Going Agro

[Image: Agro-housing will include rooftop vegetable plots; designed and rendered by Knafo Klimor Architects].

Via Dwell's recently redesigned blog, we discover so-called agro-housing: buildings made for, with, and alongside residential experiments in agriculture.

[Images: Agro-housing by Knafo Klimor Architects].

Agro-housing, Dwell writes, "incorporat[es] greenhouses within high-rise housing projects."

Essentially, the project is a combination of housing and urban agriculture. There's an apartment tower in which people live. Then there's a multi-story greenhouse that sits in the middle of the building, where fruits, vegetables, spices, and flowers will grow. A rooftop green space caps off the structure, and passive and active solar energy, along with gray water irrigation and rain water harvesting, helps keep the building also somewhat sustainable in form as well as function.

Jetson Green adds that this would also result in a "decreased reliance on transportation for agricultural products," thus cutting down on unnecessary truck, train, and container ship journeys.
You'd walk out onto your terrace, pick an apple and then eat it.

[Images: Like the interior of the Oxygen Garden, it's agro-housing by Knafo Klimor Architects].

The specific project featured here is by Knafo Klimor Architects – and, though it was intended for construction in China, clearly it could be useful elsewhere. The building has the potential to bring its climate with it, as it were, and so this would be as appropriate for Shenzhen as it would be for South Chicago – or Camden Town or Trastevere. Water-depending, of course.

[Images: Agro-housing by Knafo Klimor Architects].

I'd build half a dozen of them and grow cloned roses. Open up a show garden. A maze of fertilized balconies overlooking the East Bay. At the end of the tour you eat a salad of flowers, specially tended in top secret fields, grown inside an unacknowledged seventh building somewhere on Van Ness.
In any case, I'm all for cross-breeding architecture with agriculture and, at the very least, this is a well-rendered (if overly rectilinear – surely there are better angles for capturing rain and sun?) possible start.