AGRI – CULTURE

A research and design studio @ the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture.
The studio has focussed on ways the city can contribute to its own feeding needs. In this way we were interested to discover, through research and testing, new typologies for urban food production. To achieve this target, students needed to understand the way several types of foods are produced from its architectural envelope, its structural skeleton, its pipes and flows of nutrients and waste to the way citizens & urban farmers can benefit each other. The city is not merely a background neither, the city is a huge reservoir of materials, nutrients and technology that these new typologies should connect to. Also; citizens can also become customers, participants, visitors.

By taking all these parameters into account, students were stimulated to find new architectural narratives for food producing buildings. The studio was formatted in such a way that research and design ran parallel to each other. This included understanding the specific spatial and environmental needs to produce food products but also investigating through scenarios various alternatives that could answer the urban questions of agricultural production. By following a series of precise and strict drawing techniques, students have visualised their research and design results.