The first rendering that strikes a fancy looks like if you were to take Sauerbruch Hutton's GSW building in Berlin, assign plants for each color, and clad the building with the same transparency as Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque.
These two combined equals:
It sure is pretty, but as usual, details on how exactly a building like this would function run a little bit short. Technology like hydroponics is starting to make these buildings feasible, but, sadly, it seems we are still pretty far from realizing any project of this nature.
The other notable rendering looks pretty much like an MVRDV project, just with more trees:
Above is MVRDV's Dutch Pavilion, which famously started falling apart after about 5 years (woo starchitecture and it's emphasis on, uh, quality!).
The real fun is when you start to consider that these proposals are being pushed mainly in New York, where our increased housing and food needs pale in comparison to China, where they have started proposing agro-housing.
This rendering by Knafo Klimor Architects. The population of Chinese cities is increasing at an incredible rate, leaving little room for agricultural areas as the cities are expanding. Agro-housing proposes both apartments and gardens integrated into one structure, with each resident growing their own food. But how much better would this solution work to solve the growing urban agriculture problem? Would it be better to simply have solutions that are pure vertical farms, or rely on housing residents to provide all of the farming necessary?
What could potentially be truly exciting is the possibility of vertical community gardens, much like those squeezed into urban plots in New York right now. Imagine if communities gather, not on the block, but in the air.
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