Chris Jacobs Vertical Farm

New Designs as of September 19 08 originally presented to the Mindshare group at www.mindshare.la in Los Angeles. Special thanks to Dean Fowler for his help in modeling and rendering (and design help) the “black” building…soon to be GREEN! These renders will be updated very soon with foilage and plant life…and more color on the actual structure.

I worked very hard on the balsa models…but in all fairness, they were built using Rhino 3D and rendered using the Maxwell Rendering Application.

Here are some conceptual designs that were developed prior to the Vertical Farm published in the NYtimes.com article.

…and one with Vegitation:

This is a truncated version of this website article…originally published in New York Magazine (April 2007). This article started the Vertical Farm revolution.

The Circular Vertical Farm designed by Chris Jacobs was, in fact, the first attempt to design a “Vertical” farm from scratch. According to Dickson Despommier, The Living Tower, designed by Pierre Sartoux actually wasn’t originally designed to be a Vertical Farm.  Some popular magazines have published the circular farm, and they are below:

Here are a few renderings of a new Vertical Farm design that would have a glass shell (not yet rendered) with an outside structure to support the inside hydroponic facilities. These are just rough design sketches - as the final is in development. The inside of this structure would house efficient LED lighting systems in the red, green, and blue spectrum’s.

These new designs will have full housing on the top and bottom of the multi-level hydroponic facilities, including a full produce shop on the ground floor. The housing is still in development. Solar systems will surround this structure and will help to power the thousands of LED lights. The pins that come out of the X structures serve to hold the outer glass that will surround this structure.

Welcome to Chris M. Jacobs Vertical Farm Blog. I’ll be updating this site with more images, links, posts, and essays on this topic. You can find more information about Dr. Dickson Despommier’s Vertical Farm website here. You can also find an article written for New York Magazine here.

Chris Jacobs has been working with Dr. Despommier for almost 3 years now and created the first widely published design for the Vertical Farm. These designs have helped to elevate the concept to amazing heights. The most published Vertical Farm design can be seen below:

And Night….

Windspire inspired by associate professor of mechanical engineering, Majid Rashidi.

A new (iterated) design (below) modeled and rendered by Dean Fowler of Machine Films. Dean modeled and rendered the first Vertical Farm design and Chris and Dean both received design guidance from Rolf Mohr.