The New York Times this week highlighted Dickson Despommier’s idea for “vertical farms” and one of the images looked awfully familiar.
The professor of public health at Columbia University, working with his students, coined the concept about a decade ago, but it’s being taken up recently by several imaginative architects.
It’s been estimated that a prototype vertical farm would cost $20-30 million, but it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build the kind of 30-story towers that could feed 50,000 people.
For its originator, the concept speaks to ways that environment and human health converge, and architectural renderings now imagine such facilities.
It was a little easier for us. We thought that you, like us, would find one of the renderings particularly familiar. It’s the fourth image on the New York Times’ vertical farm slide show.
