The fish and the plants and Santa Claus and breweries!!
June 8, 2010 1 Comment
This month’s lecture given June 2nd by John Edel, a developer (erase the ugly connotations of that word as you read on) who has a deep love for industrial building preservation. The lecture covered the history of his building, Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, located on the near south side, which he turned around from years of abuse and serious disrepair. In recent history it was the site of broken motorbikes and spare parts when it was a place called Scooter World run by wild characters with crazy nicknames who treated the building as a landfill and the neighbor’s buildings as target practice. Now John Edel and a team of several dozen volunteers and caring community members have turned it into a habitable, workable space for his tenants.
The vegetated roof’s planting pattern is a dot-matrix-inspired portrait of his daughter at 6 months, industrial process waste heat is used to preheat water for the water heater, and nearly every material in the building was salvaged from demolished sites.
Through the evolution of this 100-year-old paint warehouse, Edel has managed to breath new life into a dying shell of a building, all the while providing construction volunteers with green job training, a place for boutique manufacturing and sustainable business entrepreneurs to flourish, and integrating sustainable design and construction strategies to help the building exist for another 100 years.
The way I see it, the sustainable movement is equal parts conscientiously building or rebuilding and utilizing the waste created everyday in meaningful ways. As a midwestern girl from Southern Ohio, I see his design/construction/business paradigm being implemented in every large warehouse district standing empty in America. Rather than build a boring new building for emergent small businesses, building owners can learn from Edel’s model.
John is employing many of the same tactics incorporated in the CSMC in his new project, The Plant. Located in Chicago’s Union Stockyard, The Plant is the site of John Edel’s current project which will showcase many of the same ideals implemented in the CSMC, as well as, serve as the test site for his new aquaponic vertical farm. His overall intent seems to be to work out the kinks and figure out the smartest way to construct and manage the closed cycle of fish farming and hydroponics so the rest of us are that much closer to starting our own urban farms.
John’s projects inspire me. What a dream to take a lovely old industrial building, save it from being razed, and incorporate all the sustainable design strategies possible.
Did you attend the lecture and have something to say? Please respond or offer your reactions to his projects.
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Comments
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