-style, investigative nature of the work that the space will be used for.

The robust, pared-down structure has simple detailing throughout with all screws remaining uncovered. To reduce project costs and ease construction, the windows are attached directly to the shell of the building resulting in a building without window frames.

A light-filled space is created through large expanses of transparent, highly-insulated polycarbonate material. These elements were also economical, with the project being constructed under £4,000 and within one week.

The studio is the first stage in a series of research projects initiated to test the potential of the waterproof material, with plans for MDA to create small studio spaces suitable for tropical climates.

Around solstice each year, the Association of Northwest Landscape Designers (ANLD) organizes a garden tour to showcase some of their members’ best designs of the past year. For 2013, there are seven gardens, all on Portland’s west side. As always, the tour is self-guided (you receive a map and directions upon registering) and you toodle from one garden to another, admiring the layout, materials and plants and gathering ideas of your own to take home.

These tours also provide a superb opportunity to talk with the designers and homeowners about the gardens, plant choices and conditions, as well as hardscape materials and art work. Learn about the decision-making process designers go through and the solutions they adopt for problems both common and unusual. Poke around the ANLD website a bit for answers to such common questions as why hire a landscape designer and to access a list of ANLD member designers.

This year’s gardens range from modern to naturalistic, with a nod to Mediterranean and tropical plant aesthetics. Low-maintenance gardens are increasingly popular, and there are also some creative outdoor entertaining spaces. Needless to say, there are edible gardens and gardens that integrate chickens. This is Portland, after all!

If you’re considering hiring a designer for your own garden, seek out some of the designers and homeowners and talk with them about how the process works.

WHAT: 9^th Annual Designers Garden Tour
WHEN: Saturday June 22, 2013 from 10 am to 4 pm
WHERE: A self-guided tour of seven of Portland’s west side gardens
COST:  $20 per person for seven gardens. Purchase tickets. Proceeds from the sale of the tickets help fund scholarships for landscape design students at PCC and CCC.

Designers featured this year:

Vern Nelson, The Hungry Gardener; Laura Crockett, Garden Diva Designs; Lori Scott, Lori Scott Landscape Design; John Gawlista and Izzy Baptista, Lapiz Lazuli Tile and Garden Design; Debbie Brooks, Creative Garden Spaces; Adriana Berry, Plant Passion Design; and Alyse Lansing, Joy Creek Nursery.

The month-long pop-up event from June 14 to July 14 at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California will showcase Eye of the Day’s garden pottery from around the world, including modern and classic terra cotta from Italy, rustic Greek terra cotta, California’s own Gladding McBean and French Provencal Anduze Vases. In addition to providing availability of their products in a new location, Eye of the Day has scheduled a number of demonstrations and speakers throughout the month, as well as a variety of giveaways taking place weekly.

Santa Barbara, CA (PRWEB) June 13, 2013

Saturdays, June 22, 29 and July 6 at 12:30 pm: Larry Walling of Bellissimo Architectural Finishes, will demonstrate how to re-finish old and new terra cotta and concrete pottery and fountains to look like new.

Saturday, July 6 at 2:00 pm: Jean Cross, Executive Directory of the Art League of Lincoln and Gladding McBean sculptor will present a slide show and lecture on Gladding McBean’s contribution to the Stanford University Campus.

Saturday, July 13 at 11:30 am: presentation by Stefani Bittner, co-founder of Star Apple Edible Gardens and co-author of The Beautiful Edible Garden.

Saturday, July 13 at 1:00 pm: presentation by garden designer, Rebecca Sweet, from Northern California’s Harmony in the Garden and best-selling author of “Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces”.

Sunday, July 14 at 11:30 am: presentation by garden designer and best selling author, Rebecca Sweet.

Sunday, July 14 at 12:30 pm: Julie Chai, a garden writer who was Senior Garden Editor at Sunset Magazine, will discuss Container Gardening 101.

Sunday, June 23 and Sunday at June 30,11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Pacific Horticultural Society will speak on a variety of subjects pertaining to horticulture and gardening today.

Eye of the Day Garden Design Center’s first pop-up store will be on location in the Pavilion at Stanford Shopping Center from June 14 through July 14, open between 11 am – 6 pm . The flagship retail store is located at 4620 Carpinteria Avenue in Carpinteria, California and is open every day from 10 am to 5 pm.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2013/6/prweb10829575.htm

13 June 2013
| By Allister Hayman

Garden bridge by London 2012 cauldron designer and Arup would span the Thames between Victoria Embankment and South Bank

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