Vertical farms are one of our favorite future-forward concepts for creating sustainable cities. Providing locally-grown produce and food will not only help us reduce our carbon emissions significantly, but also help us become healthier. Romses Architects recently came up with an amazing concept for a vertical farm in Vancouver as part of the City’s 2030 Challenge. Complete with a tower for growing fruits and vegetables, a livestock grazing plane, a boutique dairy farm, commercial space, transit lines, renewable energy and more, the Harvest Green Tower has the potential to be a food growing, energy producing, living, breathing sustainable transit hub.
The City of Vancouver has ambitious plans to become the most sustainable city in the world. This spring they held the FormShift Vancouver Competition to develop and improve the city’s livability through greener, denser developments. The Harvest Green Tower received an honorable mention in the Primary category for a mixed use primary (arterial) site along a major Vancouver street that includes a rapid transit station. Their vertical farm concept is centered around sustainable food production as well as the creation of a multi-purpose space that can house, transport, feed and entertain people.
The tower consists of interlocking tubes that grow various fruits and vegetables, house chickens and contain an aquaponic fish farm. On top of the vertical growing tower is a rainwater cistern to collect and help water all the plants and animals. At the base of the tower is a livestock grazing plain, as well as a bird habitat and boutique sheep and goat dairy facility. Underneath that is a grocery store, farmer’s market and Harvest Tower Restaurant. Renewable energy is produced from rooftop mounted wind turbines and photovoltaic glazing on the building with the additional help of geothermal heat pumps and methane generation from composting.
Not only would the tower produce local, organic food, but it would also support people with live/work units off to the side of the tower, an educational center, and a seed lab. The base of the tower features a transit hub along with an underground parking lot and shared car co-op. The tower would play an important role in the production of locally grown foods, provide urban employment opportunities and contribute sustainable density to Vancouver.
+ FormShift Vancouver
+ Romses Architects
Via Designboom
Why aren\’t the wind turbines on the top of the tower? There\’s a reason why wind turbines are on towers — there really is more and better (less turbulent) wind up there.
I think there needs to be a greater understanding in the designers’ part regarding the way these plants can be grown with agricultural systems that work hand-in-hand with the building’s mechanical systems. Most of these vertical farm designs are still conceptual and would require enormous investments. That being said, I really enjoy looking at these designs online, but I just want to see more diagrams of the agri-building systems working together. Something more than “this is where the black water gets recycled and this shaft carries grey water.” I applaud these designers for their efforts nonetheless, it will help future vertical farm architects with real projects.
i don’t fancy the idea of living with chickens & livestock and the smell they create.
What is the total number of hectares dedicated to agriculture, here, and how much food could it produce per year? That seems to be a crucial question….
Pretty, though!
Chris MacDonald
BusinessEthicsBlog.com