Check out this Agritecture bridge concept by Chetwoods architects that was the winning entry for the London Bridge competition!
Laurie Chetwood’s design for an inhabited London Bridge includes solar-powered spires housing a self-sufficient hydroponic organic farm and commercial centre taking advantage of renewable energy generation, harvesting and efficient re-use of water, solar heating and natural ventilation. The vertical farm acts as a cooling tower and powers a wind turbine. Solar heated convection heats water, and EFTE provides a solar PV skin for electricity generation.
From Chetwoods architects
The “Spiral Garden” - A Vertical Garden Made of Light Mesh Material
I was browsing through Dickson Despomier’s vertical farm blog (now moved here) and stumbled upon this simple and beautiful vertical garden concept. The structure is designed to support community agriculture practices and because of its vertical construction, could store significantly more plots than traditional gardens. I really like the circular ramp that winds up the structure because it facilitates synergy among the garden plots. Also, the ramp makes it easier to use non-mechanical equipment to transport tools and harvested plants up and down the building on wheelbarrows or carts. Although not explicitly stated by the project architects, a ramp design like this could improve water use by designing an irrigation system that flows down and around the structure through each of the plots. Finally, the ramp design and open space in the middle makes the “Spiral Garden” a singular community space for the gardeners so that they can see one another, work together, and socialize.
This is what the designers themselves had to say about the “Spiral Garden”:
We wanted to build a new environmentally-friendly town where the environment is considered as an important part of everyday life. We propose ‘spiral garden system’: a public sustainable place like a green heart, easy to maintain and self-sufficient, created by a joint population that will stimulate social interaction among neighbors. A light, spiral structure protected by a transparent and suggestive mesh, the project encourages the city to create sustainable exchange spaces in different ways. This spiral contains an ascending garden where native vegetation can coexist with urban orchards, shared and planted for the neighbors for easy maintenance and serving also as a green outdoor walk. The ‘spiral garden system’ increases social interaction between people, provides a place for exchanging natural products, and becomes a way for local residents to get involved with their neighborhood. To sum up, we propose an ecological project in a way to give sustainable change to daily city lives, where humans and nature can coexist.
From DesignBoom
I really like how they integrate community use of the plots contained as part of their design concept. Here are some technical images of the building:
The light mesh outside envelope seems to allow a lot of light into the gardens but have neither seen nor read anything about artificial lighting, something which would most certainly be required to produce yields worth investing in such a project. Here are some images of the interior of the structure:
The team also presented one image of the structure in a dense urban center. I prefer the idea of a “Spiral Garden” being placed in a park or natural area mainly because this is a community Agritecture solution, not a commercial one. If it were commercial and located in what looks like downtown Tokyo, as the image below is proposing, then it would require a lot of artificial lighting and security systems to protect it. In a park or residential area on the other hand, community gardeners could be the guardians and it would be less likely to be vandalized. Furthermore, the open mesh outside layer as it is designed (without artificial lighting) would require wide space between the “Spiral Garden” and other structures so that natural light would never be blocked.
A very cool Agritecture concept that reminds me of a less expensive, hippie version of Plantagon’s vertical farm that also uses a spiral technique. I tip my hat to the Spanish design team that came up with this creative idea for producing food in urban areas, winning them 2nd place in the iida awards 2010. Now, let’s make it happen!
The Eco-Laboratory: Pure Agritecture
Every now and then you come across a sustainable design project that really inspires. This concept agritecture project is from 2008 but has not been featured on this blog yet. This project is a perfect example of how agriculture can be integrated into our buildings and provide multiple benefits to the structure, the environment, and its residents. Besides producing crops, this building uses agritecture as part of a closed loop living building design that reuses resources and improves efficiency. Meanwhile, the building brings the inhabitants closer to the systems that sustain them.
A team from Weber Thompson won the 2008 Natural Talent Design Competition at Greenbuild with their “Eco-Laboratory”. It is a Whole Earth Catalogue of green systems, with a rainwater collection system; hydroponic garden to grown food for the community; biological wastewater treatment system to convert black water to greywater and potable water; earth tubes to funnel clean, natural air into the building through underground ducts; vertical axis wind turbines and solar panels for on-site green energy; and hydrogen fuel cells powered by methane, a byproduct of the wastewater treatment system.
Check out how passive design strategies can be used to make the most of building-integrated agriculture systems. The diagram below shows how shading is used to optimize the sunlight for the crops in this living building.
And now check out the “earth tube” below the structure which brings fresh air into the structure throughout the year (SO COOL!)
And one last picture of the exterior:
For higher quality images, check out the Agritecture Facebook Page Examples Gallery.
Plantagon is an innovative vertical farming company based in Sweden that has just broken ground on its first farm there. This is a big step forward for the company and vertical farming in general and has been reported on by many of the usual suspects: TreeHugger, Inhabitat, Archinect, and Agriculture.com. Here are some pics of the design that they are supposedly building:
A larger design of theirs:
And now the Plantagon “Helix” design:
And one more:
This company’s main focus is on constructing highly sophisticated automated systems that move crops from their infancy to harvest day upwards through the structure in order to guarantee optimal light distribution for the crops. I doubt that this rotating design can replace the need for artificial light as there is no way to evenly distribute the sunlight for all the crops which severely inhibits the feasibility of even harvests. Balanced, manageable, and predictable harvests are fundamental to the financial feasibility of dense urban farming projects because some of the founding principles for BIA are to improve food security, and urban crop profitability. Furthermore, the energy required for the mechanization that Plantagon plans to install for its systems is likely to cost copious amounts of energy.
Check out all of these inputs and outputs that they are designing!
For the moment, I will join the skeptics on this one. I just can’t seem to wrap my head around how this project will be successful in the near future. Eventually it might but for now it seems like a waste of resources when there are so many simpler solutions that they could be breaking ground on. I believe that we need to build up to vertical farms by improving the efficiency of the dense urban farming technologies that we have right now. Skipping over those development steps could prove to only worsen the environmental problems vertical farming aims to improve by using excising amounts of resources to build “utopia farms”.
I will end by saying that I do admire their perseverance and risk-taking. We need more of that from sustainable small businesses. Furthermore, Plantagon’s transparency demands respect as many VF companies are very protective of their techniques and projects. I also find their unique “companization” organizational structure fascinating and innovative. It is also interesting to note that the majority of the company itself (~80%) belongs to a New York State native American tribe. While this collaboration is unusual, it does represent a creative partnership which certainly keeps Plantagon afloat and could reap rewards for the Onondagas tribe in the long-run. To read a more critical assessment of the Plantagon vertical farming project and its partnership with “the people of the hills”, check out this article on Syracuse.com.
Plantagon has some very cool designs, mechanized systems, and is pushing the envelop in vertical farming perhaps more than any other business. I wish them the best on their new project and eagerly await the days that we can see images of the construction and eventually assess the success of the project.
