The ambition is to create a parasitic urban farm that can occupy and take advantage of the temporary nature of stalled construction sites. The farm can be hung from empty facades and help encourage eating local as well as creating community gathering nodes.
Food becomes infrastructure, and halted progress of construction offer up platforms for productive community growth.
Mid review has come and gone, and what did I learn?
1. A hydroponic urban farm in Brooklyn is feasible.
There are many farmers markets in Williamsburg alone that would (hopefully) become outlets for selling the crops grown from my project.
2. I don't need a solar array.
Thom brought up a really good point in the review- I don't need a solar panel system. At least not to the extent to which I thought I did. Before mid review I thought I needed a 40-panel solar array to power a field of LED growlights. But without those components, I can keep the project more low-tech and more mobile as a consequence.
3. Design the farm as an object, THEN design the farm as a system.
I was doing a lot of research that was getting pretty technical. The project was starting to feel more like an engineering endeavor as opposed to an architectural one. The research was important because I now have a firm enough knowledge of hydroponic systems that I can design with system components in mind. But I want to design the object first and then make the system conform to what I want rather than the other way around. To make the system adaptive and able to attach to any site, I'm considering a modular system. More thoughts on this later.
Next Steps:
I've already done some sunlight studies (above), but I'm going to revisit them and show how the sun strikes the facades of the site. The hope is to create an elevational map of where the sun hits the site, and from there create formal studies that occupy the sunny zone.
