Farming Just Got A Whole Lot More Cosmopolitan, And Way Cooler Than You Could Ever Imagine

Thinking The Future

In what some might call one of the most amazing feats in architecture history, an Italian architect is going to combine a vertical farm with a 51-story office building that will eventually complete the Shenzhen skyline in what is being called a “farmscraper.”

The front of the building will have a vertical hydroponic farm that completes the entire façade of the building. The Jian Mu Tower, which it will be named, was designed for a prime Chinese supermarket where tenants can actually grow, sell, consume or buy produce in the very same place where they work.

The building will be located in the south city of Shenzhen in China. The Turin-based architectural firm, Carlo Ratti Associati, have disclosed their magnificent architectural plans. The building will be 650-feet, or 218-meters, tall with a massive 100,000-square feet – or 10,000-square meters – will be glass exterior purely for producing food. This amount equals 590,000-pounds of food per year, with another million-square feet of the building to be used for office space, a food court, a supermarket of course, and gardens.

The building will be using hydroponic gardening, which uses nutrient rich water vapor instead of soil to grow their produce. This also means plants can be grown in tubes that are stacked vertically, rather than having to grow in soil on the ground.


Alongside the architectural team is ZERO, another Italian-based company that specializes in futuristic and innovative methods of agriculture. Jian Mu’s farm will be enhanced to produce a variety of agricultural products such as salad greens and fruits, to aromatic herbs and the like, all the while making sure to stay efficient and highly sustainable.

In order to make sure everything is working properly, an AI agronomist will be there to oversee most of the hydroponic systems, making sure the planting and harvest cycles were done at the right time, as well as regulating the water and nutrients, and all other matters required.

Designed to be the new headquarters of the Wumart supermarket chain, the building will be the location for the entire production chain to be “showcased in a clean, and technologically exciting way.” Taken from Chinese folklore, the building is named and designed after a mythical tree that happened to separate heaven and earth.

The project page found on the architecture website explains that according to traditional belief, the earth is square while heaven is round. Therefore, the skyscraper is meant to echo this same principal by having a rectangular base that increasingly becomes tubular as it rises higher into the air.

Dezeen

Carlo Ratti explained to Dezeen, “The vertical hydroponic farm embraces the notion of zero food miles in the most comprehensive sense. Crops cultivated in the tower are sold and even eaten in the same location, which helps us conserve a great deal of energy in food distribution.”

Meanwhile, the sun will also aid the crops in their growth, while allowing the interior offices to be shaded from the sun simultaneously. This will help reduce the load of the air conditioning, while the most sub-tropical China air will help supply additional moisture to the growing plants.


Ratti, who also happens to be a professor at the acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also said, “Small-scale urban farming is happening in cities all over the world – from Paris to New York to Singapore. Jian Mu Tower, however, takes it to the next level.”

He continued, “Such approach has the potential to play a major role in the design of future cities, as it engages one of today’s most pressing architectural challenges: How to integrate the natural world into building design.”

You can see the concept reveal on the video below, which honestly, looks like something out of a sci-fi movie that definitely warrants the entire world’s attention.

 

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