Like a giant snowglobe with a helter-skelter snaked inside it, this conceptual design for a vertical farm from Swedish firm Plantagon may represent the future of urban food production. All three of Plantagon’s designs for large-scale vertical urban farms feature the spiral ramp system illustrated above – a kind of corkscrew conveyor belt that carries plants slowly down the spiral over the course of their growing cycle to a harvesting station at its base. All three are designated as part of the company’s PlantaSymbioSystem, intended to mesh symbiotically with the ebb and flow of a city’s built environment by converting surplus heat produced by its industrial buildings into energy, gorging on its carbon dioxide emissions, and gobbling up its food scraps for fertilizer.
The system can either be integrated into the design of any building – tempting office employees to slide down the conveyor with gleeful abandon – or serve as a stand-alone structure. And while it’s still unclear that vertical farming as a model will provide a practical, scalable solution to growing the amount of food needed to supply the world’s ever-growing cities, Plantagon claims their system produces three-to-ten more crops per square meter than standard greenhouses.
The question remains of course whether these whimsical skyscrapers will delight or dismay our senses. To us, there’s a certain poetry to their spiralling symmetry, but others may disagree. As the young lady of wit and grace who turned us on to this story says, “These are kinda ugly, but have to feed people somehow! Reminds me of playing Sim City 2000 on the computer when I was a kid.”
Via SustainableCitiesCollective.
