A trio of New Belgium beers from their winter sampler pack. From left to right: A Belgian Dubbel, IPA, and a nicely hopped Winter Ale.
This post is a little behind but with a little work last Sunday Jen and I were able to finish a pair of sketchbooks to use for the semester. It was a great little project to get us into a mode of making for the semester. We had all the materials lying around from past projects so they cost us nothing! The paper used in the sketchbooks is a rag vellum paper and takes pencil really nicely. One book cover is made of cowhide leather (from Tandy Leather in Roseville) which we dyed a rich brown. The other is created from two 1/8″ pieces of Baltic Birch plywood and bound using a ‘coptic stitch’. They are both 10×11 inches in size which is significantly larger than the moleskin sketchbooks I normally use but is so far an interesting change and nice for drawing. Hope you like them – we do.
Our original proposal and interests described in Fish. Brew. Bamboo: An Argument for Integrated Industry, have expanded since our last post. Vaguely, we touched on how the design might influence the surrounding community, but now we are considering the opportunities for consumer and community engagement to equate in importance to an effectively operating, integrated system.
The site we have chosen is between Dowling Ave and N 36th Ave on the Mississippi River. The significance of this site to us is tied to the RiverFIRST proposal designed by Tom Leader Studio and Kennedy & Violich Architecture. RiverFIRST is “A set of inter-related design initiatives-focused on health, mobility and green economy-that function at multiple scales and are enhanced by community outreach strategies to raise public awareness about consumer choice impacts on the River system.”1 We would like to capitalize on strategies that make space at the river for the community in ways that are both industry and consumer friendly. RiverFIRST’s suggestion for our site and the immediately surrounding spaces is to locate ‘green’ industry in that area with some public amenities such as an amphitheater – possibly a potential learning space. We believe that our design will fit well within this proposal as a place that not only functions in an ecologically considerate manner, but also as a place that will welcome and encourage engagement from the community.
There is an inherent social aspect to eating and enjoying a hoppy beverage with many precedents already in Minneapolis (we visited the new “Dangerous Man Brewery in NE last night). As part of our program we have decided to include beer and seafood serving facilities in the design as a means of engaging the public at our site. In doing so we hope to give people, through our design, the opportunity to experience the weaving of industry as well as becoming aware of the practices of a locally supported system. We intend to approach this project working at multiple scales, from the three systems and their place in the RiverFIRST proposal, to seasonal changes, to opportunities at the scale of a single person. In the spirit of our “full-scale” studio we intend to explore through 1:1 scale making, speculations on these smaller scale interactions within the design.
Speculation of what the site might be within the RiverFIRST proposal. Photoshop Collage
Speculation of entering the site through barley plantings on the rail road.
A section perspective to generate ideas of how program becomes architecture.
Since our last post, we have researched the fish farming industry, looking at several variations on practices and processes. During the research we decided we would like to pursue the idea of raising saltwater fish in our fish farm. After all, the original concern was for the over fished oceans and a desire to give rest to that ecosystem. By bringing saltwater species to the mid-west for growth, we hope to cut the distribution distance required to have these varieties locally.
This image shows from where the species of saltwater fish we wish to grow come, in relation to where we are.
This image shows all of the places one can buy seafood near our site in Minneapolis.
Local Ocean, a company out of New York, is the first to successfully practice commercially viable, inland saltwater fish farming. We are excited by their work and intend to use this practice as a precedent for our own. Below is a preliminary diagram of what our process may look like – including a potential species food chain and potential useful waste products from the system. To note: unlike today’s typical fish farm, we would like to design more of a fish habitat – something a little more humane and worth viewing over something that is designed to reap the most yield from the least resources. *More on this later.
Diagramming the fish growing process.
Our Brew. and Bamboo. parts of the project have been given a fair amount of attention as well. The biggest change is that bamboo will no longer be grown in our garden. Instead, we would like to grow the ingredients to make beer – barley and hops. Not only are we looking for a new name that is as ‘catchy as Fish.Brew.Bamboo, but we are also realizing the astounding amounts of resources that go into commercial beer brewing – the numbers impressed me anyway. Again, we are using precedents of breweries that are successful and are doing things with which we are concerned. Because they so willingly give their statistics to the public, New Belgium brewing has become a model of process for what we hope could be achieved in the brewery. Based on their practices and the capacities of some of our favorite breweries, we have been able to size our brew system for programming purposes and spatial requirements and to also size the growing area we would need to produce barley and hops for this desired capacity. This is where we have found an issue. Apparently, for a 20K bbl/year output we would need over a million pounds of grain (malted barley) a year, which would require something like 600 acres of land… So we will propose that the garden grows a percentage of the specialty barley needed (these are the grains that add unique qualities to the beer). Below are the process diagrams for both beer brewing and barley and hops gardening.
Diagramming the beer brewing process – first half.
Diagramming the beer brewing process – second half.
Diagramming the process of growing and processing barley and hops.
This wraps up the catch up portion of the blog, however we still need to flesh out the expansion that the project has taken in terms of impact and necessity – what we would like the proposal to mean to the community. Watch for this post as well!
Gathering materials and beginning the making of some sketchbooks to use throughout the semester.
Titan IPA is a big, aggressively hopped India Pale Ale brewed for hop disciples. It starts out with piney hop aromas and citrus hop flavors, and finishes with a nice rich, malty sweetness that is balanced with crisp hop bitterness. Served in a 16oz goblet glass.
Tonight we are working on some fish farming research to get ourselves up to speed on species, practices, and the general process. We hope to have some information in the next few days.
david j.
jennajohansson
joha0203
Fish. Brew. Bamboo. 