Urban Moss Garden

Studio 502 Spring 2019

Instructor: Andrew Saunders

University of Pennsylvania

Type: Urban Market, Individual Project

Site: Manayunk, Pennsylvania

Moss industries although has made some big money, has been unorganized and unstudied. Sometimes moss in harvested legally with permits, but most of the time moss has been illegally harvested in forests. It has a huge underground market that ranged from $5.5 million to $165 million.

Formed by city artifects from the site, a site relief was created using the logistics from Aldo Rossi’s book The Architecture of the City, to compose a moss garden. The proposed moss garden will create a regulated moss market including temperature and moisture controlled growing rooms, lab for studying moss, and public market space.

Furthermore, as the first moss garden in Philadelphia area, it will attract visitors to the area, helping bring back nature and a new flow of energy back to this declined post-industrial town.