Archinect - News

Fostering community through multi-residential housing and rooftop urban farming

2024-07-03T19:02:00-04:00

Calgary-based studio Modern Office of Design + Architecture (MODA) — the winners of Canada's 2022 RAIC Emerging Practice Award — has completed a forward-thinking mixed-use development that combines multi-residential housing and urban farming to build community and foster social interaction.

Photo: Ema Peter

Called GROW, the project features 20 units of varying sizes, which are accompanied by a 0.6-acre rooftop urban farm. Additional green spaces come in the form of private gardens, vegetative roofs, and apiaries.

Photo: Ema Peter

The units suit a range of ages and family sizes, including small 450-square-foot studios, medium-sized 600-square-foot condos, 1.5-story lofts, and large 850-1,000 square-foot, two-story townhomes. This arrangement brings various demographics together, such as young professionals, students, and families with children.

Photo: Ema Peter

In addition, residents can come together by participating in all facets of farming, including...

CAW Architects completes Oakland urban farm project to deliver 30,000 school meals

2024-02-16T12:05:00-05:00

Palo Alto-based CAW Architects has completed a food-orientated educational project in Oakland, California. Named 'The Center,' the scheme comprises a central kitchen, culinary arts education center, and an urban farm, all designed to provide 30,000 fresh-cooked meals each day to 77 schools across Oakland.

Image credit: Bruce Damonte Photography

The project is anchored by a large outdoor court, shaded under an expansive wood trellis. Designed as a central hub to connect the kitchen, classrooms, and instructional garden, the courtyard is accessed from the classrooms by large glass roll-up doors, creating a natural circulation flow from the classrooms to the courtyard to the gardens and greenhouse.

Image credit: Bruce Damonte Photography

The classrooms include a full-service demonstration and teaching kitchen, in addition to a student education space, with intended users spanning early childhood to young adults...

SCAPE, ARO, and Colloqate design Brooklyn high school campus with a hydroponics greenhouse and outdoor teaching spaces

2023-05-05T14:40:00-04:00

A team comprising SCAPE, Architecture Research Office (ARO), and Colloqate has unveiled a vision for a high school campus in Brooklyn with anti-racism, climate action, sustainable food systems, environmental justice, and experimental learning at the heart of its curriculum. The Launch School at Floyd Bennet Field will be constructed on a former airfield along the shores of Jamaica Bay, and will see a series of connective outdoor hallways knitting together buildings and landscapes.

Image credit: SCAPE

The design of the 7-acre campus embodies a ‘learning by doing’ approach featuring a refurbished and modernized central building, an urban farm and outdoor classroom, and a harvest and sensory garden. The campus will also hold a greenhouse with hydroponics, a central community hall, and spaces for outdoor art, teaching, performance, and exploration.

Image credit: SCAPE

“Launch at Floyd Bennett Field is an unprecedented opportunity to build a world-class educational ecosystem for communitie...

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.

Snøhetta unveils new urban farm design in Hong Kong

2022-12-21T18:26:00-05:00

Snøhetta is nearing completion on a trio of clubhouse designs set in the densely populated center of Hong Kong’s Pavilia Farm residential development in Tai Wai.

As a space for social interaction and shared experiences, the project serves residents of Pavilia with a vital piece of communal infrastructure while also providing urban farming capabilities and a contemplative connection to nature in what can otherwise be considered a hyper-urban environment.

Image: New World Development

“Pavilia Farm is a project that highlights the importance of creating new green, urban neighborhoods. More people live in cities than ever before — and that trend is likely to continue to increase in the future — so we need to build in a way that can make it sustainable — both environmentally and socially,” Robert Greenwood, the Managing Director of Snøhetta Asia said in a press release.

Image: New World Development

“The Pavilia Farm and the clubhouses are small but perfect examples of how that can be don...

XZero City is Kuwait's contribution to the smart city movement

2022-09-02T12:46:00-04:00

A Dubai-based developer named URB has entered the fray of futuristic community planning in the region after publishing plans for XZero City, a pedestrian-friendly, net-zero carbon community it says will eventually grow to accommodate up to 100,000 people.

Billed as a “new paradigm in green urban living,” the car-free city will spread out over a 16-square-kilometer (6-square-mile) swath in the southern Kuwaiti desert connected by a resilient landscape which serves as the “social glue” to self-sustaining homesteaders occupying one of its initial 30,000 modular residences.

Image courtesy URB

By separating the development into different Commercial, Medical, and Educational hubs, URB says it hopes to provide a high quality of life powered by advanced renewable energy technologies, fed by biosaline agricultural produce and vertical farms, and enhanced by an equestrian track, a nature conservation center, and other attractions marketed vaguely as “edutainment.”

Image courtesy URB

An ecotour...

NYC plan to allow cannabis cultivation on public housing rooftops runs into federal hurdles

2022-04-19T17:34:00-04:00

At an April 9 panel discussion in Albany, Adams said his team was exploring whether the city could allow cannabis cultivation on the rooftops of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) facilities. The idea, he said, would be to employ NYCHA residents to staff and oversee the greenhouses as the state continues to roll out its recreational marijuana program for adults. “The jobs can come from NYCHA residents. The proceeds and education can go right into employing people right in the area.”

As part of its economic development agenda, the Adams administration has been pushing an ambitious pilot program for rooftop cultivation on federally-funded NYCHA public housing properties. The current laws, however, still classify marijuana as a controlled substance, leading to an inevitable impasse. An inbound decriminalization bill written by New York Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler could clear the way for legal grow operations on such property via an update to the federal guidelines, which a spokesperson for the mayor told Gothamist are held over from a pernicious era of public policymaking.

“[Federal] laws still on the books continue to harm the same communities that have been targeted for decades,” City Hall spokesperson Charles Lutvak explained. “The House passed legislation to this effect earlier this month, and we need those who are obstructing progress at the federal level to follow New York’s lead.”

Related on Archinect: Michael Kimmelman on some newer rays of light ...

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.”

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...

MVRDV unveils Armenian masterplan named after first human to orbit Earth

2022-01-12T10:27:00-05:00

MVRDV has unveiled its vision for a major masterplan in the Gagarin Valley in Armenia. The 34,000-hectare area is home to 11,000 people spread across several villages, with about one-third of the landscape consisting of patches of land owned by the local community. MVRDV’s masterplan seeks to make the area “more sustainable and ecological diverse” through the planting of 10,000 plant species, and 12,000 new housing units.

Farming infrastructure. Image: MVRDV

Under the plans, the existing mosaic of 10,000 existing plots will be preserved and reinforced, while the water systems will be enhanced through the addition of canals, public paths, and greenery along the network. Existing roads will continue to form a starting point for connecting the villages, with new walking and cycling infrastructure added.

Bird's eye view. Image: MVRDV

“The area is named after Yuri Gagarin, who was the first human to orbit the earth; he saw the planet’s vulnerability, a house in need of extra care, as many...

World’s first 'farmscraper' unveiled by Carlo Ratti Associati in Shenzhen

2021-08-26T12:43:00-04:00

Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a project dubbed “the world’s first farmscraper,” to be built in Shenzhen, China. The 218-meter-high, 51-story Jian Mu Tower will contain a large-scale farm system with the ability to produce crops to feed 40,000 people per year, as well as offices, a supermarket, and a food court.

CRA’s design was among the finalists for an international competition organized by leading Chinese supermarket chain Wumart, occupying the last available plot of land in Shenzhen’s Central Business District. The name of the Jian Mu Tower is derived from the mythical symbol of the “jian mu tree” which, in ancient Chinese folklore, connects heaven and earth. According to the tradition, heaven is depicted as round, while the earth is square; aspects which are echoed in the building’s form through a rectangular base gradually morphing into a tubular form as it rises.

Jian Mu Tower. Image via CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati

The scheme’s façade consists of a 10,000-square-m...

Take a look at the new urban farm coming to the Javits Center this month

2021-08-17T08:41:00-04:00

A sprawling new urban farm is coming to one unlikely New York venue this month after a $1.5 billion reinvestment into the state’s “Crown Jewel” convention hall.

The Javits Center will have some verdant new features when its renovation is officially unveiled this month thanks to an innovative, collaborative design by Stantec, tvsdesign, WXY, and Brooklyn Grange with green roofers Adaptive Green acting as contractor. The project is a joint venture of LendLease, Turner Construction, and tvsdesign, with Stantec providing the landscape architecture planning.

Image: © Chloe Barran

The existing green roof has been expanded while a new 1-acre urban farm has also been added along with a pavilion and greenhouse space that will save about 8 million gallons of stormwater annually in addition to providing fresh produce to the center’s catering and dining operations year-round.

Image: © Chloe Barran

“This expansion comes at a critical time for our city, our state and our industry and serves as a si...

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
A post sha...

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.”

They're promising us jetpacks again (and deeper basements)

2015-05-26T17:02:00-04:00

Floating cities and high rise farms are also predicted to shape Britain’s landscape for future generations, according to some of the country’s leading experts. In new research they outline the future form of the places where people will live and work. Spaceports for travel to the Moon and Mars are also expected to become a reality within the next 100 years, they say.

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...

The future of urban farming belongs to the bugs

2014-06-13T13:21:00-04:00

Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs. Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs.

Rooftop farms combine the rural and urban in future cities

2014-05-20T13:43:00-04:00

As fossil fuels become more expensive and the number of urban dwellers continues to rise, urban farming will help feed the population without increasing the cost and pollution of food transport. [...] The rise in rooftop farming isn't limited to commercial operations. "Rooftop farming and gardening has become extremely diverse, and in that sense a more 'normal' presence in cities"

Japanese Commuters Grow Veggies On Train Station Rooftops

2014-03-24T20:10:00-04:00

Rooftop farms have been established all over the world to enable growing food in dense urban areas. In Japan, a whole new kind of an urban rooftop farm was opened recently. Soradofarm is an urban agriculture project that uses the rooftops of train stations to accommodate urban gardens for waiting train passengers that want to use their transfer time to relax and train their gardening skills.

High Lines and park life: why more green isn't always greener for cities

2014-01-30T14:13:00-05:00

One obvious answer to these conundrums is increased focus on "sustainability", along with the questionable notion that because something has a lot of vegetation on it, it must be good for the environment. Accordingly, urban farms are part of this peculiar trend. As early as the mid-1980s, Prince Charles advocated turning the depopulated streets of central Liverpool into farmland, something which seemed connected to his war against modern architecture around the same time...

Forget Golf Courses: Subdivisions Draw Residents With Farms

2013-12-17T13:55:00-05:00

When you picture a housing development in the suburbs, you might imagine golf courses, swimming pools, rows of identical houses. But now, there's a new model springing up across the country that taps into the local food movement: Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity. It's called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA.

'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.

Rooftop Farms to Deal with Growing Food Crisis

2013-05-01T10:34:00-04:00

Some of the most densely populated cities across the globe are tackling population growth and food shortages by establishing more rooftop farms. Vertical farms are popping up on unused rooftops in cities across the globe and the outcome is extremely positive.

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.

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.