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
![[ photograph ]](http://www.buffalo.edu/news/thumbnails/Strawbale1.jpg)
Purva Ghate, a graduate architecture
student, squares off a bale of hay being
used to construct a greenhouse for the
Massachusetts Avenue Project.
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.
11/24/07
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.
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