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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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?
You gonna pipe in all that sunlight too?
Infuriate left and right
Sunlight comes from the sun in limited amounts. It takes far more sunlight than falls on a city to grow the food to feed that city. Atriums and skylights redistribute the sunlight, they don't increase it.
Infuriate left and right
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?
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