Spiraling Skyscraper Farms For a Future Manhattan 403
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."
Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [treehugger.com], 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).
Pollution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Employment problems solved.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
the big question is (Score:1, Insightful)
how long until a couple of Arabs fly a plane into these things?
Who will eat whatever is grown there? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Tons of soil weigh alot? By my calculations it should only weigh a few tons..
and no, you do not need soil to grow plants.. Hydroponics and Aeroponics do not use soil and have impressive yields.
The rest of your argument is just as poorly thought out, the major down side I see to farming in the city is the toxins the plants will absorb from the air making it into the food supply.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:2, Insightful)
To me a more realistic version of urban farming would be small gardens on the balconies of the sunny side of a high rise. Then the condo board could have a little farmers market in the lobby. This would depend on the willingness of the residents to work their little gardens. I guess you could get a break on HOA fees if you produce a good supply of fruits and vegetables.
Re:Who will eat whatever is grown there? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever heard of catsup, or boston baked beans? People eat utter crap. Hardly anyone eats fresh produce in quantities enough to notice whether or not it had relatively clean air as a child.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting but wrong idea (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that most food-producing plants need a full day of DIRECT sunlight every day of their lives. Indirect light doesn't cut it. Half days of sunlight don't cut it. They need more energy than that (after all, plants are essentially an energy-binding system, and their food value is directly proportional to how much energy they can bind).
Oh, and about water, it's heavy. WAY heavier than soil. Dry soil is light, but not much grows in it. Watered soil is heavy!
Whenever I see a project like this, I know the designer has read too much science fiction and hasn't driven enough combines.
So far removed from basic common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Apples don't give much of a good goddamn in which county they are grown. People care where they live.
If vertical farming makes sense (from an economic and agricultural perspective) do it... I don't know... maybe on farmland?
This post brought to you from the 12th floor in Midtown.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of your arguments come down to one thing: soil.
Generally, vertical farming ideas utilize hydroponics (growing plants with nutrients dissolved in water) to get around this problem. It is a technology that has been used (in smaller scales) for decades with many different plant species and is known to produce much higher yields (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics#Higher_Yields/ [wikipedia.org]). Ironically, hydroponic farming also uses much less water than traditional farming, because the water is recycled through the system until it is actually used by the plants as opposed to irrigating a field and having most of the water evaporate before it is used.
As for the other issues, I have toured several greenhouses in my life and it is not a smell that is repulsive. Many people enjoy the smell of growing things, though doubtless it is something that urbanites would have to get used to. As far as cultivation, well there is no need to spray herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizer so generally the only cultivation necessary is planting and harvesting. Do you honestly believe that we can build machines to plant and harvest thousands of acres of open field, but can't automate the process in a controlled environment?
I'm not saying that this particular design is sound, it looks like a fairytale structure the guy though would look cool rather than something designed with efficiency or strength in mind.
This isn't necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
"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).
Man that's ugly, and pretty damned impractical (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sunlight, wherezat? (Score:3, Insightful)
You gonna pipe in all that sunlight too?
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydroponics or no, it boggles the mind that anyone thinks a creating building designed for agriculture and offices would be more efficient than having separate facilities for agriculture outside of city limits, then shipping the food into the city via rail.
This thing is like Windows Mobile, which tries to be a computer, a phone, a PDA, and an iPod; thus sucking horribly at all functions simultaneously.
Beyond the weight and moisture (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:4, Insightful)
We are a very long way away from running out of food.
We are seeing several isolated conditions where politicians/warlords/mafia are relocating individuals of the wrong tribe/party/religion to areas where water hence food is very scarce. And bandits/highwaymen are waylaying food shipments from farmed area, and causing further starvation. Well meaning western governments and charities are making the problems worse by shipping foreign grain to the starving, these shipments are intercepted by the politicians/warlords/mafia which causes the local prices to fall, hurting the local farmers, whose product was stolen in the first place.
And we are seeing starvation where populations which are trying to farm marginal environments, are seeing marginal success... Which means occasional failure. These populations don't enjoy the benefit of inexpensive transportation allowing them to take part in the global commodity exchange where localized surpluses/shortages are moderated by trading across a large web consisting of large variation in production.
When will we see global food production fall to less than the need of the global population? History says when more governments take over food production, then we will see food production fall.
Re:Pretty Pictures with Little to No Functionality (Score:3, Insightful)
So? Who said anything about small farms? I thought we were talking about large structures, here.