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. This social housing structure sandwiches urban lofts (700 sf) for short-and-long-term stays between a shared porch on the street edge—a 'hyperporch'—and a shared greenhouse on its garden side. 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. Roots, trunks, and leaves benefit from the distributed moisture drastically reducing the need for irrigation. During cool periods, warm air underground is drawn from pipes and circulated to heat greenhouse air. Heat can also be exchanged with the lofts. Wild temperature swings that once hampered greenhouse operations can be smoothed out to effectively grow food year-round while harnessing several times the energy yield than possible from solar arrays.
Greenhouse planting is based on permaculture growing—resilient farming based on closed loop systems involving the development of healthy soil, polyculture or companion planting, nutrient recycling, and stacked growing or forest gardening. Forest gardening vertically layers growing space from 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 and healthy predators to control pests inevitable in greenhouses.
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 “living transect” connected to a larger context.
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