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What if you put a house in a greenhouse, substituting a stacked garden for a yard? GrowLofts is a prototype development for developers wanting to combine housing with a greenhouse. GrowLofts share food, energy, and conviviality at its edges without sacrificing household autonomy. It combines solutions to three structural challenges that will reach tipping points in the future: affordable housing, access to healthy food, and renewable energy.
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This social housing structure sandwiches urban lofts (700 sf/65 meters) for short-and-long-term stays between a shared porch on the street edge—a hyperporch—and a shared greenhouse on its garden side or the block interior. Paralleling the greenhouse, the hyperporch facilitates greater hospitality and communality than what standard housing provides without sacrificing unit privacy. GrowLofts provides for urbanites an ark—a regenerative socio-biological interior connected with a porch that becomes a force multiplier for the street.
GrowLofts is a low-carbon building prototype combining mass timber construction with a greenhouse that functions through a climate battery technology. The greenhouse is a four-season operation supporting a food forest and powered by a natural “climate battery”—a solar heat storage and air exchange assemblage that uses fans to store excess heat and humidity from the greenhouse air in the growing soil through a network of perforated pipes. Wild temperature swings that once hampered greenhouse operations can be smoothed out to effectively grow food year-round while harnessing greater energy yield than that from solar arrays.
FUTURE HOUSE 2023 Global Residential Design Award
GrowLofts is a flexible prototype that can be shortened or lengthened depending on context. The prototype can also be flipped to place the greenhouse on the street where housing can be adapted to mews, alley, or courtyard housing. The climate battery technology based on solar heat storage and air exchange was developed by the Rocky Mountain Institute for remote greenhouse locations but adapted here to urban settings for all climates. Greenhouse planting is based on permaculture growing—a resilient farming culture structured around closed loop systems entailing the development of healthy soil, polyculture or companion planting, nutrient recycling, and stacked growing or forest gardening. Forest gardening vertically stacks growing space with in-ground tubers, groundcovers including culinary herbs, understory crops like leafy greens, midstory crops like citrus fruit, growing vines like passionfruit, and overstory trees like bananas. Flower towers of insectary plants invite pollinators as well as friendly predators to control pests inevitable in greenhouses. Roots, trunks, and leaves of crops benefit from the distributed moisture, which dramatically reduces the need for irrigation. During cool periods, warm air is drawn from underground pipes and circulated to heat greenhouse air. Heat can also be exchanged with the lofts.
“GrowLofts is one of those futuring projects that achieves novel outcomes by solving for multiple challenges simultaneously. Such scenario thinking will become ever more important in advancing community resiliency — the capacity to adapt to volatile futures."
The University of Arkansas Community Design Center is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, and one of a few university-based teaching offices in the United States dedicated to delivering urban design work. Originated in 1995, the center advances creative development in Arkansas through design, research, and education solutions. Nationally recognized in public-interest design, the center has its own downtown facilities and 5-6 professional design/planning staff, some who also teach. Beyond the focus on urban projects, UACDC has developed eight place-making platforms to shape civic design and public policy at state and municipal levels. These interdisciplinary platforms include 'missing middle housing,' 'agricultural urbanism,' 'transit-oriented development,' 'context-sensitive street design,' 'watershed urbanism,' 'big box urbanism,' 'smart growth,' and 'low impact development,' vocabularies which are locally articulated but hold universal currency.
