Future Cities and the Vertical Farm

The vertical farm by ExplainingtheFuture.com.  Where to get food, water and energy in the future?

Other than the pods shown in the image above, here are some applications of the idea:

For single family homes:  Home gardens or shared community gardens where open lawns now exist.

For multi-family developments:  The same as above / if there is a flat roof, garden there

For retirement communities: Nursing and activity departments can encourage gardening on the premises.  This will create and encourage mobility, connectivity and continuity.

For schools:  Science classes can network with the community and retailers to teach where food comes from and provide hands-on learning.

For Chicago:  Use some of the Park District land.  Vacant land can be urban gardens.  This is already happening.  Current policy encourages turning vacant land  "....into viable, productive urban green spaces."  As reported in Huffington Post, Sept. 2011, Mayor Emanuel stated:

"This policy is about taking land that we have here in the city of Chicago that is literally sitting fallow both as land as well as a revenue base or tax base and turning it into a job creator and a revenue creator. And there's great parts of the city where that exists," Emanuel said, as reported by WBEZ.

Look at Detroit ...

... Mexico City ...

For grocers big and small:  Make use of those large flat roofs by creating roof gardens.  Make use of the wasteland that is a parking lot by gardening in and over it.

For any retailers and malls:  See the idea for the grocers above

For religious institutions:  Inspire people to appreciate our commonalities and differences and plant the seed, literal and spiritual, for growth, responsibility, and a sense of community.

"Make no small plans"

"In the future ... Everywhere is a portal to anywhere else", Paul Nicholls

From Paul Nicholls' THE GOLDEN AGE - SOMEWHERE:

"In the future we will establish radical relationships with our surroundings. The Global becomes the Local.  Everywhere is a portal to anywhere else.  Leaving the notion of place, questioning its identity in a database of possible environments ..."

Any one remember Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone in Total Recall, 1990?  Will painting a room become obsolete? 

Paul Nicholls says "In the future ..." Seems like we are not too far from it.  The video below by stevecadwell shows just how close we are.  A similar display is in Miami International Airport, FL, USA.

Is it the new _______?

a) blackboard

b) flatscreen

c) wall finish

d) media wall

e) storefront

f) stimulation within a health care environment

g) church altar
h) conference room
i) etc.

j) all of the above

Is it new? Is it the future? Or, as seen in the Snibbe video below, is it already here?

Light and Music: Chicago's Luminous Field

Luminous Field is by Luftwerk.  To really get the feel for this and what it's about watch the videos.  The photos are mine and the videos are by others:  explorechicago, thequinzilla, and thereseflanagan.  Wonderful hearing all the different languages while visiting this installation which ran until 2/21/2012.  Chicago, international City ...

Luminous Field 1

Luminous Field 2

Luminous Field 3

Luminous Field 4

Luminous Field 5

Luminous Field 6

Luminous Field 7

Luminous Field 8

Luminous Field 9

Dream Cities

Above is a Google SketchUp model I created for my continuing study on a High Place for Chicago. It is a to-scale 3D model of a section of Chicago's Eisenhower Expressway. A canvas, not blank, ready for more paint.

This High Place is a built thing. It is man-made. It is not only building, but also infrastructure. Also land. Also sculpture.

It is inspiring. It is responsible. It is more than Green.

It breaks boundaries. There is no difference between building and site. There is no difference between zone district and building type.

It is a nod towards built-utopia.

It is social, commercial and spiritual.

Like the inspiring images of Paul Rudolph above and Hugh Ferriss below, High Place for Chicago encourages a place that is more than plain built-environment. It is more than style, nationality, brick and concrete. It is an evolution. It is an idea that ...

... can be very real.

Tulip Days 2008

This is a design for a kinetic sculpture on Chicago's Magnificent Mile, Michigan Ave. The theme for the year called for celebrating architecture in the Windy City. I was part of a team from VOA Associates, Inc. that came up with this final design. The concept was that the City is not a static thing. It is always changing, growing, evolving. Our sculptural skyline was built with parts that responded to the wind. Solar powered lighting illuminated the whole from within. Good times.

Chicago: Beanstalk City

02.02.2009: Humanity has grown to not only live off the planet but dictate how it will develop. With our abilities of controlling the environment, lengthening our life spans, our ease at circumnavigating the globe, we have pioneered the earth to find that it has its limits. Our suburbs and farms have taken away earths natural habitats. The wild is becoming increasingly difficult to find. And the wild we find, we cage into preserves. We can not continue on this course.

“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet …” Agent Smith from The Matrix

We now have a responsibility to give back what we have taken. We need to create a habitat for ourselves. Abandon our suburbs. Contain our sprawl. Concentrate our lives and allow the earth to heal itself. Our cities shall be our habitat, our preserve, as in Chicago above. Our cities will use completely solar, wind, geothermal and other new sources of energy that do not make our atmosphere sick.

Similar in diagram to our own neural cells, our cities will house mega-populations in superstructures interconnected by a vast network of underground tunnels. Through which resources such as food will be transported, information and energy shared. Our concentrated way of living will relieve the earth of its burden to grow our food by constructing our own farms within the mega-structures of our cities. Farm land will be given back. Resources will be more conveniently shared by our proximity to each other. Our cities will be located throughout the world, like outposts, beanstalks to the sky, living among the wild life. We will allow the earth to self-sustain as we sustain ourselves in our cities.

We will use our earth-shaping abilities to save it, saving ourselves. We will be blessed to witness the resurrection of the earth’s natural habitats. By bounding ourselves, nature will grow beyond the fences we have constructed to allow lost ecosystems to replenish and redevelop. The entire earth will be a wildlife preserve. It is our honor to be stewards of how the earth develops. Let us step up the challenge.

Bungalow 2006

This is my take on the Chicago bungalow ...

A High Place for Chicago

When I was a kid I thought the cloverleaf at highways 290 and 90/94 captured my imagination. Even today, it is pretty incredible. A lot of cars and people get around it and somehow don't get tangled up. All those ramps criss and crossing. But the fascination has worn off.  Mainly because it fences off the neighborhoods of the University of Illinois at Chicago to the southwest (upperleft in the pic) and Greektown northwest of the intersection (upper right) from the Loop and the rest of Downtown Chicago. What makes a city a great place is mixing it up. The highways that make the cloverleaf are only no-mans-land-barrenness.

People are cut off from one another.

I know the cars and their highways are necessary to get people to and fro. But why do we have to live around a car and their highways? Why do we have to design around it? We need to put the car in it's place. Let's drive IT rather than let it run us over.


There is an opporunity here to reconnect what was lost. Mend the breached connectivity between Greektown and the Loop and UIC with something people can really walk on. Something people can enjoy.  New land.  New habitat.

Why not BURY THE CLOVERLEAF?

It was done in the Big Dig in Boston. Land was made where there wasn't any. Daley did it with Millenium Park. Kids, and non-kids, playing in a fountain. Priceless. With the Modern Wing of the Art Institute, we're covering up rail road tracks by building a place where people can stroll in awe of masterpieces that enrich us.

So lets bury the cloverleaf. With what? a park, mall, condo, office, stadium, ... a bean
I think the place should be a safe haven. A place to reflect. A place to rejuvenate. A high place. But more on that later ...