Vertical Farms

Adam, Cain, the Garden of Eden or the Fertile Crescent.

Few innovations have marked the history of mankind as much as agriculture, and in spite of technological progress, even fewer innovations have kept their perception or meaning unchanged over the millennia.

 

Despite being mechanized, shaped by genetic experimentation, and increasingly less sustainable, agriculture remains, in the collective imagination, associated with a rural ideal of harmony and balance with nature.

Until today. 

Regardless of its perceptions, traditional agriculture is showing major limitations in light of present-day challenges. Population growth, and thus the need for more and more crops, are in fact triggering a global crisis in the availability of fertile soil and food products.

This is where vertical farms come into play: impressive buildings, where cultivation towers lit by artificial light, use technology to force natural processes. In a few thousand square metres, they can replicate the output of hectares of land and numerous seasonal cycles.

These are avant-garde and still relatively unexplored objects, but they will progressively populate our cities, becoming sources of sustenance and an integral part of the landscape and collective imagination –just as farmland, mills, and granaries have been for centuries. 

What identity should be given to the machine-buildings of the future, which will be key to global power? And what form should be designed for a new archetype that will become a common feature of the urban landscape?

This is the question posed by Vertical Farms, the competition by YAC and Manni Group, aimed at laying the foundations for future reflection on how to nourish the planet, and thus continuing to write the history of the ancient miracle that has always fascinated and sustained mankind: agriculture.

YAC would like to thank all the designers who will take up this challenge.