Facade Farm: Solar Mediation Through Food Production

Soilless agricultural systems such as hydroponics and aquaponics, which deliver nutrients to growing plants via water, are relatively new, and only now are they being considered as serious alternatives to conventional agriculture.

The increased role of technology within agriculture offers possibilities for architecture too. The accommodation of such systems in building facades could offer many benefits beyond just the increase in agricultural production needed to support the 7 billion world; the façade might also improve thermal comfort, offer acoustic benefits, create vegetation shading systems, develop a revenue stream for the building and also offer other psychological benefits for users and citizens.

The paper describes the result of an innovative collaboration between academia, architectural practice and manufacturing, culminating in the design of a series of food-producing facades, which can be deployed in differing ways: at a window-scale for hospitals, a façade-scale for offices and at a building-scale for supermarkets. The design utilises a hardware/software concept of the biotic façade that allows the technological and the biological to work in a synergistic way.