Category — Roof Garden

Maya Donelson tends the rooftop garden of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Photo by Peter DaSilva for The New York Times.

By Marian Burros
New York Times. June 16, 2009

This summer, Tony Tomelden hopes to be making bloody marys at the Pug in Washington, D.C., with tomatoes and chilies grown above the bar, thanks to the city’s incentives for green roofs.

Mr. Tomelden, the Pug’s principal owner, says he’s planting a garden to take advantage of tax subsidies the city offers in his neighborhood if he covers his roof with plants.

“If I can do something in my corner for the environment, that seemed a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “Plus I can save money on the tomatoes.”

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Click here for large high-res image.

“What if one block in Texas became the sustainable model for the world?

XERO Project, a proposal for an “X” of greenways and zero-energy building design in downtown Dallas, earned one of three first-place prizes in the Re:Vision Dallas design competition on May 28, 2009.

Urban Agriculture

As a complement to neighboring arts and historic areas, the XERO District is focused on urban agriculture and food. Public orchards, community gardens, private planter boxes, food stalls, and locally supplied restaurants contribute to the district character and buzz.

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GreenMarket sustainable food production facility, United Arab Emerates

GreenMarket, UAE

The GreenMarket utilizes BrightFarm Systems pioneering rooftop and facade mounted, sustainable greenhouse designs, to integrate hydroponic food production into civic buildings. The layers of vegetation encased in the walls of the building provide shade for the building interior.

The interior of the building structure is designed to serve as marketplaces, recreation centers, meeting halls, or any function that can benefit from enclosed, naturally lit, shaded, conditioned or semi-conditioned space. In the Abu Dhabi climate, these spaces will be extremely appealing in the summer, but should also be very comfortable at all times of year.

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Richard Lewis, Actor/Comedian, giving a speech at the Urban Farming Food Chain launch.

The Urban Farming Food Chain

“Urban Farming has established the Urban Farming Food Chain™, a vertical farming project. The Food Chain consists of “edible” food-producing wall panels mounted on walls of buildings, growing fresh organic produce. The wall systems of the Food Chain concept are as “links” connecting to each location by intention and design, as well as presenting a new definition for the familiar term, ‘food chain’. Los Angeles is the pilot city for the Urban Farming Food Chain, a project we will replicate in other cities.

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For the Greener Good: Vertical Farming from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Presenter(s): Dickson Despommier, Robin Elmslie Osler, Carolyn Steel, and J. William Thompson
Date Recorded: April 29, 2009
Duration: 01:29:59
Sponsored by: The Home Depot Foundation

Learn about the future of urban food production with Robin Osler, Elmslie Osler Architects; Dickson Despommier, Professor of Public Health, Columbia University; Carolyn Steel, Author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives; and J. William Thompson, FASLA , editor, Landscape Architecture magazine.

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Dragonfly, A Metabolic Farm For Urban Agriculture
New York City 2009
By Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Excerpts from Vincent Callebaut Architectures:

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

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Community Catalyst submission by Garon Sebastien and Chris Foyd - Vancouver

How far we have come — urban farming entering the mainstream design and planning world! These urban agriculture submissions would have been unheard of just a few years ago! (Mike)

Form Shift: an architectural ideas design competition

The Architectural Institute of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver – a jointly-sponsored open ideas competition.

Over the past 20 years, the approach to community planning, zoning, density, transportation and housing in Vancouver has yielded substantial improvements. Continued improvement, however, requires ongoing innovation and creativity. Good intentions need to be reflected in tangible urban design.

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The New Yorker cover by Helen E. Hokinson.

Madame Rubinstein’s ‘Farm in the Sky’ included chickens and rabbits

by David Lardner
May 22, 1943
The New Yorker

Last week the United States Crop Corps, an organization of auxiliary farm workers being recruited by the War Manpower Commission, received the uncompromising support of Helena Rubinstein, who gave a cocktail party to honour it and also display her own penthouse Victory Garden, known to everybody within reach of Madame Rubinstein’s publicity staff as the Farm in the Sky.

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Photo by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, National Geographic

A chef at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront hotel harvests apples ripening among skyscrapers. Hotel accountants say the roof garden produces fruits, vegetables, herbs, and honey worth about $16,000 annually.

One of a series of beautiful Roof Garden photos in National Geographic magazine found here.

Visit Diane Cook and Len Jenshel website here.

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Photo by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, National Geographic

Wasted space in the modern metropolis may become productive “farmland” thanks to advances in waterproofing green roofs. Some of the rice used to brew Japan’s popular Hakutsuru sake grows atop the company’s Tokyo office.

One of a series of beautiful Roof Garden photos in National Geographic magazine found here.

Visit Diane Cook and Len Jenshel website here.

October 22, 2008

Discovery Channel’s Matt Danzico investigates vertical farming, an agricultural concept aimed at growing food and raising animals in skyscrapers in city centers.

Tokyo, Japan. A man tends a tomato plant in Pasona O2, an artificially lit and computer controlled greenhouse built in the basement of a high rise building in the business district of Tokyo on February 15, 2005 in Tokyo, Japan. Pasona Inc, a human resources service company, built the greenhouse in order to introduce the pleasure of agriculture also to train aspiring farmers in the city. The basement space was once used as a vault by Resona Bank Limited. Photo by Junko Kimura

Japanese Government to boost indoor cultivation

The Yomiuri Shimbun
Apr. 10, 2009

The government is set to launch full-scale efforts to promote indoor agricultural facilities to ensure stable cultivation of fruits and vegetables, government officials said.

As part of a three-year plan to boost the number of indoor growing facilities about fourfold, to 150, and raise production about fivefold, the government will offer incentives including low-interest financing and a capital investment tax credit, the officials said.

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Mumbai Port Trust Garden receives Friends of The Trees first prize for its Terrace Garden at the Central Kitchen from the hands of the Governor of Maharashtra, in Durbar Hall At Raj Bhavan.

This garbage dump doesn’t raise a stink. Rather, it helps produce exotic fruits, vegetables and flowers. Lekha Menon meets city farmers who have mastered the art of making the most out of waste.

By Lekha Menon
April 05, 2009
Mumbai Mirror

At 80, Y V Damle conducts laughter therapy classes for women at Hindu colony, Dadar East. But the “fees” for his efforts is rather interesting - a bag of garbage! On other occasions, he trudges to the Dadar sabzi mandi where, along with greens and fruits, he asks the vendors to pack in vegetable peels and sundry rubbish. All of which find their way into plastic bags, drums and laundry baskets in his terrace where the retired BMC engineer farms for veggies, fruits and flowers.

Sounds incredible? But that’s exactly what the magic of city farming is all about. Like Damle, quite a few Mumbaikars are recycling waste to generate organic farm products right in their homes. Not just an effective method of waste management, these green thumbs believe, this form of urban agriculture is just what the eco-doctor ordered for solving critical food security issues.

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Dutch firm (MVRDV) proposes Pig City

From MVRDV document:

Can we combine organic farming with a further concentration of the production-activites so that there will be enough space for other activities? Is it possible to compact all the pig production within concentrated farms, therefore avoiding unnecessary transportation and distribution, and thereby reducing the spread of diseases? Can we through concentrated farming, create economical mass and a central food core, so as to solve the various problems found in the pig-industry?

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Meet Farming’s Future

By Hamida Kinge
Feb 19th, 2009
Next American City

The way skeptics see it, Dickson Despommier has a lot of explaining to do: He’s got big plans for the future of farming. By 2050, the planet will have to feed three billion additional mouths, and traditional farms, which threaten food security by deforestation, the use of fossil fuels and ecosystem destruction, will not be able to hack it. Dr. Despommier, an environmental health scientist at Columbia University, believes the answer lies in the vertical farm, a glass-walled structure that can be designed as tall as a typical skyscraper, and can be located inside city bounds or around city limits.

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Photo: Scott Stewart, Sun-Times. Helen Cameron inspects the veggies growing on the roof of her restaurant. “I come up once a day to see what’s ripe,” she said. Six tons of soil were carried up to the roof. Larger image here.

An uplifting aspiration - Uncommon Ground has reached new heights in its efforts to bring food production back to earth.

By Dave Hoekstra
Chicago Sun-Times
September 3, 2008

In late July the folks at the Uncommon Ground restaurant, 1401 W. Devon, opened their 2,500-square foot organic rooftop farm. The lofty mission is to deliver organic produce for the downstairs restaurant and to use the garden to teach adult volunteers and children how to grow food organically in an urban, roof-top environment.

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Terry Fujimoto, plant sciences professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, checks his students’ hydroponics agriculture projects inside a greenhouse on the campus in Pomona, Calif. on Monday, Nov. 17, 2008. Fujimoto’s program is at the forefront of an effort to use hydroponics _ a method of growing plants in water instead of soil _ to bring farming into the urban areas where consumers are concentrated. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

By JACOB ADELMAN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 21, 2008

Terry Fujimoto sees the future of agriculture in the exposed roots of the leafy greens he and his students grow in thin streams of water at a campus greenhouse.

The program run by the California State Polytechnic University agriculture professor is part of a growing effort to use hydroponics _ a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil _ to bring farming into cities, where consumers are concentrated.

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Photo: Staff of NTT Facilities, Junko Kariu (left) and Masahiro Nagata, check the roof-top potato farm in Tokyo, in October. Launched by two subsidiaries of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Corp., “Green Potato” project could help prevent overheating of Tokyo as well as harvest sweet potatoes in autumn. By TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/ AFP/

Crops planted on rooftops, underground create new jobs, lower temperatures

BY Harumi Ozawa
Agence France-Presse Nov 5, 2008

TOKYO — Tomohiro Kitazawa makes an unlikely farmer. He works neither under the sun nor in the fields, instead reporting for duty in the bustling heart of Tokyo.

As Japan’s capital city struggles with problems from food safety to global warming to unemployment, a growing number of people in the famously crowded metropolis are becoming city farmers, planting crops atop tall buildings or deep underground.

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Surrey may be home to region’s first vertical greenhouse

By Kelly Sinoski, The Vancouver Sun
21 Oct 2008

Rooftop gardens and vertical greenhouses could be a sign of the times in Metro Vancouver as the region wrestles with ways to tackle a global food crisis and the effects of climate change.

And Surrey could lead the trend, with at least one developer considering building a so-called vertical farm in Whalley, which is slated to become the region’s second downtown.

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Collingwood Neighbourhood House Rooftop Garden from Michael Levenston on Vimeo. See HD version. Click screen.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Heidi Sinclair has spent the last few years developing this roof garden at the Collingwood Neighbourhood House in Vancouver BC. She gives Mike of City Farmer a brief tour of the newly opened community resource.

“This past winter, the rooftop garden of Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) went under some serious construction; the old wooden plant boxes were removed from the upstairs deck and permanent flower beds made of cement were installed. The construction, finished in time for spring planting, has meant that the Renfrew Collingwood Food Security Institute (RCFSI) has been able to grow and harvest large amounts of fresh, locally-grown fruits and vegetables on the CNH rooftop.

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