Archinect - News

IAAC students build advanced prototype greenhouse for food and energy production

2022-03-04T12:00:00-05:00

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) has unveiled a prototype greenhouse which responds to urban food and energy needs. The Solar Greenhouse was designed and built by a team of students, professionals, and experts from the school’s Masters in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities program, and was constructed in a natural park on the outskirts of Barcelona.

Photo © Adria Goula

The greenhouse has been designed to be replicated in rural and urban areas, and potentially to populate the rooftops of urban buildings. Responding to the European Union’s zero-emission goals for 2050, the project seeks to return food and energy production to cities with a compact structure that uses solar energy, sustainable materials, and advanced urban farming technology.

Photo © Adria Goula

“The aim was to design and build a system that could be replicated in both rural and urban areas,” the team says. “Solar Greenhouse is the result of the investigation and search of new ways...

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.

The Amish men that are building America's RVs

2017-07-25T13:38:00-04:00

When most Amish men were farmers, it was common for them to work seasonally with non-Amish in town, on more traditional things like cabinet making or carpentry, or even making cigar boxes, boats and band instruments. Nolt, who conducted interviews in the late ‘90s with Amish workers in the boat-making industry, said interviewees pointed to the fact that making the wooden boats was similar to wood working.

According to Steve Nolt, Senior Scholar at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, most of the Amish men under 65 work in factories. The majority of these manufacturing plants either assemble RVS or supply parts such as cabinets or windows.

Such increased involvement of the Amish in the non-Amish workplaces has had significant and transformative consequences on their community. Northern Indiana Amish, in particular, have always had some relationship to the outside world. According to Nolt's date, 56.3 percent of men in the Nappanee settlement and 53 percent in the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement are now employed by the RV industry. How did their working patterns shift so dramatically?

The big reason, says Nolt, is what he called an “economic squeeze and demographic crisis,” a shift in the 1980s that pushed the Amish (and other farmers across the country) from the farms into the factory. By the time the 1980s Farm Crisis hit, Amish families had alre...

At the VDNKh park in Moscow, Workhaus design an educational "Urban Farm"

2017-01-25T17:29:00-05:00

Larger than the entirety of Monaco, the VDNKh is a trade show and amusement park in Moscow that houses, alongside other things, a slew of historical national pavilions and teaching spaces. Recently, an urban farm was added to the site, intended to serve as both a leisure space and an educational opportunity for children and adults. Designed by the Moscow-based studio Wowhaus, the project includes a completely new building and several pavilions set in a bucolic landscape.

The project, aptly titled “Urban Farm”, houses goats, donkeys, sheep, cows, rabbits, chickens, geese and ducks. An “orangery” is divided into three zones: one for hydroponic cultivation of herbs and vegetables, one for flowers in soil, and one for exotic plants in tubs. The spaces are designed so that they can also be used for public lectures.

Additionally, there’s a cooking school for children, a “woodland library”, a fishing area and picnic areas. The Urban Farm isn’t just about agriculture, though. The site will al...

Are "Food Computers" the key to a more sustainable future of agriculture?

2016-05-11T14:00:00-04:00

That an apple can travel over 11,500 miles from where it was grown (spending over a year in shipment and in toxic, low-oxygen storage to suspend its maturation) is the perfect object lesson of our global agricultural system’s failures. [...] And with the advent of natural-resource scarcity, flattening yields, loss of biodiversity, changing climates, environmental degradation, and booming urban populations, we’re hurtling toward its natural limit.

"What if we could build a different world? One in which anyone could farm anywhere, not just on land devastated by disaster, but in basements, skyscrapers, and abandoned subway tunnels? Or in classrooms, rooftops, and old factories?"

In this article by Caleb Harper, the Director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at MIT, he criticizes the "snarled cats-cradle of crisscrossed strings between origin and destination, shipment and storage" that constitutes today's global agricultural system.

At the Open AG Initiative, they're experimenting with hi-tech but low-impact ways to produce food, such as the “Food Computer,” a "controlled environment agriculture platform." The platform utilizes robotic control systems and plant-sensing mechanisms to produce a "precisely calibrated environment for growth."

By utilizing thirty sensing points per plant, the group believes they're creating more of a dialogue with biological systems than the dominating tendencies of conventional architecture.

The Open ...

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...

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...

Jose M. Ahedo wins the 2014 Wheelwright Prize

2014-05-21T21:07:00-04:00

Architect Jose M. Ahedo of Studio Ahedo from Barcelona was named as the 2014 recipient of the Wheelwright Prize. The competition pool started with nearly 200 applications from 46 countries and then to seven finalists who were announced in April. For its second year as an open international competition, the Harvard Graduate School of Design awards the $100,000 travel fellowship to an early-career architect whose proposal best conveys original, scholarly, and professional design.

After a second stage of deliberation, the jury selected Ahedo and his proposal, "Domesticated Grounds: Design and Domesticity Within Animal Farming Systems", which focuses on the architectural and organizational models of animal farming.

"Noting that livestock is a significant cause of land degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, social friction, and problematic development worldwide, Ahedo proposes to research a wide range of practices, from industrial operations driven by 'techno-capitalist policies' to informal or vernacular farms that have grown out of traditions. 'These two distinct production modes coexist in both developed and developing countries,' Ahedo writes in his essay, observing that neither responds adequately to the innumerable environmental and social challenges related to animal farming today."

'Self proclaimed 'world's largest urban farm' gets green light in Detroit

2013-11-01T11:41:00-04:00

In some of Detroit's most deserted and blighted neighborhoods, where residents see little more than hopeless despair, John Hantz spotted opportunity. The wealthy businessman, founder of Hantz Group, decided to purchase and convert hundreds of acres of vacant city-owned plots into farmland. It's taken five years, but this week Gov. Rick Snyder approved the sale of nearly 150 acres, 1,500 parcels, to Hantz Woodlands, a private business, for about $500,000.

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.

Beau Coop - Neiman Marcus' $100k chicken coop

2012-10-09T19:24:00-04:00

Dawn breaks. The hens descend from their bespoke Versailles-inspired Le Petit Trianon house to their playground below for a morning wing stretch. Slipping on your wellies, you start for the coop and are greeted by the pleasant clucking of your specially chosen flock and the site of the poshest hen house ever imagined.

Your custom-made multilevel dwelling features a nesting area, a "living room" for nighttime roosting, a broody room, a library filled with chicken and gardening books for visitors of the human kind, and, of course, an elegant chandelier. The environment suits them well as you notice the fresh eggs awaiting morning collection. Nearby, you pick fresh vegetables or herbs from your custom-built raised gardens. You've always fancied yourself a farmer—now thanks to Heritage Hen Farm, you're doing it in the fanciest way possible!

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.