Behold: This exercise in ultra-woke-techno-narcissism for the Chicago lake-front is called (variously) Eden Rise or Sky Droplet by Yanko Design. It is supposed to be a “vertical farm skyscraper.” The promotional literature says it all:
A skyline where fresh lettuce grows a few floors above your head, rainwater is harvested from the clouds, and the architecture itself works quietly to heal long standing urban inequities. This project dares to ask a radical question. What if skyscrapers did not just house people, but fed them?
At the heart of this proposal lies a deeply human problem. Food deserts. Across Chicago, many low income neighborhoods struggle to access affordable, nutritious food. Grocery stores are scarce, fresh produce is often out of reach, and fast food becomes the default not by choice, but by circumstance. These conditions have fueled health disparities and reinforced socio economic divides for decades. Rather than treating this as a policy issue alone, the project reframes it as an architectural opportunity.
Note: The proposed site for this prank is the most affluent neighborhood in Chicago. Hardly a food desert. The actual “low income neighborhood(s)” are miles away on city’s south side and west side. Now, imagine the cost of “farming” inside a building, the electricity for grow-lights, for running the water pumps, and probably an army of farmhands to manage all the plants, the hypothetical crops they might produce, and the technology itself. Imagine the complexity of the system and the many failure points entailed. Imagine a water leak on the 63rd floor.
Consider that this is why farming is best practiced outdoors, on the horizontal plane, on dirt. . . with rain. Consider, too, that Chicago is in the Midwest, surrounded by the world’s best farmland, and how easily food can be transported across the Midwest’s flat terrain, by rail especially, from farm to market.
If you really want to solve the “food desert” problem, try asking why the problem exists. For instance, how does epidemic shoplifting break the business model of a supermarket?
Thanks to John Kane for the nomination!
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Woke politics meets garish architecture in one of America’s most architecturally distinguished cities. Let’s hope this wet dream never becomes reality.
Clown world, bubble thinking. And maybe Chicago has a few things to work out before rational folks consider investing heavily in downtown. Not least of which is the fact that most all folks everywhere don’t want the hassle of working in downtowns anymore.