The August issue of ALIVE magazine featured the winners of the Sustainable Land Lab competition in an article titled “Land Grab.” With 20,000 vacant lots in St. Louis’s urban landscape, Washington University and the City of St. Louis joined forces in an effort to address the problem. One of the winning entries is the Bistro Box, a restaurant incubator project designed by Mackey Mitchell principal John Burse, landscape architect Jim Fetterman and Chef Ben Poremba.

Bistro Box will inject vitality into the North St. Louis neighborhood by creating a restaurant incubator built of five re-purposed shipping containers that will feature a rotating roster of chefs using local ingredients in their food preparation. You can follow Bistro Box’s progress at facebook.com/bistroboxstl.