Tall & Urban News

After two years of development, Studio Precht has manifested a modular building system that looks to combat the combined issues of climate change, population growth, and food shortages. It investigates the connection of people with their food and creates a building that affixes architecture and agriculture. The result is a flexible urban farm that, in the future, could rise up within cities around the globe. “I think we miss this physical and mental connection with nature, and this project [the farmhouse] could be a catalyst to reconnect ourselves with the life-cycle of our environment,” says Chris Precht.

Regionally grown food shortens the supply chain and use of packaging, stacked gardens reduce the need for extensive farmlands, and greenhouses protect food against varying weather. These ideas are all built into the farmhouse by Studio Precht. The design itself creates an organic life-cycle of byproducts: the building’s heat can be reused to grow plants, water-treatment system filters enrich and recycle rainwater, and food waste is turned into compost for the gardens. Here, “food production becomes visible,” says Precht. “It reenters the center of our cities and the centers of our minds.”

The farmhouse is designed using trees as its main material. Cross-laminated timber panels are used to develop the modular system as, among many benefits, it has a lower environmental footprint than steel, concrete or cement. These panels are prefabricated off-site, flat-packed, delivered by trucks, and then assembled in the structure of traditional A-frame houses to create a diagrid. Each of its walls consists of three layers: the inside layer includes the finishes, electricity and pipes; the middle layer offers the structure and insulation; and the outside layer features gardening elements and the water supply.

The structure enables home-owners to design their own place. With a catalog of options, gardening elements can significantly be modified to people’s needs, such as enhancing solar panels. Taller homes are available and are designed with duplex-sized a-frames. This creates a large open space on the first floor for a living room and kitchen. Above, the tent-like space accommodates bedrooms and bathrooms. Its angled walls provide the space for gardening and creates a v-shaped buffer between apartments, as well as enabling natural ventilation and light. All food grown in the gardens can be shared or sold at an indoor farmers market on the lower floors of the building.

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