Concept:

Many major cities thrive off a bustling business district with a chain of tourist attractions that populate its urban fabric. As a consequence, the downtown proper’s primary focus typically revolves around consumptive rather than productive activities. Buildings are built taller to maximize occupiable square footage, land use is corrupted to serve businesses and visitors while neglecting its residents, and public space only occurs in between programmatic contrasts or the first few floors of a structure. This form of the dense consumptive metropolis results in many of the productive entities that feed its necessities of food, water, and energy to be pushed to its extremes. Resulting from such urban characteristics, urban sprawl, food deserts, and water quality and quantity are all extremely common topics of concern when regarding the contemporary city. 

 

Approach: 

To speculate one scenario on how this gap can be bridged between productive sources and the urban, the project looks to vertical farming and water collection to mitigate the issues previously mentioned. Taking place in the heart of Chicago, the city is one of the top ten food deserts in the United States and is commonly discussed when considering contemporary issues of urban sprawl, water quality, and the energy crisis. 

 

Site: 

Sited on the peninsula between the Ogden Slip and the Chicago River, the building proposal sits on a foundation that was previously excavated for Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire. An ideal location for such a project, the site allows for large amounts of solar exposure for energy production, contact with two waterways for water collection and purification, and a prime spot on the Chicago skyline to serve as a new icon for the city. Also a prominent quality of this location, the site remains one of the last areas along the Chicago Lakefront in the city proper to be developed. As the project comes to completion, the result will complete Daniel Burnham’s original intentions for the Chicago Lakefront, completing the axis of tourism attractions that populates the areas adjacent to Lake Shore Drive with green strategies. Therefore, the site becomes a new icon for Chicago by situating a productive entity into the tourism-dense and consumption-heavy lakefront of the city.

 

Techniques: 

How this new icon is realized programmatically comes in the form of a vertical farming tower juxtaposed with high-income condominiums, residential town-homes, and a public market. In contrasting such programs, spaces become educational in quality, communicating the processes that go into the urban farming practices of aquaponics, hydroponics, and aeroponics. In order to efficiently serve such processes, the building has an array of sustainable strategies. In terms of water collection, the project features a triangulated enclosure that is linked to the building’s overall water system to irrigate its many plants and public pool. Regarding energy, this same triangulated roof’s glass panels have photovoltaic arrays that power its many systems. Finally, extending beyond the site, the pulley system that circulates throughout the project is also imagined to extend to grocery stores in the surrounding area, providing to neighborhoods that otherwise would not have access to fresh produce.   

 

Inspiration: 

Inspired by agricultural infrastructure and vertical farming innovations, the resulting spaces revolve around architectural strategies of structural openness, expression of systems, and continuity of circulation. Whether in the form of pulley systems that distribute produce throughout the building and beyond, minimal cross-bracing and skinny columns, or helicoidal cores, the project’s style is extremely invested in provoking the spatial qualities of production. This is the Biotower.