Studio NAB has released details of their proposed Superfarm project, a six-story exercise in indoor urban farming that “focuses its production on the culture of foods with a high nutritional value.” The project is founded on the principles of pragmatic implementation, high-yielding foods, reducing health risks, promoting short circuits, reviving economies, energy self-sufficiency.
The scheme is a response to the projections that by 2050, 80% of the earth’s population will live in urban centers, demanding an area of farmland 20% more than is represented by the country of Brazil. By moving farm systems indoors, Superfarm represents an “ecological transition” that is resilient, human-sensitive, and technologically advanced.
The scheme departs from the traditional urban farm typology, often limited to salads, fruit, and vegetables, broadening its attention on the production of foods such as fish and honey. The project also seeks to recreate an ecosystem in an urban environment, including seaweed culture, beekeeping, insect farming, aquaponics, and various greenhouse and outdoor cultivations.
The scheme manifests as a thirty-four meter high, six-story building erected on water. Over six levels, the vertical farming scheme contains a variety of vehicles for production, including open soil and soilless cropping techniques, seaweed, insects, fish from aquaponics, berries, honey from hives, and plants such as Ginseng or Aloe Vera. A highly-controlled environment reduces health risks, with a ban on pesticides, and the recycling and recovery of water produced by plants’ evapotranspiration.
Embedded within the city, the scheme seeks to restore the link between producer and consumer, bringing them in closer proximity and enabling easy access to sales areas through a pedestrian footbridge. On a neighborhood scale, the scheme aims to lead to sustainable jobs and an ethical, responsible citizen contribution to the city economy. It also seeks to create a collective awareness by federating inhabitants and local partners around a common goal.
The scheme follows on from Studio NAB’s “Hololightkeeper,” resurrecting holographic technology to reinvent the lighthouse.
News via: Studio NAB
A Vision for a Self-Reliant New York
"In an era of incompetent nation states and predatory transnationals, we must ratchet up local self-reliance, and the most logical increment of organisation (and resistance) is the city." This is how Michael Sorkin, writing in Aeon Magazine, explains his hypothetical plan to radically change the landscape of New York City, bringing a green landscape and urban farming into the former concrete jungle.
