Vertical Farms are Beautiful and Productive
July 27, 2008 · Print This Article
Imagine walking along a city street, looking up at the tall buildings around you and seeing beautiful hues of green, red, purple and other vibrant colors through glass windowpanes instead of just concrete and steel. Vertical farms wouldn’t just be a super smart way to grow local food in urban environments – they’re pretty, too. And, they’re well on their way to becoming reality.
From ecofriend:
Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact. The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.
Stringer’s office is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said. While many believe that the potential concept is being given outlandish shape and form which is both unrealistic and not probable, I’m willing for now to go ahead with the concept of all this. After seeing what I have seen take shape in Dubai, improbable structures no longer exist in my vision and I’m willing to believe that very soon I will pick my apple from the 16th floor-West Block!
These artist renderings show some of the incredible ideas being developed. Design is getting greener and smarter!
Link [ecofriend]
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these are awesome. we need to get some of these going up in cities!
I am so happy to see the reportage of this becoming more and more dominant in blogs. We ran a post about a campaign designed to leverage the propulsion of such a project in the future.
The real question is; are these are price competitive with normal field farms. If not, the market is telling us the land and resources are better applied elsewhere.
[...] crossover appeal, in political terms, is enormous. Here is a concept that will not only strike terrific blows for [...]