Archinect - News

Melbourne considers the future potential of high-rise parking areas as urban farms

2023-08-17T12:17:00-04:00

Urban farms and communal spaces are among the ideas for repurposing car park floors in Melbourne’s skyscrapers in the future, when it is predicted that residents will rely more on driverless and shared electric cars. The architects of Melbourne’s tallest building, Australia 108, have created designs envisioning the transformation of the building’s 10 levels of car parking into space for a vertical farm, beehives, water collection and storage, pet care, podcast studios, co-working and education.

Downtown Melbourne's potential future scenario of widely-available self-driving cars has developers rethinking millions of square feet worth of parking garages, and vertical farms are seen as a solution (along with housing, retail, and dining options). An amendment to its planning rules that would require new parking structure designs to include their retrofitting consideration has been proposed that would add an extra layer to the pedestrian-friendly ambit that mirrors policies in Oslo, Barcelona, and other global cities.

According to The Age, a 2019 City Council survey suggests an overwhelming majority (95%) of Melbourne residents support the idea of reducing vehicle traffic in Southbank by 2030.

The new face of dystopian architecture is… China’s massive high-rise pig farm

2023-02-12T08:00:00-05:00

Inside the edifice, which resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the hogs.

A 26-story structure is, of course, the world’s tallest free-standing pig farm, according to the Times. It will be joined by a twin hog-raising center in October. The draconian forms are evocative of the measures required by China’s status as the world’s largest consumer of pork products and gaps in food production that must be hastily accounted for through such construction. (Not to instantiate that Western methods of agricultural production can't be equally heinous and unsavory by their own merits.)

As Orwell wrote, pigs are the cleverest of animals.

Get ready for a big boom in vertical farming schemes

2022-04-07T17:24:00-04:00

At a time when supply chain disruptions continue to slow distribution, consumers embrace healthy eating habits and climate change is expected to affect crop yields, a practice known as controlled-environment agriculture, including indoor vertical farms relying on artificial light and technology, is attracting venture capitalists. What made moving indoors possible was a drop in price in LED lights, which plunged as much as 94 percent in 2015 from 2008.

The increasingly popular subsegment of the agriculture industry is expected to grow into a $9.7 billion market share by 2026 propelled by expanding urban populations and a decrease in arable land associated with traditional farming, which is on track to be cut in half by midcentury. Start-ups like FARM-X and AeroFarms have been able to expand their portfolio of warehouses thanks to an influx of seed capital but may still face limitations stemming from high energy costs required to maintain high-tech sensors and lighting systems based on LED technology that has recently stalled out in terms of its theoretical maximum efficiency.

“LED’s are not going to go down much more,” an adviser to the Tennessee Department of Energy explained to the Times. “Where investors are going against physics, they are going to have a hard time.”

Savvy entrepreneurs grow fresh vegetables deep beneath London city streets

2019-09-16T14:52:00-04:00

Deep beneath the streets of Clapham, London, in a former air raid shelter, Steve Dring and his colleagues are farming. Vertical farming, that is. The company Dring co-founded, Growing Underground, is cultivating a wide range of vegetables and herbs in vertically-stacked trays in the confined space. It’s part of a growing trend in Europe and the U.S.

Marketplace visits Growing Underground, a cutting-edge vertical farm inside a converted WWII-era air raid bunker 100 feet beneath London.

"If we were growing peas out in the open, we’d have three crops a year," the company's cofounder Steve Dring tells the reporter. "Here, we get 62 crops a year because we’re precisely giving the plants exactly what they want, all year round."

View this post on Instagram Great to have @bbcbreakfast filming LIVE on the farm yesterday! Go to @bbcbreakfast for full film!! . Repost @bbcbreakfast This farm makes salad ingredients 33m under Clapham . . #growingunderground #undergroundfarm #sustainablefood #sustainability #agritech #bbcnews #sustainableliving #sustainablefarm #healthyfood #microherbs #eventbrite #microgreens #healthysalad #nutrition #foodwaste #foodies #growingundergroundtour #plantpower #health #undergroundlondon #verticalfarming #futurefood #futurecities #agritech #urbanfarming #agriculture #urbanagriculture
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Is vertical farming the future of agriculture?

2018-07-11T14:36:00-04:00

The astronomical capital costs associated with starting a large hydroponic farm (compared to field and greenhouse farming), its reliance on investor capital and yet-to-be-developed technology, and challenges around energy efficiency and environmental impact make vertical farming anything but a sure bet. And even if vertical farms do scale, there’s no clear sense of whether brand-loyal consumers, en masse, will make the switch from field-grown produce to foods grown indoors.

A look at the benefits and costs to vertical farming taking into account new technologies, the architecture and economics of production, and consumer demand. In these indoor spaces food is being grown hydroponically, meaning without soil and using artificial LED lighting. As new innovations emerge disrupting the agriculture industry, the impact of indoor farming remains open ended.

LED lighting used for an indoor farming operation. Image: Agritecture.

Fuller Challenge winner says his GreenWave 3D ocean farm concept "could feed the world"

2015-11-20T13:15:00-05:00

So Smith invented the world’s first 3D ocean farm. Not only does his model aim to reduce overfishing, but it also attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change. [...] With scalability in mind, Smith wanted his model to be simple and replicable. To that end, GreenWave supports other fish farmers to get create their own 3D ocean gardens. “If you were to take a network of our farms totaling the size of Washington state, technically you could feed the world,” Smith said.

Learn more about Bren Smith's award-winning GreenWave farming system when Archinect first announced him winning the 2015 Fuller Challenge last month: GreenWave's 3D ocean farm initiative wins the 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

GreenWave's 3D ocean farm initiative wins the 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

2015-10-22T16:04:00-04:00

The non-profit group GreenWave, which won the prestigious 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, is gaining attention for designing reportedly the world's first 3D multi-species ocean farms. Much like the group's marine-oriented initiatives, the ocean farm project aims to restore ocean ecosystems and biodiversity, and work toward a blue-green economy. Another objective is to create more jobs for coastal communities that will turn fishermen into restorative ocean farmers. Restorative aquaculture was a favorite in last year's Fuller Challenge, wherein SCAPE's "oyster-tecture" proposal scored the $100,000 grand prize.

The GreenWave ocean farms are designed as zero-input "vertical underwater gardens" that consist of layers of seaweed, scallops, and mussels that grow on floating ropes, which are stacked above oyster and clam cages. These crops enable the ocean farmers to produce food, fertilizers, animal feeds, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and other products.

A single acre of the farm would remo...

Newark's 69,000 sq ft indoor vertical farm to break ground today

2015-07-09T09:34:00-04:00

What will reportedly be the world's largest indoor vertical farm will break ground on July 9 along 212 Rome Street in Newark, New Jersey. Earlier this year, leading vertical farm commercial grower AeroFarms, the property management firm RBH Group, and their affiliates jointly announced the conversion of a former steel factory into a spankin' new 69,000 square-foot indoor vertical farm. The first phases of the project are scheduled to open later this year.

Located on a three-acre site in the heart of Newark's Ironbound district, the $30 million project will also include AeroFarms' global corporate headquarters. AeroFarms partnered with Ironbound Community Corporation to create a recruiting and job training program to boost job opportunities for the local community, which is dealing with an unemployment rate that is twice the national average.

The new vertical farm is said to be capable of growing up to 2 million pounds of baby leafy greens and herbs in a controlled and sanitary facili...

Old MacDonald had a farm (on a Toronto rooftop)

2015-06-10T14:53:00-04:00

Green roofs are nice, but rooftop farms are better. They’re the future of living architecture, say international green roof advocates who gathered in Toronto last week. [...] “We have a handful of agricultural green roofs and all of them are community projects,” like Eastdale Collegiate, Ryerson’s Engineering building and the Carrot Common, said Peck. “But we don’t have any commercial-scale agriculture on roofs — that’s the next thing.”

FARM-X shares its modular vertical farming approach, pilot project nears completion

2015-03-18T19:44:00-04:00

The vertical-farming movement continues to grow with the recent unveiling of FARM-X's modular vertical-farming concept, which the Oakland, CA-based organization developed with Zurich-based Conceptual Devices founder Antonio Scarponi and an agronomy team led by University of Bologna Professor Giorgio GianquintoI. In the most idealistic sense, the FARM-X model would maximize production of fresh food up to 5 tons per day, can be applied anywhere as one means to sustainably revive unused urban spaces, and would create more jobs to develop a "green collar workforce" of urban agricultural farmers.

FARM-X aims to construct 10,000 sq.m. (approx.110,000 sq.ft.) of total vertical farm space throughout Oakland over the next decade. For starters, a pilot run of the project is near completion nearby in Richmond, CA.

Read on for more project details that we received:

"Food has historically been grown in areas of low real-estate interest, far from densely populated settlements normally described as '...

Newark to convert steel factory into world's largest indoor vertical farm

2015-03-10T20:27:00-04:00

Next time you dig into a bowl of leafy greens, chances are they were grown in the heart of Newark, soon home to the world's largest indoor vertical farm*.

AeroFarms, a leading commercial grower for vertical farming and controlled agriculture, together with property management firm RBH Group, a slew of investment partners along with the City of Newark and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) announced the intent to redevelop a former industrial site in Newark's Ironbound district into a state-of-the art 69,000 square foot indoor vertical farm.

Putting down roots (no pun intended) in a converted steel factory located at 212 Rome Street, the $30M project will also include AeroFarms' global corporate headquarters.

Read on for some more information we've received.

Currently under construction, the first phases will open in the second half of 2015, creating approximately 78 jobs in a local community with an unemployment rate that is twice the national average. Additionally, A...

First commercial vertical farm opens in Singapore

2012-11-07T18:23:00-05:00

Singapore now has its first commercial vertical farm, which means more local options for vegetables. The technique uses aluminium towers that are as tall as nine metres, and vegetables are grown in troughs at multiple levels. The technique utilises space better -- an advantage for land-scarce Singapore.

High-tech greenhouse planned for downtown Vancouver parkade rooftop

2011-12-14T20:25:34-05:00

The inside of the greenhouse will be anything but ordinary. Four-metre-high stacks of growing trays on motorized conveyors will ferry plants up, down and around for watering, to capture the sun’s rays and then move them into position for an easy harvest. The array will produce about the same amount of produce as 6.4 hectares (16 acres) of California fields, according to Christopher Ng, chief operating officer of Valcent.

The age of flower towers

2011-10-10T20:54:39-04:00

Architects are tackling the problems of the concrete jungle with ambitious schemes using green technology to grow forests in the sky

Vertical Farming: Can Urban Agriculture Feed a Hungry World?

2011-07-25T12:18:51-04:00

Agricultural researchers believe that building indoor farms in the middle of cities could help solve the world's hunger problem. Experts say that vertical farming could feed up to 10 billion people and make agriculture independent of the weather and the need for land. There's only one snag: The urban farms need huge amounts of energy.