Hot Farms: How Emails Grow Tomatoes (original) (raw)

2019 Research Prize

Hot Farms: How Emails Grow Tomatoes

“Hot Farms” proposes the research, design, and development of high-density food production, in the form of automated green house agriculture on the periphery of Dublin, Ireland that piggybacks on the data storage economy in the region.

Clare Lyster
University of Illinois at Chicago
School of Architecture

View Final Report

Combination of high-tech industrial agriculture with housing clusters and rewilding in the form of afforestation. © Summer Hofford from “Hot Farms” studio.

Jury
Scott Duncan
Iker Gil (Chair)
Marina Otero Verzier
Nicola TwilleyDoug Voigt
Charles Waldheim

Dublin is currently one of the largest data clusters in Europe with 47 data service farms in operation. The project aims to utilize the vast amount of heat currently expelled into the atmosphere (incoming cold air is used to cool the servers and the warm exhaust is then released) for the production of food, to not only solve the exhaust problem, but also to offer a more sustainable approach to agriculture in the country. Ireland has the third highest emissions rate of any European country, a third of which comes from the agricultural sector. The proposal understands “industrial symbiosis” as an environmental strategy by integrating data and food production systems, and more significantly, as a design tool to envision the future planning of a regional territory.

A yearlong research and design seminar and studio at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) conducted by Clare Lyster will apply scientific and geospatial research of greenhouse technologies and automated agriculture toward the projection of a series of future speculations that combine food production with data storage to generate new multiscalar spatial configurations for ex-urban landscapes.

Final products will include a research booklet, design projects, a series of seven-minute movies, models, and an exhibition that in combination explain how “emails grow food.”

Lyster’s proposal focuses on a too-often overlooked phenomena: on the one hand, the energy consumption associated with data as a result of contemporary forms of communication; on the other, the proliferation of seemly unassuming architectures of automated greenhouses and data centers. The project brings these issues together and aims to contribute to the conversation around the growing demands on data and food with architectural prototypes.

Marina Otero Verzier, Juror

Food production and distribution network combining data centers, roof gardens, and logistical towers for food storage and waste. © Jamie Krauer from ”Hot Farms” studio.

Super landscape of data centers, greenhouses, and surface recreation and farming. © Ricardo Sandoval from ”Hot Farms” studio.

Clare Lyster
University of Illinois at Chicago
School of Architecture

Clare Lyster

is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Lyster’s focus is on the design of the urban environment from the perspective of urban and regional systems, from the design and reuse of nineteenth- and twentieth-century networks to an investigation of how emerging platforms, from e-commerce to sharing networks, catalyze new configurations of urban space. She is author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhauser, 2016); and coeditor of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan (ACTAR, 2017). Essays have appeared in venues from Cabinet to Volume as well as chapters in edited anthologies on landscape and mobility networks. Research has been funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Graham Foundation and exhibited internationally. Lyster holds a BArch from University College Dublin and a MArch from Yale University. She was awarded the Douglas Gillmor Visiting Lectureship at the University of Calgary in fall 2017 and the CADA Distinguished Faculty Award 2019–21. She serves on the design review board of the JAE. She is founding principal of CLUAA.