ZH teamed up with producer Luckyrice, an Asian lifestyle brand whose focus is to bring awareness of Asian culture through cuisine. We built a living, educational public art installation in the form of a rice paddy in downtown Manhattan. Designed to evoke the terraced rice paddies of Asia, the sinuous wood form invites the public to engage with the planters and to investigate the rice farming practices that are on display. Located adjacent to the iconic Oculus in downtown Manhattan, the rice paddy serves to publicly showcase both urban agriculture and sustainable building practices.

Working with a very limited budget and an extremely tight timeline, we developed a scheme and followed through to fabrication within a five month period. We worked closely with Port Authority to choose a site that would maximize public exposure while maintaining a respectful distance from the WTC Memorial located just across the street.

Wanting to engage youth in the full process of growing rice, we teamed up with several local schools where students were invited to plant the seeds and tend to the sprouts in the months before the actual planting. School tours, culinary demos, and multicultural public art talks will all be part of the public programming offered to the community during the rice growing phase from June through late September, culminating in a harvest celebration where dozens of chefs will gather to create dishes that are an homage to rice.

In addition to promoting urban agriculture, ZH wanted to showcase the sustainable building practices that we use in our other projects. Teaming up with fabricators DigiFabShop and engineers Fast & Epp, we came up with a design that is comprised entirely out of sustainably harvested wood in the form of mass timber. Utilizing Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) for the horizontal support structure and Nail Laminated Timber (NLT) for the vertical wall elements, we designed the 70’ long piece in roughly 8’ modules so that it could be easily transported and assembled on site. Additionally, we anticipated that the modules would be repurposed as planter / seating units at the schools that helped grow the rice or in other public places once the installation ended.