Self-Sufficient Ziggurat-Like Tower To Bring Vertical Farming To Paris

In today’s world, where land is almost as valuable as the rarest precious metals, vertical farming serves as a sustainable and easy-to-incorporate answer to urban food production. To take the rapidly-growing movement forward, the designers at Paris-based ABF-lab have come up with the innovative Agro-main-ville (or food-farm-tower) concept. Shaped like a colossal ziggurat, the one-of-a-kind greenhouse has been proposed for construction in the Romainville region of Paris, in France.

Developed with help from Topager, S2T and Atelier Altern Paysage, the spectacular food-farm-tower design has recently won the second prize in a national-level competition organized by OPH Romainville. Aimed at popularizing environmentally-conscious urban agriculture, the 2,000-sq-m structure is designed to optimize solar exposure, while also offering city dwellers access to healthy food, grown locally with minimal carbon footprint. Speaking about the project, the architects said:

We are convinced that such a project contributes to improving the living environment, conveyed by the production of ultra-local food, healthy and quality, reducing costs, CO2 emissions and energy requirements fossil.

According to the developers, the tower’s design has been fine-tuned to maximize the diversity and productivity of crops through enhanced sun exposure. It is completely-sufficient, thanks to a rainwater harvesting system that collects water for irrigation, photovoltaic array that harnesses solar energy and an advanced on-site composting facility for safely treating wastes and in turn producing healthy, fertile soil.

As the team points out, the food-farm-tower can be easily integrated into existing mixed-use buildings. Priced at around 3.4 million euros, the project could help raise awareness about urban farming and vertical agriculture, while also fostering social and environmental responsibility among those who live in cities. The designers added:

We also believe that this type of project will pave the way for a new way of conceiving the built environment, for it is at the urban scale that it becomes possible to consider virtuous synergies between the project and the people in placing people at the heart of the process.