Harvest Green Project / Romses Architects
The ‘Harvest Green Project’ by Romses Architects was a winning entry in a recent competition held by the city of Vancouver: ‘The 2030 Challenge’ to address climate change plans and to guide greener and denser development, reducing carbon emissions for the future.
The concept of ‘harvest’ is explored in the project through the vertical farming of vegetables, herbs, fruits, fish, egg laying chickens, and a boutique goat and sheep dairy facility. In addition, renewable energy will be harvested via green building design elements harnessing geothermal, wind and solar power. The buildings have photovoltaic glazing and incorporate small and large-scale wind turbines to turn the structure into solar and wind-farm infrastructure. In addition, vertical farming potentially adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible parts of plants and animals. Furthermore, a large rainwater cistern terminates the top of the ‘harvest tower’ providing on-site irrigation for the numerous indoor and outdoor crops and roof gardens.
Seen at designboom. More images after the break.
Going green is starting to get out of hand. In fact, these are the kind of projects that bring out the irony in some “sustainable architecture.” “Let’s do something huge, but since it is green, it doesn’t matter how much energy it still takes to run this place because we’re making our own!” Being wasteful…..is being wasteful. Let’s get back to the basics of passives people. It will never fail us.
that is all
the initial cost will be high but when you factor in energy savings in trucking foods from afar it will be economically viable.
I agree. But let’s assume if u hav to build a huge building, u can choose: (A) a traditional one, which cost a lot and will consume energy after it’s done; (B) a green one, which costs equally a lot but wont consume energy afterwards. The latter one seems better.
On this project, my concern is can the farmer companies afford to build this kinda green buildings if they can grow vege on the ground? do they really need this?
i really like some of its concepts, but as damon says, aren’t they loosing control? forgetting what is a building and why we need them?
isn’t better to just have buildings that serve some porpoise like livin/inhabitating than built a huge structure to have land to farm?
I think the lesson we can take (and a good one) is how to integrate some of this features with the existing buildings or the new residential/museum/commercial project that we’ll see in the future
Evolution doesnt stand still and passive people are as logical solution as being an monkey.
I appreciate good efforts such as this- its interesting to see application of geothermal in high density solutions that area also always more efficient in an urban environment than any blingy single family Leed platinum house. Still, small scale wind power in an urban context has been proven useless like 10 years ago…
My problem is this: it is flagrantly naive on its whole “added agricultural value” gravvy.
Production is irrelevant and a waste of precious space in a high density zone (heavy rent just for growing lettuce). I think being an organic locavore is important but it will NEVER justify building a high rise to avoid shipping from a CSA 5 miles away.
It ignores the areas required to bring up animals sustainably or their “grazing area”(except aquaponics) it also seems to ignore and severely overstates the quantity of methane it can generate in this space. Hydroponics is only viable in very high-value crops (I bet you can name at least one).
The zillion “high rise farms” that have been popping up everywhere in the last few years are an intersting exercise but have no substance or capacuty for solving what is actually an urban planning problem: supply urban dwellers with tradicional agricultural land close to their home (converted lots, parks or specifically created voids).
That said, the vacant space that comes with the building is the best, chespaest idea from growing small scale crops.
I hope this is the last one.
A good mixture of chickens, wind turbines and rain water retention spread all over the building surface like a revenant of Loosian ornamentation, a regression to romanticist ideas of nature and self-sufficiency:
Are we as architects really this clueless or just cynical?
(Would probably feel moderately more comfortable with the second one.)
just cynical…..but is a necesary step to go up…!
Looking green?
I love green buildings, but i have two questions.
Firstly, how do yo control the moisture and some plegue of some rodents that love more than me to dwell in this special habitat?
Secondly, how often do you have to change the isolation with out putting out the grass layer?
thanks.
This really is a joke.
I am not a fan of the term ‘Sustainable Architecture /Design’ as it has become the emblematic by-word for Green-Ornamentation. Wind-turbines on buildings which do not even work… issues of vibration, and at the very least of all CONTEXT! Vancouver is a city of tall buildings, and tall building suffer from very poor wind path and vortex creation, placing these turbines like cartoon decoration into every free surface (get a load of those ridiculous vertical turbines even at low levels!) will produce efficiently zero energy. Wind turbines need to be placed high in the open air with no obstructions to the oncoming wind path. Green farming on the roof leading to heavy treatment of all water to be used for irrigation, if its to be retained in tanks… UV treatment costs a fortune and is very energy intense. I could go on.. and on… In a country the size of Canada… we can produce food on the great empty swaths of land at ground level, where the nutrients are in the ground, not pumped 20 stories into the air with fertilizers.
Its a Green NIGHTMARE!
We really need to go back to the issues of passive solar design, limit waste on-site during construction, build well and tight, use environmentally and people friendly materials with low-carbon footprint, and design flexibly. Of course, this is not favored by most architects as this involves having a very serious debate about costs, life-cycle, and aspirations of developers and clients, and no builders actually build… its not visually glamorous but its the real things that count… the things which at first might not be that tangible. Architects can not be held responsible for energy production in buildings, we can not anticipate technology and the rise in iPhones, iPods, large LCD TV’s, 8 burner stoves and quad-ovens in the ‘aspirational kitchen’ etc, which are ever consuming more energy. We need to concentrate on the buildings and the PEOPLE in them!!
guys,
If you want to make green architecture. Then you have to make something compact, so many roofsurface. sigh.
This is pretty cool. I like the way they break down the mass to allow lots of surface area for daylighting and agricultural production: their use of interlocking rectangular volumes to do so creates a hard, machined aesthetic that would contrast with the unruly exuberance of all the green stuff growing on it.
Now Lex: why would it be a given that green architecture needs to be compact? For highrise buildings, the greatest energy sinks tend to be cooling and lighting– both of which argue for breaking down masses to create more surface area. Without running a simulation I couldn’t predict whether this building is tall or large enough for those sinks to be dominant, and therefore the design efficient. However, it is not obvious to me that this strategy would not work.
I am no expert in green architecture, but this project looks like an expansive condo development to me. I would love to see the plans of this building. I am no expert in farming, but I think farming usually needs a vast amount of open space, for the ease of operating day to day farming activities. In addition, this building “stinks” literally, how do you deal with the animal waste, i don’t think fenestrating the building with curtain walls will solve that problem.
please inform yourself on the subject vertical farming before you criticize it.(verticalfarming.c0m)
it’s the only solution if you want to feed 10 billion people in the future and to give these 10 billion people enough land to live on, and if you also want to give some land back to nature ,btw because of global warming our usable land increases rapidly
there not many people around here who realises that we have to change how we live to be able to live
GREEN ARCHITECTURE ISN’T AN ESTHETICAL THING BUT AN ETHICAL ONE
The 2030 Challenge – Harvest Green Project / Romses Architects – http://tr.im/kR7U
“GREEN ARCHITECTURE ISN’T AN ESTHETICAL THING BUT AN ETHICAL ONE”
I completely agree but ironically this is the exact opposite.
The only way to feed a lot of people while maintaining sustainable agriculture practices is to practice small-scale organic farming in close proximity with natural systems and consumers, not in a completely enclosed artificial reality.
Sustainable, organic agriculture works with nature and helps preserve it- it´s an enclosed system of mutual support and has higher yelds (but also a lot more handlabour). In the future a lot more people will work and live with this.
These “vertical farms” novelties are not only a nonsense in terms of land use (where is the money to buy a plot in NY and build a high rise to grow cabbage? Even if you grew coca leaves it wouldn’t pay for it!) but they clearly are detrimental to the quality of the farm ecosystems that sustain a lot of bug and birdlife, excluding industrial farming methods.
I’m not speaking out of my #$$ as I’ve maintaind chickens and an horticulture allotment for the last 6 years- try it out and reach a more informed conclusion.
It’s time to be pragmatic…
i agree with your statemant that vertica
I agree with many of you, this simply cannot be taken seriously. I am all for green architecture but to be honest, this is a caricature of what green arch. should not be about. OK, let’s see: you know how much farmland available there is in the whole world? A LOT. And yet these pseudo-ecologists want to come off with a ridiculous idea that an urban building should be a farm and cultivate not only veggies but FISH? Are you kidding me? If you want to decrease carbon emissions make people change their light bulbs, exploit solar and eolic energy, recycle garbage, use green materials, and most importantly, change their consumerist attitudes.
THAT would make a huge impact, not cultivating fish and raising cattle on your rooftop. That is just stupid.
Can you give me plans and the location of this building?
It’s interesting and i want know more
At this point all of these vertical farms are just drawings. Would it be so bad to build one or two of them and *then* decide whether they aren’t a useful solution?
@Paul
I understand your position but this isn’t CERN’s LHC, various types of small scale urban farming are already practiced but need several conditions to be viable.The results are predictable.
Farming in urban buildings is certainly viable, just look at this amazing example in Milwaukee: http://www.growingpower.org/
What I ask is what is the point of vertical? What is the point of stacking animals and call it sustainable? What is the point of employing renewable energy technology in places where it isn’t supposed to be efficient?
It understand that it is tempting for architects to think that everything can be solved with buildings.
maybe it coud have more windows
isnt it a kind of copy – from mvrdv pigtower?
@ nombre
I think MVRDVs Pig City showed the full costs of our nutritional preferences and did away with a naive notion of ‘biological farming’ and ‘happy pigs’.
This project does the exact opposite: It obfuscates the contradictions of our current lifestyle by adding ‘green’ paraphernalia.
you should see his ‘award-winnning’ submission on the other design category of the FORMSHIFT competition, equally useless, with lots of lip-service and pretty images of every green technology, everything except for the kitchen sink.
I’m definitely relieved to see that most of us share the same views on the growing problem of “green-washing” (look at how green, the color, has now made its way into ALL the project images of ALL new buildings supposedly illustrating their environmental qualities, regardless of their reality).
I think this is a very good example of a “half-baked-green-pudding” of a building…
Ecology is basic physics, it requires no easy solution, but simple reasoning. There is no need for emotional over-reaction based on guilt.
You all know the Toyota Prius for instance, the first commercially successful hybrid car. Although technically its a great idea, it is “ugly” (come-on admit it!), and if it wasn’t, it would not sell. No one wants an “eco-car” looking like a BMW M5, driving an eco car seems only acceptable if everyone can see what a good little citizen you are, doing a sacrifice for the planet! In the same way that I believe an eco car should also be as beautiful as a Ferrari and as much fun as a lotus Elise, I think architecture MUST combine sustainable technology with good urban planning, interesting spacial qualities and stimulation aspect.
As architects, it is of course vital that we speed up our work making buildings environmentally viable, but it is even more important that while doing so, we do not loose track of the holistic aspect of architecture.
REDUCING ARCHITECTURE TO ONE ISSUE (as important as it may be) WILL ONLY LEED TO A LONG TERM DISASTER.
When you say “GREEN ARCHITECTURE ISN’T AN ESTHETICAL THING BUT AN ETHICAL ONE”, I couldn’t disagree more!!
Making ecologically viable buildings (let,s stop using Green or Eco for a sec, at least until we know what these words mean…) is simply a necessity, it is not ethical, its IMPERATIVE.
IN THE SAME WAY THAT YOU CAN’T DESIGN A BUILDING WITHOUT A STRUCTURE THAT WORKS, UNDERSTANDING THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT IS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE DESIGN. NO MORE, NO LESS.
in fact, we need this type of apparently not practic function, because, we’re cutting down all the forest for farm, and the lands isn’t enought since this planet is overpopulated
This design looks WAY too familiar, research a french architecture firm SOA and see theres. I afree with building on top of each other but with a conceptual idea such as this lets reach outside the box a little please.
مشروع حلو
im tunisian student …im wondering if some one have the analyze of this project ( plans …)
voila mon email :amrou88@hotmail.fr
merciii….thx