URBAN TREE FARM: A Working Landscape

location: BUFFALO, NEW YORK
size: 44 acre peninsula

Cities of the 21st century are diverse networks of conflicting and overlapping forces that can no longer be compartmentalized into zones or delineated boundaries. Architecture and landscape are often considered to be separate entities with levels of reverence for one another. Yet architecture and landscape have the potential to become merged into one entity where the territorialization of one is lost to the other. Standing as a post-industrial remnant along the Buffalo River in close proximity to the city centre; Concrete Central, an existing grain silo, sits as a monument to a forgotten era and a time when Buffalo was a prosperous city. Re-imagined as a working landscape, the existing infrastructure is transformed into an urban tree farm capitalizing on the industrial shipping connections while harnessing the untamed ecology proposing a new integrated landscape.