(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Most interesting conditions in the contemporary world, including architecture, are hybrid, exhibiting a spectrum of contrasting characteristics. Simultaneously informed by many disciplines, architecture operates across many scales and generations. This paper uses as a case study the speculative design and operation of a micro-farm, a self-sustained garden structure designed as a prosthetic addition to the facade of a building. The design of the micro-farm as an artefact is framed as an extension of a philosophical reading of architecture as living, positioning buildings as part of an expanded ecosystem. Here, the micro-farm is an active device bridging scales and tapping into systems by connecting people to food networks and built structures to climate and watersheds, while also generating microclimates and bio-habitats for a wide range of animals and plants. Fascinating aspects of heritage can be explored through this case study, including how we might re-examine agricultural practices as aided by architecture and technology. Such an approach might be used to enable hyper-local food production expanding food justice in communities previously dependent on unsustainable commercial agricultural practices. Micro-farms of this type could change people’s relationship to food, turning building occupants into farmers, tending to automated mechanisms as one currently tends to the air conditioning or wi-fi service in a home. Rituals of caring for, harvesting, cooking, sharing, and consuming the food produced would reframe critical relationships between people and architecture through the post-occupancy period. The potential interest of the public to incorporate micro-farms in their architecture could be one outcome of the global pandemic, akin to the increased interest in contemporary artisanal domestic practices. It could expand our reading of architecture’s role as an active participant within the ecosystem, perhaps serving as a call to action for increased environmental sustainability through architectural performance. Positioned in this way, micro-farms as small designed prosthetics added to existing buildings or as significant facade elements in the architecture of the future hold the potential to radically change how architecture performs technically, environmentally, and culturally. Such changes would fundamentally alter architecture’s intangible heritage to come.