Category — Roof Garden

Terrace gardening with the Indian pioneer, Dr B.N Viswanath

Home and Decor
2013

Excerpt:

What inspired you to start a movement of Organic farming, especially on the terrace?

Dr. Vishwanath: It happened accidentally. I was travelling from Delhi to Bangalore in 1995, as the flight couldn’t land on time due to some technical reason and flew over Bangalore city for a while… that’s when I noticed immaculate terraces reflecting sunlight. That’s when the thought came in my mind, why the constant rise of temperatures in Bangalore? .Even though, Bangalore is known as “Air conditioned city” because of the pleasant weather.

It disturbed me to realize that the Garden City of India, Bangalore, has become a concrete jungle day by day. I didn’t bury that thought in me; I discussed with like minded people and friends and realized that in Bangalore every one used to have an ornamental garden in the front and vegetable garden at the back side of their house.

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Photo By A. Schechter.

The “produce” from the garden will be making appearances on the room service, restaurant, and cocktail menus

By A. Schechter
Hotel Chatter
May 2, 2013

Excerpt:

If your first thought is ‘Mojito!’ when you see this picture, then you’re on the right track.

Since last summer, the Westin New York Grand Central has quietly been working on a modest but respectable rooftop veggie garden way up on the hotel’s 41st floor. Located smack in the middle of midtown (the Chrysler Building is so close you can touch it), it seems like an unlikely place to be growing…well, anything. But urban farming is trendy these days, and a hotel’s gotta go what a hotel’s gotta do, right?

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At the former Chocolate factory in Dublin city

By gabig58
ulcommunityroofgarden
April 28, 2013

Excerpt:

Started last year as a FundIt project, the Dublin Urban Farm occupies 400sqm’s of rooftop space at the former Chocolate factory in Dublin city centre. Its objective: researching and demonstrating intensive urban growing techniques. According to the project description on FundIt, the urban farm “will host events & community groups and provide hands-on workshops that teach responsible food production, carpentry, energy-saving systems, ecological cycles, and community self-sufficiency observing organic & pesticide free practices”.

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Gotham Greens and Brooklyn Grange are featured

By Jessica Hartogs
Cbs News
April 22, 2013

Excerpt:

With the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations forecasting urban areas to account for 70 percent of the world population in 2050, perhaps building farms in cities isn’t such a crazy idea.

Urban farmers say this type of farming is much more productive for the environment, cutting out greenhouse gas emissions, transportation costs, while the food remains fresher and has a longer shelf-life, not to mention making use of space that would otherwise remain under-utilized.

The produce is grown in optimum conditions where temperature, air and hydration are all monitored.

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Photo by Todd Selby.

At Eagle Street Farm – Brooklyn – November 30th 2010

Todd Selby is a portrait, interiors, journalist and fashion photographer and illustrator. His project The Selby offers an insider’s view of creative individuals in their personal spaces with an artist’s eye for detail.

Todd’s first book, The Selby is In Your Place, was released in May 2010 by Abrams. Todd recently launched Edible Selby, in collaboration with NYTimes T Magazine in which he photographs the most creative and interesting people in food around the world.

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Rain water stored in tanks in the top of the tower use zero energy gravity feeders as a source of irrigation for the building

By Except Integrated Sustainability
The tower was commissioned by SIGN, in collaboration with Bartels & Vedder, Van Reisen and Kelsey’s o.o.m.
The Netherlands

The Hortus Celestia is a vertical farm tower, designed for Naaldwijk, the Netherlands. The tower rises 28 stories high above the greenhouse-filled landscape, offering 14 farming floors with embedded expo centers.

The tower functions as a demonstration center for innovative Dutch greenhouse industry partners, and attracts international visitors from around the globe.

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Gotham Greens is paying to build the greenhouse, and the grocery chain will simply buy the pesticide-free produce as they would from any other farm.

By Ariel Schwartz
Senior Editor at Co.Exist
April 5, 2013

Excerpt:

This week, Whole Foods announced that it’s going a step further, teaming up with Gotham Greens to build the first commercial-scale greenhouse farm in the U.S. that’s attached to a retail grocery store. The hydroponic farm will produce leafy greens, basil, and unlike the Greenpoint greenhouse, vine crops like tomatoes and cucumbers. As you might imagine, the produce arrives on store shelves much quicker than if it had come from an outside farm; in some cases, crops can make their way downstairs to the store in just 20 minutes.

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55 kilowatts of solar energy from the roof help meet energy demands

By Hope Wilson
Producer
Dark Rye – An online magazine from Whole Foods MArket
Issue 9, April 2013
(Must see video. Mike)

From the issue: Feeding Our Cities from the Ground Up

Indoor Farming – Feeding the Urban Masses
By Dickson Despommier
Page 29

Gotham Greens – A Farm Grows in Brooklyn
Page 30

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Lauren Mandel works as a Project Manager and Rooftop Agriculture Specialist at the Philadelphia-based green roof firm Roofmeadow

By Lauren Mandel
New Society Publishers
April 2013

Soaring prices and concerns about chemical-laden fruits and vegetables increasingly drive us to grow our own healthy food close to home. In cities however, vanishing ground space and contaminated soils spur farmers, activists, and restaurateurs to look to the skyline for a solution. The hunger for local food has reached new heights, and rooftops can provide the space that cities need to bring fresh, organic produce to tables across North America.

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It will produce a projected 266,796 kilograms of food every three months

By Brandon Martella
DesignBoom
March 16, 2013

Excerpt:

In response to an exponential growth in population and current trends in unsustainable food consumption, San Diego architect Brandon Martella has proposed a new high-rise building typology that integrates an expansive farm and market into the American urban landscape. The vertical farm skyscraper is an architecture that responds to a burgeoning economic and environmental issue — a problem of fruit and vegetable supply not meeting the 320+ kilogram per person demand in the United States.

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Brazilian home has wall of food growing in pop bottles

By Christopher
This is Colossal
February 20, 2013

Excerpt

As part of an innovative partnership called Home Sweet Home (Lar Doce Lar) between multidisciplinary design firm Rosenbaum and TV producer Luciano Huck, the teams went through dozens of Brazilian homes doing dramatic makeovers of interior and exterior spaces. On their 48th home Rosenbaum designed a pretty amazing vertical garden that was suspended in a narrow walkway just outside the house. Reponse to the garden was so huge the firm quickly released design schematics (in Portugese) detailing how to build one. A huge thanks to the team at Rosenbaum for sharing these photos with Colossal!

Link here.

Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Awards

By Federica Marra
Manna from our roof
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Abstract:

In response to urbanized spaces’ alienation from food production and its ecological, recreational and economic values, it is necessary to reconceptualise the cities from the key viewpoint of sustainability and to educate its citizens about a new ecology of food. The manna FromOurRoof project will engage young people across the OECD countries in an international network of activities combining education, communication and business: participants will actively take part in cultivation, preservation, cooking and sale of local food products. By the means of roof gardens, window farms and edible walls, the facilities they will be working in will be providing the urban community with fresh and local produce, while taking care of their own energy supply, water and waste.

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Photo by Bob Benenson.

90,000-square foot facility in the industrial Chicago southwest suburb of Bedford Park

By Bob Benenson
Good Food Festivals
Feb 28, 2013

Excerpt:

When FarmedHere was founded, its indoor vertical produce farm was located in a tiny 4,000-square foot building in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Co-Founders Jolanta Hardej, Steve Denenberg and Paul Suder, and vice president of development, Paul Hardej, delivered their basil and arugula to retail merchants in Ziploc bags.

Now, just about three years later — enhanced in part by strategic support from FamilyFarmed.org and the Good Food Financing Conference — FarmedHere is set for the grand opening of a 90,000-square foot facility in the industrial Chicago southwest suburb of Bedford Park. It will be the largest vertical farm in America.

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Sugar Hill Housing in Harlem will provide 124 units of affordable housing. It will finish construction in December.

A Role Model for New York City’s Affordable Housing

By Ronda Kaysen
Architectural Record
Feb 14, 2013

Excerpt:

An urban farm on the rooftop of a David Adjaye–designed affordable-housing project in Harlem will provide fresh produce and income for the building sometime after construction has been completed in December. An $80 million development in the historic New York City neighborhood, Sugar Hill Housing will offer 124 units of rental housing for low-income adults and families. Adjaye’s stepped-profile design, with a rose-embossed, textured precast-concrete facade, makes it the latest example in a trend to replace bland institutional architecture typical of affordable housing with creative and striking design.

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Standing 70 stories and nearly 1000 feet, is a new proposed development at 80 South Street.

The tower will feature “vegetative roofs,” which won’t just be for show — ”we’re working with Don Pintabona, Robert DeNiro’s chef. We’re working on a shared kitchen and vertical farming,”

By Stephen Jacob Smith
New York Observer
Feb 8, 2013

Excerpt:

Santiago Calatrava’s 1,123-foot tower of cubes at 80 South Street has been dead for almost five years, but Cord Meyer (of Forest Hills fame) has selected a local designer to revive the site: Morali Architects.

Anthony Morali released elevation drawings of his 998-foot, 300,000-square foot design, which will feature apartments rising from a hotel base with garden space integrated into the tower.

In a phone conversation with The Observer Mr. Morali described his design to us. “It has some of the features of segmentation” in common with Calatrava’s tower, he said, “but what we’re really trying to do is integrate sustainability and gardens.”

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(Brilliant concept. Mike)

Corrugated iron and timber need not represent poverty and oppression.

By Stephen Lamb and Andrew Lord
Touching the Earth Lightly
Feb 2013

Excerpt:

To explain the concept, hold in your mind a cube. Like the shack, the cube has six sides. Human-hearted design looks to address the issues of fire, flooding, food security and insulation by exploring design opportunities for each of these six sides.

The first side of the cube is the floor. We raise the shack off the ground to respond to the issue of flooding. Communities around the world have been doing this for thousands of years. This is not a new concept.

The next two sides of the cube represent the sun-facing walls of the shack. On these two sides The Green Shack suggests they be wrapped with a fire-proof boarding, covered by a vertical thriving organic vegetable garden. This wall garden creates food for the household. This wall is drip irrigated using a low tech, slow-release gravity fed system via a pipe made of re-cycled car tires. Rain water is also captured off the roof and stored on site. The slow-drip nature of the irrigation system ensures that the wall is constantly wet.

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Click on image for larger file.

“Local, fresh, nutritious food is what the people of the cities need. And there is no reason why we can’t turn all of these rooftops into living farms.”

From AGRI-TECTURE:
Buildings That Grow Food
Feb 21, 2012

Excerpt:

A new Bronx building will soon have residents going green in more ways than one. Known as “Arbor House”, the nearly $38 million project built on land purchased from the New York City Housing Authority’s Forest Houses property in Morrisania boasts a hydroponic rooftop farm for growing fresh vegetables. The eight-story building located at 770 East 166th Street features 124 units of affordable housing and a variety of green perks like a living green wall in the lobby and “stair music”, in the hopes that people will take the stairs and get some exercise.

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Hydroponic vegetable farm in an unused utility room on the roof of a downtown Nashville condo.

From Kickstarter:

Urban Hydro Project is an urban hydroponic farm that provides fresh, local food YEAR ROUND to people in the Nashville community. We grow lettuces, tomatoes, herbs, and other leafy greens. Here’s the catch…we’re currently only using a quarter of our grow room.

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Section of skyscraper that include food production.

Can you imagine a building that produces more resources than it consumes?

ARUP
Feb 4, 2013

Excerpt:

The building helps to optimize city-wise production, storage and consumption of everything from food and energy to water. Brought about by a concern for depleting natural resources, lack of physical space, and drastic climate change; food production systems, like green spaces, become integral elements of the sustainable smart city.

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Since 2010, three farms have been built in Zurich, Berlin and Brussels.

DesignBoom
Feb 17, 2013

Excerpt:

The farm-container employs aquaponics – which combine traditional tools and means of cultivating – with contemporary high performance.

Each of the units is comprised of two cubic meters of water, flowing in a closed circuit in which fish feces are broken down by bacteria in a sewage tank, transformed into minerals which serve as fertilizer for the plants, which they filter – the water returning back to the pool of fish.

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