Authored by Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd in 1993, From Ecocities to Living Machinespresented concepts for designing with nature and proposed strategies for combining urban planning with agriculture. The vertical farm building was one of the proposed themes blending dwelling functions with cultivating plants and animals; a utopian vision of a vertical farming system that would rethink waste in our contemporary cities. The envisioned collective vertical structure employing all the necessary requirements for producing enough energy to power itself seems all the more possible today as techniques for energy harvesting and harnessing are becoming mainstream.
A small Austrian firm, Precht, has spent the last couple of years working on a proposal for an inhabitable vertical farm. The tall timber structure communicates an ideal of vertical production defined by an innovative modular timber construction of stacked triangular dwellings. A form of regular A-frame construction, the mega space frame is composed of cross-laminated timber panels and diagonal glue laminated brace beams. The triangular grid is fairly straightforward, simple to build and inherently stable. The grid’s panels could be produced off-site flat packed and delivered to be easily lifted and anchored into their diagonal pattern. A three layer oblique panel composed of an interior finish material, a mechanical core and a climate resistant exterior layer structures the stacked A-frames.
The prototype, if built, would provide a complete ecosystem where waste is deemed a resource. Each individual component’s output is used as an input for a different part of the system. An agile living machine the megastructure is composed of multiple living configurations from single family to larger two floor units. Potentially inspired by Habraken’s view of a natural relationship in mass housing, the units’ overall structure is collective while the interiors can be designed, developed and built according to inhabitant’s needs, preferences and their growth, both increased or decreased. The vertical truss is not completely filled in and can be ventilated naturally as interior circulation could be open to the elements. A veritable vertical city-farm, it is conceivable that this prefabricated tower «kit» could be implanted as an urban activator in multiple contexts.
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| A rendering of the tall urban farm by https://www.precht.at/the-farmhouse/ |
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