Archinect - News

Studio Gang-designed agricultural education center in Brooklyn breaks ground

2024-06-07T15:22:00-04:00

Last weekend, the Studio Gang-designed Marlboro Agricultural Education Center (MAEC) broke ground in Brooklyn’s Gravesend neighborhood. The new 9,900-square-foot, $18.2 million project transforms the site of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) Marlboro Houses into an education, job training, nutrition and urban agriculture hub.

The Center is being delivered as part of the New York City Department of Design and Construction’s Design-Build program. It aims to build on efforts to strengthen food autonomy and security in underserved neighborhoods. It also strives to empower young adults in these communities to engage with local, sustainable food production.

The Center will feature a rooftop greenhouse dedicated to hydro- and aquaponics. It will also include spaces dedicated to community activities and outreach, including a teaching kitchen, a pantry where produce grown on-site will be packaged before being distributed to neighborhood residents, and a multipurpose room that wi...

MVRDV completes stunning new green-roofed wholesale market in Taiwan

2023-02-23T12:41:00-05:00

MVRDV has shared photos of its just-completed “ambitious architectural experiment” wholesale produce market project in Tainan, Taiwan.

The firm’s second foray into the country, open-air Tainan Market features a publicly-accessible green roof, punctuated at one end by an office structure, that can be further adapted for agricultural use while providing users a stepped vista onto the market floor and surrounding landscape beyond.

Image © Shephotoerd

The design team says: “Tainan Market represents an ambitious architectural experiment. Here, MVRDV reinvents the typology of the wholesale market — a building type that is usually housed in simple metal sheds — and turns it into a mixture of a market and a public green space. In doing so, the design takes an often-prosaic part of the food industry and elevates it into a place for the public to experience food and appreciate views of the landscape.”

Image © Shephotoerd

The market is ...

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.

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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A Vertical Harvest in Jackson, Wyoming

2016-05-01T23:57:00-04:00

“There’s a whole bunch of wonderful aspects of it,” Mr. Cheramy said, noting Vertical Harvest’s tall and narrow greenhouse design and its hiring of people with disabilities. “But it also makes good fiscal sense.”

Claire Martin profiles Vertical Harvest, an urban/vertical farm which will begin churning out a projected 100,000 pounds of fresh produce a year. The firm was started by Penny McBride and Nona Yehia (co-founder of the local architecture firm E/Ye Architects).

Learn more about Vertical Harvest

Istanbul’s farmers fight to keep historic urban agriculture

2016-02-09T00:48:00-05:00

If we can protect the old city walls for architectural and historical reasons, then the gardens that have existed ever since the walls were built also deserve to be protected. They are a unique, intangible heritage.

"While urban farming gains in popularity in many capitals around the world, Istanbul is struggling to keep its centuries-old farming plots due to the drive for modernisation. Dozens of farmers face being kicked off the land they have cultivated for generations."

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.”

Can urban agriculture work on a commercial scale?

2014-08-22T18:23:00-04:00

Eating food that’s grown locally and sustainably is a fantastic and increasingly popular idea, but it’s also expensive. Producers tend to drown under marketing and distribution costs, and struggle to find retail channels for their products. To assume that urban farms can escape that trap because of their extreme proximity to consumers would be a mistake; getting food to consumers has proven a logistical nightmare for them as well.

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.

Growing "Fruit Activists" and "social art"

2013-05-13T13:44:00-04:00

The decision to go with “edible art” as part of a larger park renovation, rather than a standard mural, was seen as a way to foster residents’ participation, said Karly Katona, a deputy to Mark Ridley-Thomas, the local county supervisor.

Patricia Brown highlights the work of the group Fallen Fruit, particularly their recent installation of California's first public fruit park in Del Aire, outside Los Angeles. She also outlines a growing fruit-activist movement, who use urban agriculture as a way to explore issues of public health, public space and civic engagement.