My name is Chris Jacobs and I’m a designer living in Los Angeles. I design Vertical Farms for fun and most of all, to help Dr. Dickson Despommier to bring his vision to reality. My Vertical Farm design, created in 2007 is the very first widely published design first seen in Plenty Magazine, and New York Magazine. Since then, my designs have been published in dozens of national and international magazines, thousands of blogs, as well as some well known television programs including Cobert Report, CNN and the Discover Channel.
This fantastic article was published by and written by Green and Save and written by Steve Surman. Having had an article written about my involvement with the Vertical Farm movement was very flattering, and helped to shed some light on my contributions to Dr. Dickson Despommier and the class that came up with the idea itself.
The first ever article about Vertical Farming published in a national magazine put my Vertical Farm Tower on their cover, as well as a few pages inside. The magazine was called Plenty Magazine, and shortly after that publishing, New York Magazine picked up the story, and published 4 pages with a “centerfold” image of my circular farm design. This really started the movement worldwide, and helped to accelerate the Vertical Farm ideology that had been stagnant in the halls of Columbia University for 6 years. Here is the article.
The classic circular Vertical Farm design in a desert surrounding. All deliveries as well as the entrance are underground. Bottom floor of this farm would be a Produce Market.
Modeled and rendered by Dean Fowler. Design, Chris Jacobs and Dean Fowler
This amazing new light from San Francisco based LumiGrow Inc. is quickly becoming the industry standard for high tech LED horticulture lighting solutions. I’ve read on many blogs and threads that this lighting system is very effective. The company has partnerships with University California Davis, Duke University and several commercial growers. Although more expensive than standard horticulture lighting, LumiGrow has a return on investment of 12 to 18 months. This system can change the color of the LED’s for differing growth cycles…growing, budding, etc. Pretty amazing, IMHO.
More info can be found here.
If a Sonotube could be fully waterproofed, then this system could work. Here’s a quickie design I banged out in Rhino – a 3d app I use.
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.
