[Press Release]

DRAGONFLY, A METABOLIC FARM FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE

2009 : 800 MILLION OF URBAN FARMERS FOR RESPONSIBLE ECO-CITIES

The world of fast-food and frozen food is over! The urban keen interest of the beginning of our Century turns toward the garden flat bringing back the countryside in our overcrowded cities fighting from now on for a community urban agriculture able to contribute to the durability of the city and to rethink the food production.

On the roofs, terraces, balconies, in the hollow of the non-built public spaces, in the interior yards and the suspended greenhouses, the eco-warrior aspires to escape from its competitive and consumeristic universe imposed by the laws of the market. He desires to cultivate its immediate landscape so as to better take root in the ground by creating his own ecologic and alimentary biodiversity. The consumer becomes from then on producer and the garden inhabitant !

From the Parisian « worker gardens » to the « community gardens » of New York going though Muscovite « vegetable squares », eight hundred million of urban farmers, i.e. more than one human being out of ten, consume nowadays chlorophyllous products from these cosmopolitan kitchen gardens. These new gardens, aware of the emergency to reduce our fuel consumption and the necessity to modify our behaviour facing the climatic changes, decrease thus their environmental impact and build eco-responsible cities on a community way.

2025 : 5.5 BILLION OF CITY SLICKERS FACING THE FOOD CHALLENGE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

According to the PNUD (Programme of the United Nations for the Development), the worldwide urban population will go from 3.1 billion of inhabitants in 2009 up to 5.5 billion of inhabitants within 2025. Looking for a positive energetic assessment, the contemporary city aims within fifteen years at producing cleanly and intensively more energy than it consumes so as to pack this urban exodus! It develops therefore the urban agriculture to become food self-sufficient by recycling at the same time its liquid waste by phyto-purification, its solid waste in fertilizers by composting and by producing energy by biomass, photovoltaic cells and other renewable energies (thermic solar, photovoltaic solar, wind, tide-turbine energies…).

In order to avoid the asphixiation of the planet and the feeding of its 9 billion of inhabitants within 2050, it deals thus with reinventing the traditional energetic pattern between the city and the countryside between western countries, emerging countries and developing countries. This sums up as following: on the one hand import of natural and food resources, and on the other hand export of waste and pollution. The ecologic city aims at reintegrating the farming function on the urban scale by emphasizing the role of the urban agriculture in the use and the reuse of natural resources and biodegradable waste so as to close the loop of ecologic flows.

The urban agriculture can feed the city without any pesticide or chemical fungicide (whose toxicity is proved on the human being : cancer, sterility…), and make it less food dependant of its backcountry or other regions of the world. Organising the distribution of fresh products in short circuits, that means linked directly with the consumer, the urban agriculture complete thus the traditional agriculture. In addition to the nutritive quality of the produced and consumed food, the urban agriculture is also a growth lever of the urban unemployment market and the local economy. It is used directly as a social link in the conciliation of the primary needs of the newcomers with the challenge of their integration in the life of the city, fighting thus against poverty and exclusion. On the sanitary level, this farm approach presents also an interesting potential for the decontamination of polluted grounds and undergrounds as well as for he purification of the polluted atmosphere in CO2.

Due to the fuel crisis and climatical change, the rural agriculture of the western countries must answer to the worldwide food crisis of the developing countries and mainly Africa. Its role is from now on to produce (with an increase estimated of 60% within 2050) all the foodstuffs transportable by boat such as cereals or corn. This is based on the evolution of the science and the most advanced biotechnologies. In addition to this nutritious role, the rural agriculture is newly challenged to recycle its own culture rebus for the green chemistry in order to produce the bio fuel called “second generation fuel” using the energy of non-consumable materials from the plants, that means fibres such as celluloses.

DRAGONFLY, A NOURISHING VERTICALY CULTIVATED CENTRAL PARK

The architecture has to be in the service of this new agriculture and to design this new social desire in this context of ecologic mutation and food autonomy! The Dragonfly project suggests therefore building a prototype of urban farm offering around a mixed programme of housing, offices and laboratories in ecological engineering, farming spaces which are vertically laid out in several floors and partly cultivated by its own inhabitants. This vertical farm sets up all the sustainable applications in organic agriculture based on the intensive production varied according to the rhythm of the seasons. This nourishing agriculture is furthermore in favour of the reuse of biodegradable waste and the keeping of energy and renewable resources for a planning of ecosystemic densification.

Floor by floor, the tower superposes not only stock farming ensuring the production of meat, milk, poultry and eggs but also farming grounds, true biological reactors continuously regenerated with organic humus. It diversifies the cultivated varieties to avoid the washing of stratums of soft substratum. Thus, the cultures succeed one another vertically according to their agronomical ability to provide some elements of the ground between the essences that are sowed and harvested. The tower, true living organism, becomes thus metabolic and self-sufficient in water, energy, and bio-fertilizing. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable to a continuous auto-feeding!

A BIONIC AND ENERGETICALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of Dragonfly prototype suggests reinventing the vertical building (that outlined the urbanistic booming of New York City since the 19th Century) as structurally and functionally as ecologically and energetically.

To ensure the social diversity and a permanent life cycle (24h/24) in the tower, the mixed programmation is mainly laid out around two poles of housing and work places. Around housings, offices and research laboratories as well as the most private to the most public agricultural and leisure spaces are designed in gardens, kitchen gardens, orchards, meadows, rice fields, farms and suspended fields. The distribution of flows is made around a true safe spine spreading in loop the numerous elevators, the goods elevators and stair wells serving all the levels by separating simultaneously the inputs and the outputs recycled from plants, animals and human beings.

Architecturally, the functional organisation is represented by two oblong towers symetrically arranged in pair around a huge climatic greenhouse that links them and deploys itself between two crystalline wings. These very light wings in glass and steel retake the loads of the building and are directly inspired from the structure of the dragonfly wings coming from the family of “Odonata Anisoptera” whose transparent membrane is very finely nervured. Two inhabited rings buttress around these wings. Their organically chiselled exo-structure accommodates the inter-climatic spaces that receive the agrarian cultures. They buttress.

The whole set forms «double layer» architecture in bee nest mesh that exploits the solar passive energy at its maximum level, by accumulating the warm air in the winter in the thickness of the exo-structure, and by cooling the atmosphere by natural ventilation and by evapo-perpiration of the plants in the summer. Protecting thus the cultures from climatic changes in New York (from -25.5°C in the winter to +41°C in the summer), these plug spaces are useful to reflect on the agriculture not anymore in terms of surface area but really in terms of volume. Actually, whereas grounds nourish orchards, each wall and each ceiling are metamorphosed into three-dimensional kitchen gardens. The interior frontages of the housing and offices throw towards the skyline of New York the cantilever of their hydrophonic balconies with hexagonal section thanks to what it multiplies the culture layers by floors. The vegetation abounds, the earth is swarming of insects and animals are freely brought up in holding tanks by urban consumers with low income. The architecture becomes eatable!

Designer : Vincent Callebaut Architect

Text from Felix :
People in disaster areas need more than just housing. Both physical and psychological needs are often neglected. People find themselves displaced from their familiar environment and dwellings, and they are often traumatized. In this situation, individual survival becomes a priority and can result in brutalization and societal decline. The concept behind Sphere not only considers taking shelter from extreme weather conditions but also re-establishing feelings of security and companionship without a loss of privacy. The centre of Sphere has been conceived as a social place, where the inhabitants can constitute a community – a circle.

This place offers the opportunity of regaining contact with others, cooking and simply getting together in a social way. In this way, every Sphere becomes a germ cell for a community.

Every Sphere contains nineteen tent units that can each accommodate up to three people. Partition walls can be unbuttoned in order to create larger units for families. The inner layer of the tent is made of light, breathable material. This layer is independent of the outer layer, which consists of hard-wearing canvas. The stakes are made of fibreglass and plastic, and guarantee the stability of the whole construction. The design as such is long lasting and can be recycled if required.

Designer : Felix Stark via IGreenSpot

Text from designer :
My goal is to create more than an emergency shelter. This project is a shelter solution that meets the needs of emergency response but also provides victims with a more personal place to live; a base unit that can serve as a very basic shelter but also have the capabilities to upgrade and implement modern infrastructure. This shelter is also stackable. Many alternative housing solutions deal with small scale but can’t cope with large scale displaced populations. There are 5 points that have been the focus during the design of this shelter. The shelter must be:
1) Easily transportable, collapsible and able to be shipped flat.
2) Built of recyclable materials and have the ability to be reused.
3) Easy to erect and assembled with few or no tools.
4) Amenable to infrastructure?can be used as a basic structure, but have the capabilities to upgrade and implement modern conveniences.
5) Stackable

Über is shipped flat to allow for transport via air sea and land. All components that create the modular living unit are stored inside the shelter in its collapsed position during transport. It is then taken apart and assembled on location. When it is no longer needed, it can be dismantled, packed flat again, and moved to the next disaster area. The aim has been to design a shelter that is compatible with the current system used in refugee camps and emergencies by organizations such as the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).

Every camp is different since every situation is different. In some cases proper design of a camp is not possible because refugees have already settled on a site. Uber has been designed to adapt to different situations, terrains, and climates. Camp needs are addressed in phases. Phase one is to meet the basic needs of the people, providing them with the bare essentials.

When there is more time, funding, and personnel, phase two provides camp residents with more pleasant solutions and conveniences. For example, phase two would include building an outhouse, rather than having a defecation field or trench. This shelter is delivered in the same fashion. When the initial crisis occurs, Über is shipped as a base unit to meet the initial need for shelter. When the camp is ready for phase two, a separate upgrade package is shipped and added into the shelters units to provide conveniences (electricity for light, compact stove and refrigerator).

Designer : Rafael Smith

Designer : Matthew Francke

T.E.D. (Transportable Emergency Dwelling) is a product which takes advantage of two systems to solve a global problem. The world has an incredibly advanced transportation infrastructure which allows product to move from country to country with relative speed and efficiency. Emergency housing is needed globally so why not use that infrastructure to our advantage. To optimize the shipping of these housing units they must fit within the footprint of the most widely used shipping containers. Each housing unit is self sustaining in the correct conditions, meaning it can collect water and create energy through solar panels. One shipping container can house two families of 4 people comfortably. It can be expanded to fit more. Once these units are done being used, they may be shipped back to their origin for restoration and refurbishment for their next adventure.

Designer : Craig Mackiewicz