Vertical Farms
By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers.
Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today.
Vertical farms may not be as practical as green roofs, but the idea of food being grown right in the city doesn’t get any more local than this. New York magazine asked four architects to dream up proposals for a lot on Canal Street and Work AC came up with this.
“We thought we’d bring the farm back to the city and stretch it vertically,” says Work AC co-principal Dan Wood. “We are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles (food travels),” adds his co-principal and wife Amale Andraos. Underneath is what appears to be a farmers market, selling what grows above. Artists would be commissioned to design the columns that hold it up and define the space under: “We show a Brancusi, but it could be anyone,” says Wood.
Other vertical farms like Gordon Graff’s Sky Farm is proposed for downtown Toronto’s theatre district. It’s got 58 floors, 2.7 million square feet of floor area and 8 million square feet of growing area. It can produce as much as a thousand acre farm, feeding 35 thousand people per year and providing tomatoes to throw at the latest dud at the Princess of Wales Theatre to the east, and olives for the Club District to the north. Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto.
A Columbia professor believes that converting skyscrapers into crop farms could help reduce global warming and make New York cleaner. It’s a vision straight out of Futurama where he says ” cities already have the density and infrastructure needed to support vertical farms, and super-green skyscrapers could supply not just food but energy, creating a truly self-sustaining environment, Imagine an urban highrise CSA where we just walk across the street from our highrise to the next to pick our dinner” Futurama Farming in New York
Robots tend crops that grow on floating platforms around a sea city of the future. Water from the ocean would evaporate, rise to the base of the platforms (leaving the salt behind), and feed the crops.” Wayback Machine 1984: The Future of Agriculture
Daekwon Park designed a prefab system (see photo Gallery) : “Clipping onto the exterior of existing buildings, a series of prefabricated modules serving different functions would be stacked on top of each other, adding a layer of green space for gardening, wind turbines or social uses to make new green façades and infrastructures.” Retrofitting our Skyscrapers For Food and Power
Weburbanist has great coverage of Pierre Sartoux of Atelier SOA’s vertical farm.”r. A light-shading skin wraps around the structure and opens to admit sunlight at particular locations for various functional (and aesthetic) purposes. The building’s air, heating and cooling systems are wind-driven and circulate oxygen and carbon dioxide between growing and living spaces.
The simple but reinforced structure is designed to handle additional dead loads from the weight of growing floors and also serve to make the entire building more durable (and thus sustainable). Urban Design Proposals for 3D City Farms: Sustainable, Ecological and Agricultural Skyscrapers
Advantages? As Mike from Treehugger in the Future of Agriculture says : No more use of pesticides, herbicides, oil-based fertilizers, and to give a break to a lot of land that we have been stressing for decades than as an extra food source.
The food would grow quite a bit closer to you the consumer, something that will become more important as oil prices keep rising and transportation on long distances becomes a luxury (no more kiwis from New Zealand in Canada during the winter).
As Voltaire said : “Il faut cultiver son jardin!”
Wode Paint Boudicca & Wode Scent Boudicca
So “Free and Happy”, ah? Well, you just accomplished something I’ve been trying to do for ever but somehow I get entangled in the most unexpected ways.
I liked your take on vertical farming. It reminds me of a project I did a few years back on growing plants in soil-less environments and optimizing sunlight. It looked a bit like the stacked up terraces of yours. I might I’ll try the project again.
Rossen