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Over a five-year period, the company became the largest landowner in Solano County after purchasing more than 55,000 acres of undeveloped land. The company has paid more than $800 million since 2018, according to court records. [...]
On the eastern end of Solano County, the city of Rio Vista is now surrounded by Flannery Associates land. Mayor Ronald Kott said that, like many Solano County officials, he had not been approached by anyone from the company to discuss plans for the land.
— LA Times
Similar to Marc Lore’s utopian vision for a new $400 billion Shenzhen-style city from scratch called Telosa, the secretive land grab-cum-startup city lies suspiciously close to Travis Air Force Base and is being marketed as a “new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy... View full entry
A new three-year partnership between the Royal College of Art (RCA), nonprofit Community Jameel, and the London-based former Turner Prize nominees Cooking Sections has been announced by the institution in the hopes of using architecture as a tool to advance our knowledge of agriculture-related... View full entry
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 New York Times
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
Grain elevators were once an icon of Canada’s west: often painted a bright boxcar red, they stood in towns across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. [...]
In the 1930s there were nearly 6,000 towers; now fewer than a thousand remain. The destruction, in many ways, mirrors the broader decline of rural communities in western Canada.
— The Guardian
For The Guardian, journalist Leyland Cecco on the struggle of small agricultural communities in Canada's prairie provinces to preserve their aging, wooden grain elevators as cultural heritage monuments. Restored Alberta Wheat Pool elevators at the Canadian Grain Elevator Discovery Centre in... View full entry
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
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... View full entry
This morning, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design announced Polish architect Aleksandra Jaeschke as the winner of the 2019 Wheelwright Prize. Established in 1935, the coveted $100,000 architectural grant supports travel-based research and investigative approaches to contemporary... View full entry
In one of their latest developments in Taiwan, MVRDV announced the groundbreaking of their upcoming Tainan Xinhua Fruit and Vegetable Market. Designed with LLJ Architects, the open-air wholesale produce market transforms an often-overlooked part of the food industry into a public experience... View full entry
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. — civileats.com
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
In a surprising new study, Stanford researchers have found that drought-ravaged California is sitting on top of a vast and previously unrecognized water resource, in the form of deep groundwater, residing at depths between 1,000 and nearly 10,000 feet below the surface of the state’s always thirsty Central Valley.
[...] new research could prove controversial among scientists trying to interpret what it means for a state that has battled over water, and its distribution, going back many decades.
— washingtonpost.com
Other drought-related stories in the Archinect news:California eases some drought restrictions but makes others permanentHow is water used in California?"Grassroots Cactivism," 1st place winner in Dry Futures Speculative category"Liquifying Aquifer", 1st place winner in Dry Futures Pragmatic... View full entry
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.
— Near Future
"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... View full entry
A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.
As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.
— The Guardian
"Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: 'Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.'"Related coverage:Unchecked climate change... View full entry
