Architect Vincent Callebaut hopes future cities will farm the sky
Imagine stepping out of your high-rise apartment into a sunny, plant-lined corridor, biting into an apple grown in the orchard on the fourth floor as you bid "good morning" to the farmer off to milk his cows on the fifth.
Imagine stepping out of your high-rise apartment into a sunny, plant-lined corridor, biting into an apple grown in the orchard on the fourth floor as you bid "good morning" to the farmer off to milk his cows on the fifth.
You take the lift to your office, passing the rice paddy and one of the many gardens housed in the glass edifice that not only heats and cools itself, but also captures rain water and recirculates domestic waste as plant food.
No, this is not the setting for a futuristic movie about humans colonising a new planet.
It is the design of Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut for a 132-floor "urban farm" - the answer, he believes, to a better future for the estimated six billion who will live in cities by 2050.
With food, water and energy sources dwindling, the city of the future would have to be a self-sufficient "living organism", said the 36-year-old designer of avant-garde buildings some critics have dismissed as daft or a blight on the landscape.
"We need to invent new ways of living in the future," Callebaut said at the Paris studio where he plies his trade.
Each building, he said, must ultimately be a "self-sufficient, mini power station".
