Snegidhi.com

Back to Home >>

Future Vertical Farms Concept

     05th August' 2009

The basic premise, as you see in this image, is to be able to grow food in urban areas by creating tall buildings where, instead of each floor having offices, each floor is in essence its own super greenhouse, where different crops can be grown to feed people within its own community. The idea is to not only be able to feed the community, but to protect the land that’s being damaged by over-farming and making sure that there will still be enough food for an ever growing population.

This model of a design is for the city of Seattle, which helps us to see how it would work. It’s integrated into a city plan so that it fits in, and has areas where people can go inside to not only tend to the plants, but could actually buy their produce at the same time.

To highlight how power might be created for all the energy needed to grow crops in urban areas, as the designs for vertical farming wouldn’t be able to provide natural light for all of the crops, so they’d need enhancement from artificial lighting. It’s one of the major criticisms of trying to have vertical farms

As you can see from this image of what the inside of the vertical farm in Seattle might look like, not only are there people who tend to the plants, and in some cases can pick their own produce, but it’s a place of beauty and tranquility that many in urban areas have to leave the city to enjoy.

In a city like New York, for instance, one could see a design like this in either lower or upper Manhattan, where they have dense populations and no land areas to grow their own products, making it expensive to get produce into the city.

This is another design for the Roosevelt Island area of New York City, built not only to be productive, and not only to help generate its own energy with a combination of solar and wind power, but can also be a popular meeting place in the city, with a supermarket, restaurant, and even kind of a virtual indoor park in the middle of the city.

This design was made for the city of Toronto, and was estimated to be able to feed around 35,000 people a year. It would be a 58 stories high, becoming the fourth highest building in the city if made, but it’s design is still sleek enough to fit in with the culture of the city. And, this gives us an idea of how the builders see different products being produced on the different levels.

This design is for a city like Dubai, where fresh water isn’t as readily available, seawater is used to cool the greenhouse and also create humidity, which not only helps the plants grow, but then produces more fresh water that can be used for not only the crops, but if produced in significant amounts could be used for the city’s water supply.

For a city like Las Vegas, which is not only landlocked but also has no true vegetation growing around it for hundreds of miles, now will be able to grow their own produce in a building like this one, which was designed as a prototype for them. This design could easily capture enough sunlight, though there would still have to be modifications to keep the temperatures down, especially in summer months.

Not all urban areas are the same around the world. However, Vertical can still take up a lot of area, and as this image shows, it can be a planned community where everything is self contained and the farm can be a mixture of internal and external, as well as retaining certain elements of a culture.

This was an idea for a vertical farm in Vancouver, which was drawn up in 2003. This idea even comes with a plan for a grazing plain and a dairy farm, right in the city. The energy for it would come from wind turbines and geothermal heat pumps.

This is the pyramid vertical farm, which has come up with the concept given by Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology at Columbia University. It’s not only a vertical farm, but a tourist attraction as well as a peaceful park of sorts.

Even designs like this could be used, where, instead of taking over land that could be used for residential or commercial space, one could build vertical farms right into the waterways, where they would still be a popular attraction.

Washington-based architectural firm Weber Thompson, is a 12-story high-rise complex that would mix residences with gardens that produce food for the local neighborhood. The firm estimates that sales of tomatoes and lettuces grown in the high-rise's hydroponic gardens could total about a million U.S. dollars a year, based on revenue minus the base production costs.

Knowing that different types of plants have different growth requirements, Oliver Foster of Queensland University of Technology designed the Vertical Farm-Type O concept. Heavy orchards grow at top carparks (foreground), which are linked to the main vertical farm via a skybridge. The bridge is encased in a skeletal-like structure for growing vines and for connecting services such as electricity. Reflective surfaces inside the 12-story building bounce sunlight to the back of the growing space.

Architect Chris Jacobs collaborated with Columbia University's Dickson Despommier to create one of the first vertical farm designs. Reminiscent of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, the concept above includes a giant rooftop solar panel that moves with the sun to capture full light.The building's windows are treated with a chemical that blocks pollutants and prevents water from beading, which maximizes the light getting in to help crops grow, according to New York magazine.

Back to Home >>