Press

5/11/06

Healthy Eating by Design-view online at http://hebdbuffalo.bfn.org/

The vision for the Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo (HEbD-Buffalo) program is to raise awareness for the benefits of healthy living and to promote the integration of active lifestyles and healthy eating for children and their families.

The Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo (HEbD-Buffalo) project is designed to promote, reinforce, and facilitate healthy eating and enhance active living efforts for youth at a school on Buffalo’s East Side.

The Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP), the University at Buffalo (UB), the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC), Urbgardens, Montessori Outdoor Learning Experience (MOLE), Bennett Park Montessori Center, Native Offerings, a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, and the Lexington Co-operative Market are the primary partners forming the working group of the Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo project.

In conjunction with funding provided by an 18-month Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, the Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo project is promoting healthy eating and active living among school children through the following programs...

ACTIVITIES:

▪ FARM-TO– CAFETERIA PROGRAM

▪ FOOD & FUN WORKSHOPS  

▪ HEALTH EDUCATION IN THE CLASSROOM

▪ ART & HEALTH   

▪ CELEBRATE FOOD & FAMILY

▪ PROMOTE ACTIVE LIVING BY DESIGN  

4/20/07

Straw Greenhouse Rises on Buffalo's West Side

Purva Ghate, a graduate architecture student, squares off a bale of hay being used to construct a greenhouse for the Massachusetts Avenue Project.

Release Date

04/20/07

Contact Patricia Donovan

pdonovan@buffalo.edu

716-645-5000 ext 1414

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Contrary to the unhappy experience of the first little pig, straw bale is a strong, cost-effective, exceptionally insulating, fire-resistant, sustainable, natural building system.

University at Buffalo architecture students and community members -- cold, covered in mud and stuck with hay -- recently raised 130 50-pound "two-string" straw bales (14-inches-high by 18-inches-wide by 35-inches-long) that will constitute the load-bearing walls of a community greenhouse on Buffalo's West Side.

The greenhouse was designed and is being built for the Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP) as part of "Natural Building Systems," a graduate seminar taught by architect and engineer Kevin Connors, adjunct instructor in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, who has a deep interest in sustainable construction.

"We hadn't seen much straw-bale construction since it was used for houses in early 20th-century Nebraska, where trees were few and grass was plenty," Connors says. "Its obvious advantages, however, have helped provoke its comeback over the last 15 years or so."

In the next stage of construction, the community-student group will coat the straw-bale walls with an earth-clay plaster that will become part of the building's skin, along with a resistance coat of lime plaster.

Dave Lanfear of Bale on Bale Construction of Hamburg again will present a building demonstration for the workers on April 21. His company provides straw-bale construction services, including planning, bale raising and plastering, throughout Western New York and the northeastern United States.

The greenhouse, adjacent to MAP's community garden at 387 Massachusetts Ave., will be used by the organization for "Growing Green," an entrepreneurial program that partners garden-based businesses with neighborhood youths and trains them in sustainable urban agriculture and food systems issues.

Connors says straw bale, so useful in this instance, can be used much more frequently if architects, designers, engineers and the public become familiar with how and why it works so well. That is the educational mission of the project.

"We built the foundation and frame of the greenhouse over the past few weeks," he says, "minimizing the use of concrete with a technique called 'shallow frost-protected foundation.'"

Concrete foundations must be four feet deep in this region to accommodate ground freezing. In this case, rigid insulation was spread on the foundation, limiting the required depth of concrete to 12 inches.

"The roof and at least one wall of the greenhouse will be made of polycarbonate," Connors says, "a strong, lightweight plastic that allows the wall and ceiling to serve as a light source and permit passive solar energy to heat the building in sunny months."

The team used standard techniques to frame the roof, including fabricated steel-plate connections to allow for very rigid posts and beams.

The posts and beams were made of both standard lumber and lumber salvaged from a beautification project on Bailey Avenue. For that project, another group of Connors' students worked with the not-for-profit group Street Synergy to build a neighborhood park at the corner of Bailey Avenue and Dartmouth Street.

Although most people are completely unfamiliar with straw-bale construction, Connors, points out that such buildings are going up all over the country, particularly in the southwest.

"A bale house is being built in South Wales, N.Y.," he says, "another near Syracuse and a third, in Rochester, is being put up to give the public an opportunity to see it and to assess its cost in comparison to standard construction methods."

Connors emphasizes the fact that straw bale is as insulating as fiberglass, but is much thicker than most rolls of insulation, so it provides a stronger shield against heat and cold.

Straw-bale construction also is fire retardant. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that potential investors are encouraged to learn that plastered straw-bale walls have been proven to be a fire-safe envelope for both residential and commercial buildings. The paper noted that in recent tests, a straw-bale wall satisfactorily withstood more than two hours of 1,700-degree heat and the subsequent hose-down.

Connors says he first was exposed to straw bale at a natural building colloquium in Bath, N.Y., in 2004. Participants of the colloquium began five buildings on the site of the PeaceWeavers, an extended community of people from different cultures and spiritual practices dedicated to peace, healing and living and building in a way that has a positive impact on the earth.

"There, I learned about straw bale and found it to be a great way of building. Although most projects like this are in rural areas, I saw the greatest need for ecological building in the city."

Straw bale is not the only natural building method studied by Connors' students. During the spring 2006 semester, they collaborated with a civil engineer to test paper-crate construction, in which blocks made of compressed recycled paper are used as walls.

This semester, they experimented with cob, a particularly long-lasting mud-daub building method in which earth, sand and straw -- in this case from the Bailey Avenue site -- are mixed together and massaged onto a foundation, creating thick, long-lasting, load-bearing walls.

Connors says he is interested in helping to develop a factory cottage industry for the production of sustainable building materials this summer for the Costa Rica Sustainable Futures Program, a collaborative sustainable building project of UB, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois-Champagne-Urbana, and the Syracuse University School of Forestry and School of Architecture

UB architecture graduate students who participated in Connors' straw-bale seminar are Garrett Wyokoff, Lindsay Clark, Andrew Petrinec, Felix Lomonaco, James Teese, Jr., Susan Voelxen and David Ruperti.

Connors is a principal in Kevin Connors and Associates, a Buffalo architecture, engineering and planning firm dedicated to ecological architecture.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.

The Broadway Market Hosts Inaugural Christmas Fair

Crowds gathered at Santa's Market; Santa Clause arrived at the Broadway Market by horse drawn carriage at 10 am on Friday morning.

The day after Thanksgiving signals the official start of the holiday season. With anxious crowds mobbing retailers, and hundreds of thousands of families gathering to rejoice in the festivities, this merry time is also the busiest time of the year. While many local businesses are gearing up for the hectic season with familiar family events, the historic Broadway Market launched a new tradition this year with the introduction of its first annual Christmas Food Fair. Carol Bronnenkant, co-chairman of the event, said "the tradition of Christmas markets hosting food fairs in the month of December dates back for centuries in Europe." Bronnenkant originally got the idea of hosting one of her own from her sister who lives in Germany and told her about the fairs and how popular they are overseas. Bronnenkant thought it would be a lovely tradition to start in Buffalo and remarked "what better place to begin than the Broadway Market which has been serving the community since eighteen eighty eight."

Without a doubt, the Broadway Market has served as an integral part of the Buffalo area for well over one hundred years. With events steeped in tradition and plenty of involvement from the community, it has acted as a union for areas and neighborhoods that otherwise would not come together. Attendees of the inaugural Christmas fair reflected on the market's vital role in societal and holiday events. Tom Taylor, who runs and operates a jewelry stand within the market, commented "it is a wonderful thing what they are doing here for the Christmas season; hopefully within the next couple of years this will turn out to be as big as it is around Easter." In fact, the Broadway Market has played a significant part during that particular holiday for generations. As Carol Bronnenkant mentioned, "350,000 people come to the Broadway Market every year for Easter. It instills a real sense of tradition and gives people a true sense of community and camaraderie; invariably you will run into someone that you haven't seen in years, and it gives you such a warm, close knit feeling."

The Christmas festivities kicked off on Friday morning with the arrival of Santa Clause. The celebration continued inside with a Santa's workshop, a choir, a band, and over two dozen vendors offering a rich variety of delicacies. All volunteers at the fair welcomed guests with open arms, and their causes were as noble as they were diverse. Among the crowd, representatives from the Buffalo City Mission and Cornerstone Manor sold Christmas ornaments decorated by manor residents, Chateau Buffalo hosted a wine tasting, and members from Corpus Christi Church offered a history on their celebrated landmark. Carisma Robinson of the Massachusetts Avenue Project said that it was her first time ever vending at the Broadway Market, and she was joined at the event by two other members of her group as well as her teacher, Zoe Holloman. Holloman is the Youth Enterprise Coordinator of the Massachusetts Avenue Project; the group's goal is to teach young children the value of eating organically, as well as establish skills in entrepreneurship, and urban farming. She said that "every year the children attend the Northeast Organic Farmer's Association conference and talk to other farmers and youth groups that are active in urban agriculture and discuss trying to promote locally grown foods and how it is better for the environment and for our bodies." The active project sells its organically made products to local merchants, and in turn, the children are taught valuable life skills along the way. Especially benefitting are lower income urban areas that would otherwise be deprived of the essential nutrients and knowledge that come with the Massachusetts Avenue Project's mission.

Likewise, that is just what the Broadway Market has done for close to one hundred and twenty years; joining a plethora of groups and a rich, culturally diverse heritage, it has acted as to means to instill values and tradition to better the community. Patrons of the first ever Christmas Food Fair were jubilant, and excited to be involved in what will hopefully be a very celebrated and eagerly anticipated event for years to come. The two day celebration continues Saturday until 5 pm.

For more on the Broadway Market and the Christmas Food Fair, check out their website at http://www.christmas.broadwaymarket.com/

And for information on The Massachusetts Avenue Project, go to www.mass-ave.org.