Vertical Farming..design

The Beenleigh Hills is an experimental architectural design typology integrating densified cohousing, vertical farming, solar farming and boutique agricultural fields. Sustainable design must build vertically and become part of the eco-system. An eco-system has no waste, just another resource for another system to plug into. Building vertically must expand past our traditional way of thinking about living and working, it should include growing our food which currently uses 1/5th of the Earth’s available land area. Vertical farming is the solution to feeding a growing global population and halting deforestation. Advancements in energy, robotics and low cost aeroponic modular systems are first required for vertical farming to be feasible.

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St. Louis Rooftop Garden

Mary Ostafi, an architect who founded the nonprofit Urban Harvest STL in 2011, has led an effort to dump some 40 tons of dirt on the building’s 9,000-square-foot roof and grow organic vegetables in a venture called the Food Roof Farm.

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Canada Green Roofs

The city bylaw requires green roofs to be 80 per cent covered three years after planting. If you're harvesting crops every season, the green roof is periodically naked while the new crops grow, and this breaks the law, Throness explained.

“I think the fear was that edible plants would take too much labour and water,” and the city wanted to give developers a low-maintenance solution for building green roofs, Throness said. “But we’ve been monitoring our water use and don’t require any more.”

After a pilot project in 2013, last summer the roof hosted a five-crop rotational farm that produced more than two tonnes of vegetables, she said. “We’ve found that we can grow everything here.”

The harvest is split between campus kitchens and the Gould St. farmer’s market on Wednesdays.

Ontario imports billions of dollars of produce from California each year and this supply is becoming threatened due to the state’s prolonged drought, said Throness. Rooftop agriculture adds local food security to the existing environmental benefits of green roofs.

For Peck, while rooftop farms aren’t appropriate everywhere — older buildings often can’t handle the extra weight — they’re an essential part of the future of the city.

“There are still hundreds of millions of square feet of roofs in Toronto that could still be greened,” Peck said. “We invest billions and billions of dollars on grey infrastructure. It would pay great dividends to devote a small part of that to green infrastructure.”

By the numbers:

72,020: Square metres of green roofs built in Toronto in 2014

232,000: Square metres of green roofs already in existence

185,000: Additional square metres approved.

4,984 hectares: Land area identified as the total available area for green roofs in the City of Toronto, about 8% of the total.

20 %: Minimum area that must be covered by green roof on new buildings.

2 tonnes: Amount of produce produced by a 929-square-metre farm on the roof of Ryerson University’s George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre last summer.

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Architecture and Food

Specialist Design Consultancy dedicated to developing the architecture of Building Integrated Agriculture.

We work with building owners and developers to unlock value in their sunlit roofscapes and concept designs for new-builds by developing a model of horticultural production infrastructure supplying local markets and consumers with fresh produce.

Once roofscapes are activated and relationships with their hosts are negotiated and agreed, A&f will form branches of sister company * Hyperlocal to take on the horticultural operation. We hope to eventually develop London's own indigenous, high-volume, resilient food production capacity supplying fresh produce at stable prices, free from supply-side volatility, over the long term.

Urban Agriculture is a field steadily gaining attention for its commercial and social opportunities. We believe it will be a major influence on the development of architecture and a powerful tool in urban food security, community development and climate change adaptation.

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Vertical Farming update

"If you follow architecture or design at all, you may have come across aggressively futuristic renderings of skyscrapers topped with rice paddies, or tree-shaped buildings, sprouting plant life from every orifice."

Check out the updates on what's happening with Vertical Farming here:

Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security

Titled ‘Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security: Perspectives from Switzerland and Qatar’, the day-long event will feature a series of lectures and a workshop on green roofs. 

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Vincent Callebaut Masterplan

The extensive use of trees throughout the rooftops and balconies not only beautifies the district, but aids in its self-sufficiency. These communal gardens provide residents with self-renewing sources of food, helping to locally produce the city’s necessities. Additionally, these orchards provide extraordinary environmental benefits, including CO2 filtration and harmful particulate removal, for a healthier atmosphere.

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urban architecture in the UAE

“Food is a very good barometer of how successful we are at managing our relationships with the climate, temperatures, sun, water, everything.”

Mr Rodriguez said although the use of rooftops for farming was an attractive idea, “there are fundamentals that have to be guided by a submission to the conditions”. Farming indoors could be an option to avoid the intensive heat, given the existing technology for viable production, he said.

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Value Farm

"Value Farm creates value by cultivating the land as a collective effort. The project intersects issues of urban transformation, architecture and urban agriculture with an international cultural event, and explores the possibilities of urban farming in the city and how that can integrate with community-building. It forms part of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013, within Ole Bouman’s Value Factory located at the Shekou Former Guangdong Glass Factory in Shenzhen, a site that is itself undergoing radical transformation. Responding to the Biennale’s theme of ‘Urban Border’ and Shekou’s post-industrial regeneration, Value Farm is realized as new architectural and landscape design providing permanent infrastructure for the site’s future as well as a substantial piece of performative, growing event-architecture throughout the biennale."

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Urban Farm

Nicely stated: Urban Agriculture project: "The Urban Farm Project aims to create an agricultural food hub in the heart of the city. Its story is centered on local food production, distribution and education. It is a shared vision to strengthen our city’s food strategy and bring local food issues to the forefront. The proposal’s multi-story tower and landscaped podium showcases a unique mix of programs centered on food that includes a new space for the Greater Food Bank of Vancouver, a vertical urban farm, a farmers’ market as well as academic and research spaces related to food science. In whole, it serves as an organized central hub that aims to improve local food issues such as distribution, equity and education. The synthesis and organization of this complex program and the requirements of multiple stakeholders were central to MGA’s initial work task."

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NYC - the garden

What if NYC grew all it's own food? A project by Terreform Research Group visualized just that question. These visualizations look at what the city would look like if it grew all it's own food. These questions of what urban agriculture would look like have been in the design consciousness for some time now. The argument still stands, and logistics are far from a reality, but really, can we do it, should we do it? The current model of urban and rural, suburban are not contributing to this issue.

Some questions: What are our current eating habits? How have they changed in the past 100 years? What could the next 100 years of eating habits look like? What is a gluten-free-paleo city?

What infrastructure of CSA's and community gardening efforts look like and what systems already feed into the city that could link up (ie, Amtrack, MTA, cargo ship?). Sexy images are fun to share and imagine...but that arugula sprout on 147th street?

How about a library of what can be grown, when it can be grown? Getting more specific with the food item and the diet and the climate...perhaps that could inform the new green city.
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Brooklyn Grange Farm

Brooklyn Grange is the leading rooftop farming and intensive green roofing business in the US. We operate the world’s largest rooftop soil farms, located on two roofs in New York City, and grow over 50,000 lbs of organically-cultivated produce per year. In addition to growing and distributing fresh local vegetables and herbs, Brooklyn Grange also provides urban farming and green roof consulting and installation services to clients worldwide, and we partner with numerous non-profit organizations throughout New York to promote healthy and strong local communities.

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the ‘italian pavilion

 the pavilion is organized through a series of shifting volumes that create terraces facing southwards. they encompass the gallery areas, even if serving the whole building, and are used for the cultivation of fruits and vegetables 

Via Verde, NYC

Via Verde: 'Green Building' in the Bronx with rooftop gardens and orchards...