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Precision Farming

Monoculture, Polyculture, Permaculture, Hyperculture
A first step away from monoculture is the move to polyculture; and then onwards to the broader
permaculture (a contraction of both “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture”).
Hyperculture goes further, as it captures the unity of agriculture and the information interface.
Satellite information networks today drive the creation of landscape. But those same satellites
guide us to view the landscape as well; to see, interpret and understand the earth itself as an
interface. We seek to operate on this dual role of the earth as interface.

In “precision farming,” GPS now guides tractors to plow and seed fields, instrumentalizing the
earth remotely and resulting in a monoculture of cornfields over thousands of acres throughout
Iowa and into several other midwestern states. This industrialized agriculture is at the expense
of so much. To begin with the ecological fallout, consider vast water usage; erosion of topsoil;
and the introduction of chemical pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers into the water table and
eventually major water bodies such as the Mississippi. It also costs us all nutritionally, as food
products and food subsidies go to the placement of corn in everything we consume – even, as
Michael Pollan has pointed out, what our cars consume.

In his Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan gets to the root of corn production through a visit to the farm
owned by George Naylor, in Greene Coutny, Iowa. For our project, we have done the same,
albeit virtually. We have chosen and “bought” a plot that is currently for sale in Greene County;
and used it to present a snapshot of what could be.

Using the same digital tools that produce straight rows of corn, we create an overlay of imagery
organized by polyculture. These images change appearance at different “zoom”s, when viewed
from above using Google Earth. At altitude +20 km, an image of a chimerical plant appears – not
a logo, but a figment composed of multiple species: wild garlic, winter rye, vetch and corn.
Zooming in closer to +2 km, each 40-acre parcel breaks into a more abstract pattern of
diversely planted rows. Closer still, the rows are tagged with information and a photo of the
crops. The Google Earth interface and earth interface unite at this moment, as satellites both
direct and mediate food production.

Project Date: 2009
Project Team: Rael San Fratello Architects: Virginia San Fratello, Ga-Ga: Jordan Gieger

Feb 05, 2010 | Categories: Precision Farming | Leave A Comment »

PRAXIS 0-10

PRAXIS: The Journal of Writing + Building, was founded in 1999 to provides an alternative means of addressing architecture, featuring work outside of the geographic and celebrity mainstream. By exploring and problematizing received conventions of architectural theory and practice—where theory functions either as generator of form or as legitimator of form—the journal strives to reconceive their relationship. Each issue of PRAXIS takes on an editorial position or theme that is then conceptualized through the graphic design and cover design of the journal.

Issue 10 Cover

PRAXIS 10, Urban Matters: The double meaning of the title “Urban Matters” refers to the relevance of urbanism for architecture and to the effect of the materials that comprise the contemporary urban condition on the city. This issue considers different means for architecture to forge an alternative to modernist and post-modernist urban paradigms through ecological, technological, topological and political design approaches.

Issue 10 Inside Cover

The cover is urbanized by a selected series of buildings featured in issues 0-10 that are converted into glyphs as a a true type font set that were then propagated on the cover to create both a field condition and image. Details of the images and their locations in past issues, as well as an exploded view of the cover is featured on the inside cover.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 10, Urban Matters Number 10, October 2008
Project Team: Cover Design: Ronald Rael; Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 9 Cover

PRAXIS 9 addresses issues of “surface” at the moment when its ubiquity in the discipline has brought it to the verge of cliché. Projects and essays reconsider surfaces as sites of performance and effect, that are articulated simultaneously through form and material.

Issue 9 Cover with laser cut perforations

Employing a similar process to the fabrication of the facade for the de Young Museum, a limited number of copies of Issue 9 were produced with 34,816 laser cut perforations. Readers who wish to fabricate their own perforated cover can download the laser ready file.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 9, Expanding Surface Number 9, October 2007
Project Team: Cover Design: Ronald Rael, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 8 Cover

PRAXIS 8, “RE: programming” reflects upon the complex, ambiguous and ultimately paradoxical set of ideas denoted by the term program. The elusive definition of program is not only because of its complex history but more importantly because of its continuous redefinition in contemporary architectural practice. A broader shift in the term program, with the emergence of computer culture, has empowered architects to see what was traditionally considered a given, as something that can be reprogrammed at will. The cover serves as a diagram for the content, or program, of the journal simultaneously denoting the amount of pages dedicated to each article within.

Issue 8 cover detail

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 8, Re: Programming Number 8, May 2006
Project Team: Cover Design: Ronald Rael, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 6 cold (left) and warm (right)

PRAXIS 6, New Technologies://New Architectures focuses on the relationship between architecture and contemporary technologies of production. The issue highlights projects that use recent developments in building systems, performance standards and fabrication methods to rethink conventional approaches to material and structure. Projects include innovative approaches to recycled or sustainable materials; building operation and conditioning; off-site assembly and fabrication; rapid prototyping; and cnc milling.

Table of Contents are revealed on the cover as it is held

The cover is the first to use thermochromic silk screen ink, which becomes opaque when cooled and transparent when warm. When warmed by the hands of the reader, the cover reveals the Table of Contents of the journal, by exposing the hidden layer behind the thermochromic ink.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 6, New Technologies-New Architectures, February 2004
Project Team: Cover Concept and Design: Ronald Rael, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Two of the hundreds of unique covers for issue 5

Issue 5 Cover

PRAXIS 5: ARCHITECTURE AFTER CAPITALISM was awarded a design award by I.D. Magazine’s 2004 Annual Design Review for the cover graphics. A typical mid-sized printing press runs thousands of test sheets to calibrate color, finish and registration every day. Frequently a single piece of test paper is printed several times with different imprints before being discarded. In April 2003, the same month the PRAXIS was printed, Garrity Printing produced a wide range of jobs including: advertising for Harrah’s Casino, brochures for Tulane Engineering School, and handbooks for the US Congress. I asked the printer for a palate of their waste for this cover of PRAXIS. Of the 5,548 usable sheets of paper, 4,000 have become PRAXIS covers. The remaining 1,548 will become waste in our own process. The paper that has become our cover had been used for over 17 different jobs, and overprinted to create several different combination

Back-inside cover of PRAXIS 5 describing the possible family of covers

Looking at the back-inside cover (last page of samples enclosed) you will see that PRAXIS has documented the 14 most common progeny of this process, so you can trace the genealogy of your cover and determine its uniqueness.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 5, Architecture after Capitalism, May 2003
Project Team: Cover Concept and Design: Ronald Rael, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 4 Cover

PRAXIS 4: LANDSCAPES offers an investigation of landscapes from the unique vantage point of the architect. Projects and essays explore overlaps between landscape, urban design, and architecture, featuring work that is simultaneously open-ended and highly constructed.

Issue 4 Cover, using static clean vinyl

Issue 4 employs static-cling as the structural method for binding the cover to the journal. Printing on the transparent film suggests the ephemerality and thickness of landscape and the half-tone pattern suggests multiple spatial and scalar readings.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 4, Landscapes, September 2002
Project Team: Cover Design: Ronald Rael, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 3 Cover

PRAXIS 3: Housing Tactic s, provides an in-depth look at innovative housing strategies across the Americas. Feature articles investigate a diverse range of subtobics: innovations which strive to use technology in the design and production of the single-family home; results of the Chicago Housing Competition; and recent housing projects by a variety of North American architects. The field condition created by a manipulation of the facade of Yerba Buena Lofts by Stanley Saitowitz demonstrates how repetition and transformation contribute to the thinking in the housing projects within.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 3, Housing Tactics, December 2001
Project Team: Cover Design: Ronald Rael, Brad Bell, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 2 Cover

The largest and fastest city on the American continent is the focus of the first of the Praxis issues dedicated to a case study on a particular city. Mexico City presents a unique opportunity to investigate issues facing all American cities including sprawl, infrastructure, transportation, and housing. A number of firms whose work is little known outside their own country are responding to these urban issues with innovative solutions, inextricably linked to the larger project of the city. The cover, entitled “Pollution” illustrates the contextual power and phenomena created by this mega-city and its re-reading through the lens of GIS data.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 2, Mexico City, March 2001
Project Team: Cover/Front and Back Matter Design: Ronald Rael, Brad Bell, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 1 Cover

If architectural practices can be said to have anything in common, it is a concern with the specifics of a project, with its details. Focusing Issue 1 on detail enabled us to pursue its definition. Just as it is often possible to understand an architectural project through its details, we propose a reading of the current state of practice through a sampling of projects. On the cover is illustrated the detailing of the graphic design by articulating the guides and bounding boxes from the layout software for the journal. At a smaller scale, details of the fonts, size, ink and image file directories are revealed.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 1, Detail: Specificity in Architecture, June 2000
Project Team: Journal Design: Ronald Rael, Brad Bell, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Issue 0 Cover

In this first issue, we consider the complex legacy of the relation between architects and universities. We chose this theme as our first, not as a typological study, but because, as the primary source of intellectual thought in our society, the university fosters a unique environment for implementing critical work. Cover 0 showcases the work of photographer Judith Turner.

Project Info: PRAXIS Issue 0, Architecture and the University, November 1999
Project Team: Journal Design: Ronald Rael, Brad Bell, Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer

Jan 29, 2010 | Categories: Praxis | Leave A Comment »

The Bay Line Video

Project Date: 2009
Project Team: Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Emily Licht, Duncan Young
Additional Project Information can be found here.

Jan 25, 2010 | Categories: The Bay Line | Leave A Comment »

WPA 2.0 Presentation Videos

Presentation delivered by Ronald Rael at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. at the WPA 2.0 Symposium. “There exists far more potential in a construction project that is estimated to cost up to $1,325.75 per linear foot.” Recognizing the high cost, limited effectiveness and unintended natural consequences of the new, multi-layered US/Mexico border wall (disruption of animal habitats, diversion of water runoff that has caused new flooding in nearby towns), this proposal names alternatives that might better combat the energy crisis, risk of death from dehydration, disruption of animal habitat, loss of vegetation, negative labor relations, missing creative vision and lack of cross-cultural appreciation likely in the government sponsored version.

Project Credits: Rael San Fratello Architects: Ronald Rael,Virginia San Fratello, Emily Licht, Plamena Milusheva, Brian Grieb, Colleen Paz, Molly Reichert

Soundtrack: Glenn Weyant/The Anta Project. Compiled from covert performances utilizing implements of mass percussion and a cello bow to play the steel wall, barbed wire fences and assorted ephemera that separates the United States from Mexico.

Jan 17, 2010 | Categories: Border Wall | Leave A Comment »

Food Archipelagos of the Sacramento River Delta (SRD)

In the next 100 years, the ocean will rise approximately 1 meter, completely inundating the nation’s most fertile region with sea water.

From left to right: SF Bay Area and SRD 2010, Projected SRD Flooding by 2110, Food Archipelagos

Dredging and the management of dredged material are an important function in the United States and the Bay area. In order to maintain channels and harbors at safe depths, periodic dredging is required. Annually, the U.S. dredges about 400 million cubic yards of material from its waterways. Of this amount, about 60 million cubic yards are placed in ocean waters and the other 340 million cubic yards are dredged in coastal and inland waters and placed in a variety of locations, including uplands, beach sites, wetlands construction sites and riverine sandbars.

In 5 years dredged material from the San Francisco Bay alone would tower exceed the height of the Trans America pyramid.

The delta consists of a myriad of small natural and man-made channels that create a system of 70 isolated lowland islands (20 feet below sea level) protected by levees. It is one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the nation, but it’s agricultural future is in danger.

Mega Terroir Food Archipelagos and Fresh Water Aqueducts 2110

By relocating dredged material to the existing islands, which is the original home of the material in the delta (and 99% similar to the existing farm soil), a new agricultural topography is created–a mega terroir–and the precious farmland continues to be productive after the inevitable seal-level rise.

Bacon Island in the Sacramento River Delta 2010

Bacon Island in the Sacramento River Delta 2050

Bacon Island in the Sacramento River Delta 2110

From the new elevated farmland a new terrior will blossom, one that also takes advantage of the ocean water. For example, farmers may elect to grow oysters and mussels in low intertidal zones, plants that are salt tolerant and may be irrigated with brackish water such as melons, may be planted sea side.

By 2110, changing agricultural practices forced by rising tides will reshape the SRD landscape.

Traditional crops and orchards will receive fresh water from a series of newly constructed aqueducts and will be planted at the upper elevation of the newly mounded archipelagos. The agri-hills will be shaped to create tidal pools and at optimal soil and solar angles for growing food, forests, accommodating wildlife and tourism.

From left to right: Pre 1850, current and projected section through Sacramento River in the delta region

Section through the agricultural biomes of the food archipelagos

Project Date: 2009
Project Team: Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Emily Licht

Jan 12, 2010 | Categories: Food Archipelagos | Leave A Comment »