SOA

Urban farming

2005-2012

Brief:

Prospective research studies on urban farming

www.lua-paris.com

• Minifarm
A small local farm producing traditionally-grown and soilless crops with a farm shop
• Cactus
An intensive production farm with limited ground surface area, erected above the urban landscape
• Urbanana
An intensive banana farm in a medium-sized ‘Haussmann’-period Parisian building
• Superfarm
An intensive market garden produce greenhouse associated with a supermarket
• Tridi
A large-scale intensive production farm growing crops on a three-dimensional structure.

After devising the Tour Vivante vertical farm project in 2005, Augustin Rosenstiehl and Pierre Sartoux decided to create an urban agriculture research group within their practice, SOA Architectes. In May 2008, Professor Dickson Despommier of Columbia University and several European students were invited to take part in a ten-day workshop aimed at producing visualisations of his theoretical work on vertical farms. But the question of architecture still had to be addressed.

The following year, the SOA team, aided by three students from the EIVP (Ecole d’Ingénieurs de la Ville de Paris) and Guillaume Jounet, architect, began working on intuitive conceptions of urban farms. In 2010, having carried out several case studies and, enlightened by written contributions and discussions with farmers, philosophers, sociologists, agronomists, etc., SOA definitively focussed the problem of urban agriculture around notions of complementarity between environmental and social diversity.
In 2012, SOA teamed up with Le Sommer Environnement and Le Bureau d'Etudes de Gally and together they now run the LUA and its related activities, aided by its members.

Since 2005, SOA have been designing several urban farm projects.