assignment 4: vertical farm

vertical farm

For the next six weeks, you will be adapting the existing structure at 91 Hartford Ave to house an Urban Agriculture Center with a Vertical Farm. You are to incorporate the following program elements into the existing building, and you are allowed to extend the program beyond the structure of the building by a factor of 25%. This can be done horizontally (in plan) or vertically (in section) or both.

The program for the new building is broken into two categories. The first is the Urban Agriculture Center, where food and soil are grown, and community/education outreach takes place. The square footage of this category is open, and the area allotted to each component is given in percentages. The second category is supplemental, serving as financial support for the UAC. These programs are given specific (minimum) square footages. The breakdown is as follows:

urban agricultural center:
food production & acquaponics (65% of area)
compost & vermiculture (10% of area)
classrooms, offices & incubator kitchens (25% of area)

supplemental program:
market - 10,000 s.f.
café – 4,000 s.f.

optional site enhancements:
exterior (windrow) composting area
livestock/chicken area
bee hives
exterior (seasonal) growing beds

other considerations:
loading areas
site circulation
vertical circulation
site/neighborhood context

The following programs are required to have zenithal light (i.e. daylight from above): classrooms, offices & incubator kitchens, the market, and the café. Obviously the food production area will need light from above as much as is possible, but it is understood that artificial light is essential to the control of the growing environment.

assignment 3: subtraction

subtraction

As established at the beginning of the semester, the mill building you have so thoroughly documented is eventually to be re-imagined as a vertical farm. Though we do not yet know exactly what that requires programmatically, we know that it will demand a large amount of light indoors. The existing building has a particular relationship to light, a particular materiality and a particular structural system.

You each have spent the last few weeks thinking carefully about light and making devices that measure, register, regulate and manipulate light. Using the thinking that the full-scale process has initiated, you are to spend the next week exploring subtractive operations on the site. Though your work may involve many ways of manipulating the materiality of the existing building, subtraction (also understood as the addition of light) is to be primary. Everything else is open: the degree of abstraction, the scale, the method, the sensibility.

Using a material of your choice, build a ‘thumbnail’ sketch, in model form, of this operation. Begin with the building itself, at one of the following scales: 1/2” 1/8” 1/16” or 1/32” = 1’. The thumbnail itself should be no larger than 10” in any direction.

You may wish to build several models in sequence to flush out your ideas. This is welcome, but some degree of resolution should be present in the final thumbnail that is presented. If you have built a sequence of models, present the trajectory. If the process of drawing is important to facilitate your inquiry, please pursue that, and present those drawings to accompany your thumbnail.

Reading:

Stoner, Jill. Rain in the City. from Visualizing the City, ed. Alan Marcus and Deitrich Neumann, Routledge 2007.

assignment 2: measurement & documentation

The students spent Saturday March 14th, and part of Thursday March 26th documenting and measuring the site of their next project. The following was their assignment.

measurement & documentation

We will spend Saturday, March 14 at the building at 91 Hartford Street in Providence. The building is a former mill structure, situated on the Woonasquatucket River at the southern edge of Olneyville. You are to work as a team of 12 to document the building completely in a set of drawings. The drawings are to be completed in Autocad, fully coordinated and cross-referenced with each other.

All drawings are to be at a scale of 1/8” = 1’, except for the site plan which is to be at 1/32” = 1’. The following is the list of drawings to be completed:

cover sheet / index of drawings
a1-0 site plan
a2-1 ground floor plan
a2-2 second floor plan
a2-3 third floor plan
a2-4 fourth floor plan
a2-5 roof plan
a3-1 cross section
a3-2 cross section
a3-3 long section
a3-4 long section
a4-1 south elevation
a4-2 north elevation
a4-3 east elevation
a4-4 west elevation
a5-1 ground floor reflected ceiling plan
a5-2 second floor reflected ceiling plan
a5-3 third floor reflected ceiling plan
a5-4 fourth floor reflected ceiling plan
a6-1 ground floor interior elevations
a6-2 second floor interior elevations
a6-3 third floor interior elevations
a6-4 fourth floor interior elevations
a7-1 – a7-12 detail

Each person will be in charge of one category of the drawings, depending on the level of complexity. The group will need to work closely together to coordinate the set, and make sure the correspondence between drawings is correct.

You are also to individually locate and document one detail in the building. Select the detail for its particularity and idiosyncrasy. The detail drawing can be at any scale deemed appropriate. It should communicate an intrinsic aspect of the building to the rest of the class. Presume your drawing to be a highlighting of some aspect of the materiality of the building, and a document of the detail’s relationship to natural light. If necessary, take creative license with this drawing in the pursuit of the detail’s particularities. How do you communicate the idiosyncrasy of this detail?

Reading:

Frascari, Marco. The Tell-the-Tale Detail from VIA 11. University of Pennsylvania. 1991.

Map:

Photos from Growing Power

Over spring break, Ming-Yi Wong and Yoko Saeki travelled to Chicago and Milwaukee to visit the innovative urban agriculture project Growing Power and to interview it's founder, Will Allen. They learned a tremendous amount about grass-roots urban farming, and the potential for translating this organization's systems into a true vertical farm. Allen has a project in the works very similar to ours already.

Here are the photos from their trip to Growing Power, Milwaukee/2009. Click title.

Urban Agriculture in Providence

here's a little informative pdf on Urban Agriculture in Providence.

(click on the title or.. http://www.farmfreshri.org/learn/docs/urbanag-growing.pdf)

3D Rhino Model

Just wanted to let people know the status of the Rhino model of the building I started (click images to look at a larger version).
The only things missing are:
-south facade
-interior elevations
-stair cores
-roof

I've spent quite a bit of time getting this set up and the rest should be a little easier, but just tedious. Since I will be sharing the model with everyone, it would be great if I could get people to help me finish it quicker.

JT

P.S. I'll upload pictures of the site on Sunday.

Southside Community Landtrust

Here's a link to Providence's Southside Community Landtrust. It was started in 1981 to help the residents of south Providence grow their own food. There's some good info in there if you poke around.

http://www.southsideclt.org/