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During the COVID-19 pandemic, city farms across London lost many of their public donations and visitors, and are now facing economic dilemmas. The project proposes transforming Vauxhall City Farm into a mixed use urban farm with in-residence researches in the form of the UCL Urban Agriculture Faculty.
This project argues for the scope to reimagine the city farm as beyond its current form: as a living, breathing and thriving community for both humans and animals; a place where co-existence between species is the driving force of the community. In order to achieve such a goal, the research and explorations carried out during the first term design critique of the Barbican, for example, the kitchen-less apartment, the communal kitchens, and the vertical farming, have been critically introduced in the master plan for Vauxhall City Farm.
In the new city farm, both animals and humans would live freely in this ecosystem, where housing for researchers families, research facilities for the UCL Urban Agricultural Faculty and the city farm would create an environmentally forward and fun model for future cities to move towards.
By criticising the austerity of the Barbican, the project removes the private kitchenettes off the apartments and inserts a communal kitchen and farm into the building. This communal kitchen also functions as a shared living room for studio flats.
A self-supporting programme structure is proposed to save the City Farm. The UCL Urban Agriculture Faculty provides the research foundation for the existing city farm as well as dwellings for students, tutors, faculty staff and city farm staff.
Previous kitchenless apartment and communal kitchen research are applied to the City Farm dwellings. A hen coop is included to provide fresh eggs for residents. An egg-stealing machine and a fire exit for hens are designed for the sake of henmanity.
By reversing the anthropocentric principle while designing the architecture for animals, this project conducts from animals to humans.
Instead of isolating the visitors from researchers and dwellers, their journeys connect these three parts into a whole educational agriculture plan. The programme leads an organic and roundabout venture for the visitors to get in touch with farming.