F13: Farming Lambrate

By Administrator / February 27, 2014 / Work / No Comments

Our project is an attempt of understanding the way in which urban agriculture can provide a response to a part of the questions that Milan faces regarding the food provision of its inhabitants and their possibility of achieving self-sufficiency, while also exploring the level of livability and the sense of community that the farming activities can generate.

Therefore, we first defined a means by which the first goal of urban self-sufficiency could be achieved, basing our decisions on a research into current food diets and their afferent costs, both in terms of space, workforce, production technology, health, and environmental footprints, concluding that a vegetarian diet would be the most economical solution, healthy and varied enough, provided that an appropriate selection of crops is priory done.

We proceeded to a further crops classification according to their light and temperature requirements in order to determine the amount of energy that would be necessary for ensuring their continuous growth and maintaining its costs at the lowest level possible. Since the differences between crops are considerable, we took on a shape of greenhouse that, as a result of sun orientation and radiation input, can provide a “gradient” of light and temperature that corresponds to the plants’ needs, reducing in this way the costs of heating for warm crops and the dangers of overheating or excessive water evaporation for cool crops.

Following this, we determined a number of support systems that could contribute to the project’s energy efficiency, partially burying the greenhouse, placing the rainwater harvesting pipes and tanks along the greenhouse and the vermicomposting area at its end, turning the northern wall into thermal mass, placing solar panels on the south facing surface of the greenhouse and equipping the house with a heat pump that will either complement the solar heating system or will work in reverse during summer months.

While implementing these systems in the Lambrate site, we considered a number of aspects that relate to the urban environment as design priorities. Firstly, the existent circulation system and the way in which the chosen site reacts to it through its pathways not only ensure the longitudinal and transverse crossing of the site, but also define spaces that serve different purposes – production/consumption, work/play, farming/park – creating a degree of separation between them. Secondly, the system of greenhouses further contributes to the diversification of these spaces, since it overlays a shape of its own, while the back-land resulted from the greenhouse excavation is expanded and transformed into a two level circulation system that separates two types of users – bicycles/skaters from pedestrians – and qualifies as the relaxing park promenade. Thirdly, the interstitial spaces determined at the ground level by the greenhouses serve mainly as green areas and farming places for the surrounding Lambrate community.

Finally, we each developed different house proposals, while maintaining certain criteria the same. These refer to the positioning of the house along the greenhouse curvature and the specific on-site points where these houses occur. The former is a decision based primarily on efficiency reasons – ease of access, more efficient house and greenhouse heating – while the latter is concerned with the circulation nodes existent within the site, where the connection between levels is made as a result of two greenhouses’ proximity.