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Spiraling Skyscraper Farms For a Future Manhattan
Mike writes "One of three finalists in this year's Evolo Skyscraper Competition, Eric Vergne's Dystopian Farm project envisions a future New York City interspersed with elegantly spiraling skyscraper farms. The biomorphic structures harness cutting-edge technology to provide the city with its own self-sustaining food source while dynamically altering the fabric of city life."
One of three finalists in this year's Evolo Skyscraper Competition, Eric Vergne's Dystopian Farm project envisions a future New York City ...
So that's what they're aiming for these days? A dystopian future? Well, at least the architects are catching on to the trend our government's been setting.
I don't know if it's Slashdotted or what but from what I can see in other sources, these are really just photoshopped images some dude made while tripping balls.
I may have been raised a dumbass farmboy but here's a few hints to architects like this guy:
I could go on for hours about how completely unrealistic this bad idea is. These pictures indicate that the architects have little to no idea of how top soil and nutrient cycles work.
There's no better way to put a million people into a square mile than skyscrapers in a city. Leave Manhattan as Manhattan and instead focus your efforts on controlling waste and returning the Northeast to massive forests (for some reason Americans love to overlook the ridiculous logging that took place here while we bitch and moan about the rain forests).
My work here is dung.
to 'eat me out of house and home!'
Any concern about the dense air pollution in NYC getting into the food? Doesn't seem like particularly "organic" food when the plants are feeding on car exhaust and cigarette smoke...
It's very pretty and all, but for all it's "I copied this from nature!" functionality he seems to have forgotten to design a way to actually harvest the crops. If you can't drive a combine harvester or a tractor around it then it's not much cop as a farm.
Unless he's suggesting we return to manual labour. In which case he's solved all our employment problems at the same time and he should be heralded as a genius.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I wonder, can you use your shuba off one of those things?
how long until a couple of Arabs fly a plane into these things?
Who exactly is going to be willing to eat produce grown in a smog cloud? I doubt people will eat that food just because it was grown in the city, so it won't really sustain the city. It is unlikely ever to be cheaper to produce food there than in foreign fields.
There's no better way to put a million people into a square mile than skyscrapers in a city. Leave Manhattan as Manhattan and instead focus your efforts on controlling waste and returning the Northeast to massive forests (for some reason Americans love to overlook the ridiculous logging that took place here while we bitch and moan about the rain forests).
I pretty much agree with everything you say, but... isn't the point of this silly exercise to be able to free up the land to go back to forests?
People seem to want to continue eating food, so... if we reforest the Eastern U.S., where does the food come from? While the stated concept may be ridiculous, the underlying idea of vertical farming (and/or hydroponics) may have some value...
The complaints of taxes on downloads in NY that were made today. NYC has had an unsustainable population since the early 1900s. From this story
Probably it had not been for the blizzard the people of the city might have ignored one for an indefinite time enduring the nuisance of electric wires dangling from poles, of slow trains running on the trestlework, and slower cars drawn by horses in the streets dangerous with their center tearing rails. Now two things tolerably certain that a system of a really rapid transit which cannot be made inoperable by storms must be straightaway devised and as speedily as possible constructed and that all the electric wires -- telegraph, telephone, fire alarms, and illuminating -- must be put underground without any delay.
At some point it will become nearly impossible to import enough food and merchandise to sustain the population of NYC as it is dispersed currently. Increasing the volume of locally produced food stuff will definitely decrease the cost of living there by some degree... if enough is produced there. Unfortunately, as the story details it, such efforts are also vulnerable to the elements if not encased inside the buildings themselves. In the terms of climate change I think this is necessarily appropriate to think of. The closer that NYC comes to being a city in a bubble, the closer we are to many science fiction themes... interesting.
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ever hear of hydroponics? plants that can be sustained by nutrient rich water, without soil?
"These organic structures will harness systems such as airoponic watering, nutrient technology and controlled lighting and CO2 levels to meet the food demands of future populations."
i never heard of airoponics, but i assume its similar to hydroponics, thus negating the need for soil. No one designs a billion dollar building without looking at everything. Im sure there will be specially made machines to harvest.
pay for the infrastructure? Those will be expensive artichokes.
Looks like something the silithid might build. I'm thinking the cenarion circle is going to ask me to go there and hack up 15 searchers, 20 tunnelers, and return with 5 egg sacks for study.
More music, fewer hits
I guess I don't get it, is this anything more than a pretty picture. What would be the motivation to build something like this? It certainly wouldn't be economically favorable. It would probably cost billions of dollars for R&D and construction to make it happen. All for what? Why go to the trouble when you can grow more food in a better climate and just ship it in... all for much, much less?
I seem to remember some statistic from history about food production in the USA where it was 100 years ago it took like 70 people to provide enough food for 100 people a year, then 50 years ago it was some other number, and currently it is like 5 people can feed 100 for a year. I dont think that food production is really a big problem for the future. Food distrobution might, but again I doubt it. Employment to buy said food is the issue. Building a brand new ultra modern skyscraper isnt going to help much when the only people that can afford to live in it are executives who can afford anything they need already.
There are too many people, in the USA and abroad, who have zero employable skills. Personally I think it falls back to the question of education. We dont need as much manual labor as we used to. We need more thinkers. Kids nowdays are lazy and stupid, hardly a bright future when it comes to scientific development.
Sigh, it's getting a little weird visiting Digg and seeing the exact same headline on slashdot in the span of a few minutes...
http://digg.com/travel_places/Spiraling_Skyscraper_Farms_for_a_Future_Manhattan
And even if they could solve all the engineering problems, there is no way it will ever be economically viable to use prime real estate in the middle of Manhattan for farming. It will always cost more to farm in a sky scraper than on the ground, so they won't be able to compete in the global market against traditional farms. Furthermore, using it locally won't matter either. New York is a major shipping hub, and has more fresh food passing through it than the vast majority of the country, and as a consequence has lower grocery prices than many parts of the country.
The only point at which something like this would make sense is if we've transformed the vast majority of the planet into a giant city, like Tantor.
Reminds me of SimCity 2000 (yes, the OLD one, just after the original SimCity) and the bio domes/cork screw buildings.
Land on Manhattan remains some of the most valuable land on the planet. And he wants to use it for the most land-intensive production imaginable? For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC. That's the market trying to give you a hint that allocating Manhattan real estate to agriculture is not the most efficient thing to do.
Even more damning, the whole damned point of having a civilization is to allow a small minority of farmers to produce enough food for everyone so that the rest of us can do things like engineering, science, art, law, politics, philosophy and all those other things that many of us find more satisfying than toiling in a field.
Disclosure: I have a garden in my backyard and I enjoy growing food in it. I don't, however, delude myself into thinking that it's anything other than a hobby -- one that is not economically sound (in the sense that I can buy the finished products much cheaper than I can grow them myself). Since I have to bring in soil, water and fertilizer, I'd be lucky if the whole thing was carbon neutral.
They already have those in China. They're called apartment buildings and they build them to grow chinese people pic pic new farms are built every day pic
Everyone thinks "kids today" are bad... You know what? they're not. They're just as dumb as their parents were at that age. I know I did plenty of stupid stuff when I was young....
Plenty of kids today are bright and creative, and now have outlets for that creativity thanks to our wonderful information age.
So go stick in your craw Gramps.
-T
What a load of hooey.
Just KISS!
Maybe we are supposed to wait for the bees to fill the thing with honey, then eat the building.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
"By 2050 nearly 80% of the worldâ(TM)s population will reside in urban centers, and 109 hectares of arable land will be needed to feed them."
Assuming this quote is accurate, then that means we'll have plenty of land to grow crops on (because not as many people live in rural areas).
that this was going to say "dynamically altering the fabric of spacetime."
They build these on the unused parts of Manhattan. The plan seems so clear- They bring in Dirt from New Jersey(its the Garden State so it has the best dirt) Water piped in from the Hudson Fertilzers...well Having been to New York I suspect the smell of acrid nitrogen rich fertilzers from the streets and alleys might somehow be harnessed.
I thought we paid farmer not to plant crops because we have too many farmers.
If they were all to try to plant food and sell it none of them would be able to cover costs.
So how is this going to be cost effective?
My knowledge of topology might be somewhat limited, but don't plants require sunlight, and wouldn't a traditional horizontal farm receive a lot more sunlight per unit surface area than a vertical farm?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
In other news, Battlestar Galactica fans want to build a Cylon base star in Norfolk, Virginia.
is a drill that will pierce the heavens.
Why is it that city dwellers try to eliminate the countryside at every effort? A city is not a place to grow things.
the last resort of art school and engineering school dropouts.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
There's a really good reason most buildings are rectilinear - anything else is significantly more expensive to build. I love how these designers just think we'll magically come up with the ability to analyze, design and fabricate these types of structures. Have you even wondered why we don't all live in Gehry-inspired buildings? It's because, as interesting as they are to look at, they cost between 5 and 50 times as much per square foot of usable space to build. Now, I'm sure most Wall Street types, with annual salaries that look like my phone number, don't care how much their living space costs, but I work for a living and I just can't see multiplying my mortgage times 10 just so food that grows just great on a farm down the road can grow in the flat next to me.
Sure, you can hydroponic this and aeroponic that, but I'm still waiting for anyone to actually make a sustainable, profit generating business which operates in all the sectors of agricultural products. And make a city produce it's own food? You've got to be kidding me. It takes something like three acres of flat land to support a person on an ongoing basis (no, I don't have a citation). I'll give you that I'm off by an order of magnitude AND that you can get an order of magnitude better results by using hydroponics. You'd need to double to quadruple the space for every person (1300SF hydroponics per person vs less than 600SF per person for living). So now instead of increasing your mortgage/rent tenfold, you'll have to double or triple that. But hey, you'll get free food (without processing) for just 29 times what you currently pay for your mortgage, which probably comes out to only a few times your annual income. And you still haven't figured out _how_ to harvest and process that material in such a system.
Why can't they just call these science fiction studies? I hope the winner didn't expect a cookie.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Silly person. Doesn't he realize that NYC already is growing food? Hasn't he seen Soylent Green? Doesn't he watch Monty Python?
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Watch it! I'm farming here!
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.
Anyone so foolish as to attempt to "dynamically altering the fabric of city life" in NYC will find himself fed to the rabid taxi cabs in short order.
...which is simply real estate costs. I just don't see how this could be economically viable.
http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2007-07/skyscraper-farms Hello and welcome to 2007.
i could see that going over on the west coast, but it just wouldn't fit in in NYC.
What?? No flying cars?
Free vasectomies and tubal ligations. It's WAY CHEAPER than all these band aid fixes. Control the population and resource management by having less people.
All very creative and everything, but until people learn how to fly on their own where do skyscrapers fit into the post-oil world? Seems to me we should say, "Food hell, will a skyscraper create enough energy to heat and cool itself and move the people up and down?"
You could say, "It's better than a suburb!" But are suburbs _or_ skyscrapers a good idea?
Sustainability in design is becoming a rapidly more important topic (IMO). Few forms of architecture are more pleasing than biomorphic structures but does New York really have the room for a project like this?
uh, good luck with that
Plants need sunlight, which won't magically increase just because you have expanded the surface area. No city can feed itself with the available sunlight over its city limits.
Or maybe he includes lots of growlights and the associated bigass nuclear power plants, and figures people will get along jess fine with all that concentrated light.
Infuriate left and right
Plants need sunlight too. You may be able to pipe in water and nutrients, but where is the light coming from?
Infuriate left and right
You gonna pipe in all that sunlight too?
Infuriate left and right
Just use regular apartments buildings and you can call the food source soylent green, should be a big seller.
Tahoe was cleared for the Virgina City silver mines. There are pictures of clearcut forests, just stumps as far as the camera can see. Only forestry experts know the difference between the current new growth and the pre-white man old growth.
Infuriate left and right
".....to provide the city with its own self-sustaining food source while dynamically altering the fabric of city life."
-Food like what? Crack?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
And call it New Jersey.
If you know xbox games (halo and mirror's edge, specifically), the renders look like The Flood from Halo took over the city in Mirror's Edge. There are alien looking structure Creepy...
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
It is very unlikely to be self sufficient because the modern American diet is so inefficient, particularly feedlot meat production which requires around an acre of grain/corn/soy raising to feed an American with meat.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What is more important is not being able to remember all the crap in it, but knowing how to find out. In today's world, I just search on the exam and get the answers, HERE.
What is important is not knowing things, but knowing how to find out and what to do with the information when you get it.
That said, I have noticed a marked (general) decrease in student abilities to reason, and an equal increase in a kind of fucked up sense of entitlement. There are always exceptions - there are always brilliant hard working kids - but the number of dopey bimbos and brainless douchebags has multiplied wildly in even just the past 5 years. Those kids are fucked. They need to know how to figure things out, how to logically suss out a problem. Now they just whine because they can't do facebook during my lecture...
Argh.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'll ignore the weight and moisture and the problems with insects (both as lack of pollinators and mites/aphids) and instead concentrate on:
Where, exactly, will the ENERGY to run this come from?
If you ask me, instead of trying to create hybrids between the artificial and the natural, we should be looking to replace all of nature's functions by man-made processes.
Obviously there's no replacing the gulf stream, at least for the next 2000 years or so, but smaller things can be done.
For example, if we had ridiculously cheap energy, we could just extract CO2 from the air, get some other elements from other gases/rocks/*stuff*, and synthesize our own nutrients. Even though the energy requirements with our current state of chemistry would be mind-bogglingly immense, this still seems more practical that growing crops in skyscrapers.
Either way, we'll soon have to solve the problem of cheap, virtually infinite energy. Just think about how much energy Google's data centers will consume in some 50 years. Once that problem is solved, and maybe chemists come up with some catalysts/enzymes (or fungi. i love fungi) that make it easier to synthesize nutrients humans need, then there you have it. The entire world will be eating white goo. No more macdonalds, no more obese people (who'd want to get fat eating goo?), no more FDA (I mean the F part, not the D)... Basically, the matrix except without the plugs. Although, I wouldn't mind the plugs, either. That would probably be USB 4.0.
Sorry, got a little distracted there near the end.
weinersmith
hmmm..that has been accomplished if you want to go check it out. The north eastern states have just huge amounts of forests. Go out in the woods there where the big trees live and go for a hike. Every once in awhile you'll find still intact but usually quite overgrown huge long stone walls, some ten feet high even with trees growing from the tops of them. Some are hard to see because they have been so long overgrown, but you can see the lines of them easily. There are thousands of miles of them still to see.
All those stone walls came from back in the 1800s and earlier when all that land was cleared. With the advent of tractors and cars and so on, the need for draft animals diminished greatly and all those carefully cut and cleared and de-rocked by man power and oxen power pastures were allowed to grow back to forests again. Now there was a *second* big forest clearing effort during world war two in new England. Huge amounts of trees were cut and burned in huge pits for the woodash, the ash was shipped to England by the shipload to use for fertilizer there so they wouldn't starve, although it did get close and it took their agricultural base to well into the 50s to get back to somewhat normal. But even most of those areas have grown back already.
You leave a cleared area untended, within ten years it is covered in trees again, at least east of the Mississippi where you get more normal and adequate rainfall. You don't have to do a thing either, just let it grow up. I know I spend a lot of time keeping our pastures cleared of baby trees every year. Luckily though where I live we don't "grow rocks" like New England does. Every spring you have to go around your fields and pick the newly heaved up rocks out of the fields, man, it gets to be a lot like work sometimes.. it also pushes wooden fence poles out of the ground as well.(farmed in new england as well as where I live now, and some other places)(and the rocks, cold weather and thin soil and too many baby mountains is why so many farmers moved west from there back during our pioneering days)
Raising food indoors, in town, means:
no more expense and excuses for crop failure, ...
no more crop dusting (hey, its indoors, we're not talking the great outdoors here.)
no more to much or too little water, sun, nutrients, (its indoors, we can control the environment,)
no more losing crops to rodents, insects and other pests, (its indoors, we can control the environment,)
no more burning fossil fuels planting, growing and harvesting, since the planting, growing and harvest can be done by electric overhead crane suspended from the ceiling,
the most transport the things get subjected to is an elevator ride (instead of ripening in a truck on the way from far, far away,)
soil rotation (or removal) can be done by literally moving the soil around
If all the land in New York City was built with control and planning instead of the haphazard growth over the last century and a half, we wouldn't be wasting any fuel trucking the stuff in from anywhere NOT New York City.
It could be easily done on a few floors of the buildings we're going to have to build over the next century.
Wind farms on the upper floors, agricultural space for plants interspersed on the lower floors, we could make New York City totally self sufficient.
Just keep animals and animal products OUT and you also keep the smell out.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... what's the threshold for number of occupants before they blast off?
/no, I will not explain the reference.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
The Dystopian part is a weak attempt at irony. What they are really planning is a Utopia wherein all those troublesome redneck farmers are gone. They've become right-thinking (or is that left-thinking?) city people, as farming jobs are replaced by urban food-manufacturing jobs.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
It's dumb putting vertical farms in the middle of a large city. Land is too precious there. It's not as if the surface of the earth is covered by skyscrapers (vertically developed urban area). My back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it at about .01% of the land area of the earth.
Such farms - if they are to exist at all - would best be placed at the outskirts of large cities to reduce transportation costs.
And people wonder why America is falling behind globally.
Skyscaper farming is nothing new on /.
Plants (especially plants like alfalfa or grasses as depicted) have massive root systems requiring literally tons of soil to be healthy.
Grasses may require a lot of soil but not all crop plants do. Some grow quite well hydropnically. From TFA linked to: "After a strawberry farm in Florida was wiped out by Hurricane Andrew, the owners built a hydroponic farm. By growing strawberries indoors and stacking layers on top of each other, they now produce on one acre of land what used to require 30 acres." The article "In "Urban Farming," Crops Grow in Skyscrapers" says "More than 100 crops can be grown indoors by taking advantage of a technique called "hydroponics," where plants grow using mineral nutrient solutions instead of soil."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And it takes cheap fuel to deliver crops from the farm to cities so people can eat. I'd like to see a life cycle analysis comparing both these vertical city farms and farming as it's done in the US. In Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union people started planting city gardens which now feed a lot of Cubans.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Cuba is an example of what happens when absolutely everything goes wrong.
Except the city farms and gardens in Cuba are able to feed a lot of Cubans.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Farms require the use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer, all of which are toxic to humans.
Organic farms do not use fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. However they do require more manhours. And guess what those chemical inputs are made from? Natural gas and petrochemicals, both of which are being used up.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This building is very obviously the product of Cylon technology. Compare it to pictures of Cylon Basestars, and the resemblance is undeniable.
It all makes sense now...Gaeta is the 7th Cylon, and this is just an example of his architectural ideas in action-"lots of stairways!" All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again...
Its a really cool idea, but... one 30 story building that takes up 1 city block to feed 50,000 people doesn't seem like that's enough for a city like New York. I mean 50 thousand people is nothing. There are millions of people in NY every day - millions of people who actually live here, millions more who commute in every day, and what seems like billions of tourists. If they want to start tearing down city blocks, I'd rather they build more parks and ship the food in from across the Hudson. Dedicating an entire City block? How many of these things would we need?
The traditional methods of reducing the human population are disease and war. For the most part, humanity has resisted all other efforts.
Actually education and equality which boost economics leads to a reduction in birth rates as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If in 2050 each person needs 109 hectares of arable land, we are going to be in trouble no matter what. With the population at that time estimated to be 9 billion, and given that there are about 3 billion hectares of arable land on the planet, we might need to come up with a few hundred thousand more earths.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://artslibrary.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/chris_jacobs.jpg&imgrefurl=http://artslibrary.wordpress.com/category/sustainability/page/2/&usg=__K74PisrH3qLdQeFl3YlFqkgMmfI=&h=250&w=193&sz=12&hl=en&start=18&um=1&tbnid=ScQsW_66-ARiIM:&tbnh=111&tbnw=86&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522sim%2Bcity%2B2000%2522%2Bgardens%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG Am I the only one to remember Sim City 2000's version of Arcology?
In the future, maybe we don't need more efficient use of space, but rather fewer humans?
Of course, that doesn't win you silly design competitions.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Wear condoms. Seriously folks, the problem is over population. Let's start limiting people to 2 kids and be done with it. The problem with humanity is that we're all about more of everything. If we stop our growth rate, we'd maybe have time to fix problems like global warming, world hunger, unemployment, etc...
Either that or we start killing off the baby boomers (or everyone over 60 years old) to make room for the next generations.
Why is it that winners for these types of contests always end up being some of the fugliest (Fugly = Fucking+Ugly) god-awful crap imaginable?!
Honestly, it's like a Paris fashion show.
I really don't get the logic behind the winners being things that NOBODY would ever, EVER buy, even if they could afford it.
The winners should be something that not only is new and innovative, but also something that people would WANT to buy or build and put the idea to good use. It's worthless if nobody would want to use it.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Is this like the attic farming that went on by horticulture students from my old high school? I heard they were able to make a cash crop under the roof of their house with grow lamps powered by a solar panel and reduce water usage by recycling dish water and using rain water.
You know, I bet someone in New York has already been doing this, this attic farming stuff. I bet they work with undocumented pharmacists too. How is this really new news?
Hydroponics
(Apogee) Dwarf Wheat
Thanet Earth (Guardian)
Thanet Earth (Daily Mail)
Eurofresh: in inhospitable Wilcox, AZ
Eurofresh: Air-Conditioning Greenhouses
Vertical Farm Project
Artifical light growth rates in a controlled environment (Omega Garden; also a good example of what growing indoors looks like--it's not hard to imagine a blocky wharehouse filled with these, unlikely the fanciful design in the article):
CFL (6 Kilowatts per Hour (KWH))
2 week total: 1646.4 KWH to produce 2160 units of Lettuce
Per Lettuce Unit = 0.76 KWH
LED (0.48 Kilowatt)
2 week total: 171 KWH to produce 2160 units of Lettuce
Per Lettuce Unit = 0.079 KWH
Eurofresh has 319 acres under glass (horizontal hydroponics with natural light, with additional costs for cooling), and grows 125 million pounds of tomatoes a year. That's 196.5 tons annually. So, it jives with the above study from 1975 in Bengal. That means, this stuff scales. Eurofresh is able to compete (and expand) right now in the market with horizontal pesticide dependent geoponic farming done in the best arable land; food mile transportation costs still exist.