The sixth and final post on vertical architecture presented by The Rathaus is titled Aberrant Agriculture. Designed by Scott Johnson, a Masters of Architecture student at the University of Kansas, the 30-story high-rise takes a fresh, new approach to growing food in an urban environment. Aberrant Agriculture combines vertical farming, residential, hotel, and retail functions into a single, hybrid structure that is intended to be self-sufficient in regards to its carbon footprint and impact upon the environment.

While other concepts for vertical farms efficiently site their towers within the urban fabric, thus minimizing the need for food distribution through transport, Johnson’s project entirely eliminates the need for transport by processing and vending the entirety of the building’s food yield on site. The building is biomimetically influenced by the anatomical make-up of a sea cucumber. A sea cucumber’s exterior skin is structured for protection while its interior anatomy is dedicated to sustenance. They have generally flaccid exterior shells that are capable of becoming very rigid when endangered and their interior anatomy is primarily dedicated to the processing of food and reproduction. These systems are reproduced in Johnson’s project. The vertical farm is an entity in the building’s core that nourishes and provides for the hotel and residential occupants inhabiting the building’s shell who in turn react to the climatic conditions that Chicago presents them.

The agricultural core hydroponically grows 12 Power Foods, as Johnson calls them, that are known for their high concentrations of essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and protein. These foods include: citrus fruits, berries, tomatoes, onions, peppers, broccoli, spinach, sweet potatoes, eggs, black beans, garlic, and various herbs. The production of food, in accompaniment with housing, creates a different form of sustainable building than has been planned by organizations like LEED. The on-site food production creates a building that not only sustains itself but the people that inhabit it daily. Johnson does not, however, intend for the vertical farm’s yield to be the only source of sustenance for the occupants but for the yield produced to theoretically equal the annual need, in caloric intake, of the residents of the building. This system thus seeks to minimize and offset the consumption of food produced hundreds or thousands of miles away and shipped to Chicago. All excess produce will be for sale to the public in a market on the easily accessible third level of the building.

The vertical farm employs similar systems to those seen in urban farming projects by SOA Architects, William McDonough, Mithun, Gordon Graff and Dickson Despommier. Fresh water is drawn from Lake Michigan and stored in underground cisterns. Hydroponic systems pump nutrient infused water to all plants. Lighting is carefully monitored in each growing area to the specific preferences of individual crops. Humidity and room temperature are likewise adjusted for individual plants and also according to sunlight and circadian growing cycles. Ventilation is controlled separately in each growing space and is capable of drawing newly circulated air from the building’s spacious atrium. Finally, energy is produced from burning the large amounts of methane in plant waste and harvesting the steam for electricity.

An urban agriculture initiative that draws water from a local resource, in this case Lake Michigan, would make Chicago an influential precedent setter for other Great Lakes cities such as Buffalo, Detroit, Cleve­land, Toledo, Erie, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Toronto, and Duluth. Imagine traveling to the city to catch a glimpse of an agricultural environment. By creating an accessible farm at the core of a residential high-rise, residents will reestablish a relation­ship with the food they consume. People will rely on the build­ing for sustenance rather than simply for shelter and thus feel a deeper connection with the building and its occupants than with other buildings in their environments.

Proposals for hybrid buildings such as Johnson’s have the ability to transform our built environments and reinvent the cities we know. Johnson asserts that the implementation of urban agriculture, housed in towers throughout cities worldwide, is an efficient, sustainable, achiev­able, and above all, local solution to many global problems.

A pdf of the Aberrant Agriculture proposal can be downloaded here or please visit verticalfarm.com to see the new addition of Aberrant Agriculture to its site and check in on the other vertical farm designs mentioned above.

For more and higher quality images of Aberrant Agriculture please visit Johnson’s Flickr account.

posted by: s.a.johnson

Of all the active participants in the vertical farming movement, Dickson Despommier is considered by many to be the most important proponent. As a microbiologist and esteemed professor of environmental health at Columbia University, his research is proving the feasibility of vertical farming while his leadership over student projects is creating architectural precedent for hopeful future implementation.

Despommier is also the founder of VerticalFarm.com, a site created for hosting and posting new information about academic and professional explorations into urban farming, primarily in the form of towers. The site provides an increasingly complex set of essays, designs, news, links, and presentations related to the concepts Despommier is pontificating. Promoting sustainable urban environments and returning the many lands that have been turned into agricultural endeavors back to their native states is an important goal of Despommier, having changed his research interests to focus entirely on this issue.

The systems developed by Despommier are among the most ambitious to date. His towers aim for complete self-sustainability while offsetting the building’s energy use and cost of maintaining hydroponic systems. Popular Science magazine did an article and interview with Despommier which provides some insight into his efforts: “Vertical-axis wind turbines are potentially 50% more efficient and produce energy from the building’s rooftop. LED bulbs are set to light plants at specific wavelengths favored by differing species. Burning methane from 100 tons of sewage produces as many as 19 megawatts of electricity. Systems in each growing room will monitor humidity, temperature and nutrient distribution.”

Popular Science Interview

Colbert Report Interview

The images used in this post are from “The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline” project which was designed by Blake Kurasek, a graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

words by: s.a.johnson

Many people know that the Northwestern coast of the United States, with cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, is a hotbed for liberal and civically progressive initiatives when it comes to environmentalism and sustainability. And the Cascadia Region Green Building Council (GBC) is no exception. Its parent organization, the USGBC, is a non-profit organization pushing to foster interest in green building technologies in hopes that all construction will be sustainably built within a generation. These are lofty goals indeed, but with areas like Cascadia setting the example the end result does not seem so far out of reach.

The Cascadia GBC also hosts the Living Building Challenge, a project that presses architects to find new, creative and affordable ways of enhancing our built environment with sustainability in mind. A few characteristics of their ideal building include: generating all energy with renewable resources, capturing and treating all water, and operating efficiently while maximizing beauty. For projects to attain living building status they must cater to six performance areas, or Petals as they say: site, energy, materials, water, indoor quality and beauty + inspiration.

In 2007, the Center for Urban Agriculture by Seattle-based design firm Mithun won “Best of Show” at the Living Building Challenge, and for obvious reasons. It is an entirely self-sufficient urban farm that will grow both vegetables and chickens for local consumption. While its footprint occupies a mere 0.72 acres on the site, the 23-story building contains 318 one- and two-bedroom apartments and produces enough food to feed 450 people annually. The building is also sheathed in over 34,000 sq ft of south facing solar panels that will theoretically match 100 percent of the building’s energy consumption. The ground level features an organic café that will serve food grown on the site to reinforce the importance of travel-free food consumption. As famed suburban polemicist James Howard Kunstler quoted in a 2004 TED Talk, “the age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end.”

by: s.a.johnson

While a Masters of Architecture student at Waterloo University, Gordon Graff developed the concept for a 58-story agricultural tower called the Sky Farm. Its 8 million square feet of growing area, equal to over 180 acres, has the potential to provide enough food for 35,000 citizens per year. Because of the building’s large floor plates plants will be grown primarily with artificial lighting which in turn uses nearly 82 million kilowatts of power per year, equivalent to 8,000 households. However, about 50% of this need will be supplanted by burning the large amounts of methane found in plant waste which produces much less carbon dioxide than other fuels, making it a cleaner option.

The placement of this tower in Toronto, a northern city removed from the primary sources of much of its food, is ideal for an agricultural tower. Furthermore, its lakefront access to the freshwater of Lake Ontario is perfect for feeding the large hydroponic system in its growing facilities. Considering the incredible water resources provided by the Great Lakes, numerous other cities on the waters including Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Duluth could be prime candidates for establishing Sky Farms.

For information on GROW, another exciting urban farming concept by Graff, please download the available pdf here.

posted by: s.a.johnson

Three years ago, SOA Architects unveiled one of the first programmatically feasible towers in the vertical farming movement. Their proposal for a Parisian tower dedicated to agriculture proved that skyscrapers can be used for far more than just residences and  office space while still retaining a design that is both provocative and aesthetically stimulating.

The Living Tower is symbiotic in its approach, utilizing sustainable building techniques and an advanced agricultural program designed to specifically minimize the ecological footprint left by our farming practices.   Photovoltaic cells feed the building power on sunny days, a rainwater filtration system collects water to be filtered and later used by residents, black water produced by the tower is filtered and used to fertilize plants, and wind turbines also generate power using the strong currents from the roof level. All elements use natural means of convection to ventilate the building’s core in order to minimize its mechanical functions.

For a finely tuned and very detailed description of the building’s functions, program and capabilities please refer to SOA’s Living Tower Press Pack.

Info via: SOA Architects
Images via: The Vertical Farm Project
Press Pack downloadable pdf file: click here

posted by: s.a.johnson

For the last century, establishing socially conscious and sustainable urban environments has been a deeply polarizing issue within the architectural community. And though theories on the matter have been plentiful, limited action has been taken towards the actual goal. As the planet’s population climbs higher, urban centers are experiencing a swell like never before. The percentage of Earth’s occupants living in urban areas surpassed that of rural areas in 2007 for the first time in history. This mass migration towards cities has created problems with food distribution and furthered the disconnection between humans and our own food production. To combat this issue, architects all over the world are hoping to develop an agricultural tower to serve as a prototype for sustainable methods of creating and maintaining vertical farming in urban environments.

Our cities are in dire need of transformation if they wish to make it through the 21st century.
With the worldwide population growing, it is estimated that by the year 2050 nearly 80% of people will be living in urban areas. Lack of plantable land in arid climates, nutrient deficient soils from over-planting, increase in fuel prices used for transport and a scarcity of irrigation from depleted water sources are crucial problems that need to be dealt with. A new approach needs to be taken to account for and counteract these looming environmental complications which will have an especially adverse affect on the urban dwellers who live removed from any direct source of food or sustenance. The implementation of urban agriculture, housed in towers throughout cities worldwide, is an efficient, sustainable, achievable, and above all local solution to many of these problems.

In the coming days The Rathaus will be posting some of the best proposals for vertical farms created by the likes of SOA Architects, William McDonough, Gordon Graff, Dickson Despommier and Mithun. Our hopes in posting this information about the use of agricultural towers in our urban cores will heighten interest not only in vertical farming but also the radical changes in attitude needed to sustain our future cities.

by: s.a.johnson