Harvest Green: Vertical Farm

Harvest Green: Vertical Farm by Romses Architects wins Competition
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05. 6.09
Design & Architecture

all images by Romses Architects via Designboom

Romses Architects recently won a competition held by the City of Vancouver to "to address climate change plans and to guide greener and denser development, reducing carbon emissions for the future."

It has everything. From Designboom:

The concept of 'harvest' is explored in the project through the vertical farming of vegetables, herbs, fruits, fish, egg laying chickens, and a boutique goat and sheep dairy facility. In addition, renewable energy will be harvested via green building design elements harnessing geothermal, wind and solar power. The buildings have photovoltaic glazing and incorporate small and large-scale wind turbines to turn the structure into solar and wind-farm infrastructure. In addition, vertical farming potentially adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible parts of plants and animals. Furthermore, a large rainwater cistern terminates the top of the 'harvest tower' providing on-site irrigation for the numerous indoor and outdoor crops and roof gardens.

In addition to food and energy harvesting, the proposal purposefully incorporates program uses for residential, transit, a large farmers market and supermarket, office and agricultural research and educational facilities, and food related retail/hospitality. The result will be a highly dynamic synergy of uses that compliment and support each other.

More on Vertical Farms:
Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC (roundup)
Vertical Farm in Dubai Uses Seawater
Adam Stein on Vertical Farms: "Pie in the Sky"
The Future of Farming: Vertical or Horizontal?
Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto
Mithun Architects' Vertical Farm for Seattle

Related Tags: design competitions | food | vancouver | vertical farms
Comments (17)
Cooool!
May 6, 2009 11:07 AM | flag a problem
Kelvin says:
I have read a lot about vertical farming and I think it is a great idea with some big hurdles to jump. The only issue I take with this paln is adding the animal production levels. One, PETA is going to have a fit about containing animals in small indoor space their whole lives. Two, has anyone every been to a cattle feed lot or a poultry farm? The smell is overwhelming. The supermarket is suppossed to be the level below the grazing area for cattle. I am sure people that are going to be paying a premium for their food want to shop in a store that smells like cow crap.
May 6, 2009 11:54 AM | flag a problem
Trent says:
I'm curious what the net energy and resource balance of the building will be. Will it be self-powered? That would be amazing. Will it recycle it's water, and how effectively? Compost its waste?
May 6, 2009 3:21 PM | flag a problem
Anthony says:
Wow a freaking city boy architect and his urban friends are designing a farm ..... without talking to farmers ---- I'm to stunned into stupidity to understand how they won this competition.

Environmental farms are supposed to be about function over form but this fake farm is about form over function.
May 6, 2009 6:59 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
@Trent
Well I think vertical farming for plants and agricultural crops is the future. But in terms of keeping livestock I think it's a really bad idea both ethically and logistically.

Asides from the smell, the amount of damage that would be done to the floors and living environment would be considerable and means that the livestock would have to be on the first few floors. Having them higher up would increase the cost of maintenance and would also be rather risky.

Ethically, the conditions would be abhorrent - conventional factory farms, as they are, already limit the amount of light that enters - by stacking up a few of these vertical towers you would basically be boxing in these animals - not only does this arise ethical/moral concerns but it also leads to issues in the meat that arise from stress and poor health in the animals.
May 6, 2009 10:34 PM | flag a problem
Television Spy says:
wow. . pretty sure they have a much cheaper, humane and environmentally friendly version. . it is called the family farm.

this is about as far from the right changes as we can get.
May 7, 2009 12:53 AM | flag a problem
d says:
The cross sections of available rainwater, sunlight, and grazing area are too small to support any sort of farming even close to what current intensive agriculture allows. To support even a very small population you would need huge amounts of land devoted solely to these things, which are much more expensive to produce (both ecologically and financially) than remote farmland.

Suggestions:
-drop grazing, it requires more surface area than it's worth
-don't rely on natural sunlight, if you're urban, you have the benefit of cheap electricity
-don't rely on rainwater, that's just ludicrous in most of the world
-aquaculture is generally a good return on investment (energy/calorie wise) but poultry is not
-move the whole thing 40 miles outside of the city, use a larger land footprint, and use the energy/land/tax savings to subsidize the cost of moving goods to market

It does look cute though.
May 7, 2009 3:10 AM | flag a problem
anon says:
This design is very cool. I would really like to see this in person. However, I think a project like this would be more af an art project, rather than an advance in ecological design.

What will the embodied energy be in construction? Even if this is made out of 100 percent recycled content, it will be a massive, expensive, energy-intensive project. And most likely, the number of calories produced by the food grown inside the building will never exceed the number of calories used in extracting, processing, refining, recycling, transporting, constructing, etc. this building.

Innovation is necessary and creativity is the cornerstone of the "green" movement, however, the new "green" economy has to be about a lot more than neat designs and actually make this stuff ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE. Projects like this will cost millions of dollars, keeping the elite architects and developers on top of the pyramid and not dealing with the issues of restrictive economies or growth.

Just say "no more growth" and then farm the traditional and sensical way--in the soil. It provides a lot more connection to the earth anyway.
May 11, 2009 6:05 PM | flag a problem
Chris says:
I wonder how practical it would be to build these sorts of vertical farms next to power stations and pipe the CO2 emissions directly into the building to increase the growth rates; kill two birds with one stone and all that.
May 12, 2009 1:21 AM | flag a problem
Fernando S says:
I hate to rain on your pretty ideas about being green, but a steel and concrete tower to grow food is a phenomenally stupid and wastefully ideas. It represents the worst of wooly thinking. Applying only the slightest analysis to this project reveals that nothing about it works, energy wise, cost wise, environmentally wise. It merely allows one to feel good about ruining the planet.

Applauding this misguided design undermines the value of good green design and makes us easy targets/laughing stock of the polluters. Oh, this is so kewl, when actually, even the paper it was printed on and the electricity used to display it only adds to it despicable nature.

Hard science (How far do windmills need to be separated to be effective, for instance?) will let you see the benefit, or not, of this design. I am not going to make your lazy lives any easier by giving you the answers to why this sucks so much. You must learn to think for yourselves.

OK, just one answer, 5D. That is 5 blade diameters are required between windmills, and sure as hell you can put them behind a frekkin tower as it would block, the, you know, wind.
May 12, 2009 10:40 AM | flag a problem
j.blit says:
Nothing says eco-friendly like a skyscraper. How about less-dense development, we all spread out and use fields and orchards to grow food? I can only imagine the diseases that'd run through that cow and chicken factory. BTW what happen to free-range fanfare? Is that trend over? And where does the poop go?

I think a better approach would be to liquefy our meals and plum them directly to our living units where we can suck a straw and shop for eco-fads on LED HDTVs. Why bother getting up to eat? That's just a waste of energy.
May 12, 2009 7:04 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
Sigh. Yet another design competition won by a pretty rendering.

Fantasyland designs like this make it harder for me to develop real vertical farming systems.
May 13, 2009 2:58 PM | flag a problem
brennan says:
Hey, easy now, this is just a design competition to generate ideas and stimulate progressive discussion! Also, remember that Architecture is all about site, and some of the criticisms ignore the fact that this was designed for Vancouver (in BC, Canada I presume)

Vancouver has lots of rain, so a roof-top collector and cistern is not a bad idea. Excess water could run a micro-generator as it is drained away.

Metro Vancouver has little room to farm traditionally: It is closely bordered on three sides by seawater, mountains and the US border. The arable land of the Fraser Valley goes roughly 150 km to the East and that is steadily filling up with residences and warehouses.

Because land is scarce and its economy strong-ish, land prices make horizontal farming uneconomic.

Vancouver is heavily dependent on food imported from the USA, Mexico and Asia, so any way to increase food production locally is a good one. One of these vertical farms would make one heckuva grow-op too!
May 14, 2009 3:24 PM | flag a problem
Van Car Idler says:
I can go with this as a purely axiomatic, mental exercise.
As a practical matter not so much.

But you should have included both halves of that vertical exploded diagram. It IS a cool design of consolidation, and something may come of some piece of it.
May 14, 2009 7:07 PM | flag a problem
John says:
Why don't they build it already? This sounds really cool. If it could be a profitable business, they should hop to it.
May 15, 2009 3:51 AM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
I agree that they should get started on this already. It also has the potential to save thousands of acres of farm land from being eroded from over-production.
May 15, 2009 8:39 AM | flag a problem
Fred Smilek says:
I'd have to agree with most of the other intelligent comments about how impractical this is. Lets focus on retrofitting all of the unused buildings we already have and use the valuable farmland on the outskirts of our cities as a limit to sprawl and carbon sink that they could be.

Wonder if they had a farmer on the project team?