H&P Architects Mixes Urban Farming with Stunning Architecture - Dispatch Weekly

H&P Architects has made a multi-tiered home in Vietnam, fusing architecture with agriculture and urban farming, highlighting how sustainable design can be integrated into cities.

Agritecture: Where Agriculture Meets Architecture

Agritecture fuses agriculture and architecture together, bringing the outside inside and vice versa.

Vertical farming and urban farming are associated with this movement, utilising urban spaces to their fullest capacity. Rooftop gardens, living walls are examples of architectural features that are used in cities.

Food and produce can be grown as part of the urban farms or small-scale crops. It can improve community interaction and food education.

Urban rooftop gardens are becoming more popular as increasing populations puts pressure on space within cities.

Examples of successful rooftop gardens are: Eagle street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, New York, and the Cloud 9 Rooftop Farm.

Tiered Home in Vietnam: the Concept

The Vietnam based building was made using nine concrete terraces, all with large vegetation grown outside.

The plants act as a barrier from noise, dust and over heating coming from outside. An irrigation system ensures all plants are regularly watered to limit them from drying out.

The ground level contains the living accommodation, which includes: kitchen, bedroom, lounge and play area. The first floor has three bedrooms and the second floor has a study and a workshop.

Connection and Cultivation

H&P architects explained that “Agricultural cultivation helps bring city dwellers closer to the nature by giving them interesting first-hand experience in planting, taking good care and sharing harvested produce from their own farmland plots with their neighbors.”

Mixing urban farming with architecture has many benefits such as cleaner air, which is helpful in smoggy and polluted areas.

Growing your own plants can also help people feel more connected to their area by taking the time to take care of a living thing.

Shared spaces can help bind communities together whilst providing education for those who have little understanding of where fruit and vegetables come from.

Why is Urban Farming and Agriculture Important for Architecture?

Overpopulation puts stress on the environment, food production and the earth as the climate changes and pollution levels increase.

As these concerns escalate, architects increasingly have to react to these changes, integrating and challenging the status quo into a more positive outcome.

As Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects notes:

“From an architect’s perspective, it must be said at the outset that issues as complex and far-reaching as urban regeneration, environmental sustainability, and economic development are impacted first by choices made long before a project reaches an architect’s office.”

“They are the choices a society makes about the ways it wants grow, and the legacy it wants to leave to future generations.”

Do you think urban farming and agriculture will become more integrated into architectural design in cities? Or do you think it is a fad which is largely impractical?