Just like Dystopian Urban Farming

Here’s another vertical urban farming project posted on Inhabitat. While we love the spirit and general interest in vertical farming, there are so many misguided and we think potentially detrimental projects out there that we just had to re-post Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm. Why anyone would think urban farming is a dystopian future is beyond us, but I suppose there are those folks out there who would miss fossil fuels, international tomatoes, and abused farm-animals. But rather than nit-pick at the title we can get at the root of what really bugs us about this project in particular…its biomorphism.

Using urban space (which would be at a premium for sure!) for farming would suggest a project based on effective and efficient systems of organization and density, not metaphoric allusions to bone, cells, or choral — all of which are highly redundant and materially inefficient (from an economic stand-point) systems by the way. Yes, it’s a seductive project, we all love to look at repetition and softly curved bodies, but mostly it perpetuates the misunderstanding that an ecologically minded project must look ecological. In the end the project retreads the old (and mostly mis-understood) “Form follows function” dictum and remains at the level of metaphor making architects look like folks who confuse poetics for research.