The Wallpaper* Handmade issue celebrates the art of design by commissioning fresh custom products from furniture to food from top-notch artists, designers, craftsmen, and architects. Well, one architect: Pritzker Prize winner Richard Meier.

Meier’s idea puts animal husbandry in the urban environment with a concept called Plug-in Farm, a series of residential and agricultural units that envision urban living as an efficient, sustainable team effort. Wait, back up one second: animal husbandry? The future just may be in breeding chickens, don’t you know.

As Wallpaper* writes, the farm is a “modestly sized but ultra-efficient modular concept” with a “three dimensional structural frame designed to be adapted to any site, from an unkempt corner of Manhattan to a slice of downtown Miami, reusing existing structures while building up residential density and community.”

The Richard Meier & Partners plan is featured in the two-page August issue. Left wanting more? We have exclusive companion renderings, plus a collage illustrating the concept, after the break.

The cover of Wallpaper*’s Handmade issue for August, customized for Richard Meier. Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners

The compound is clad in a signature Meier steel armature, though the units are pre-fabricated offsite and imported to the given site. It contains “plug-in” living and farming units, the latter “conceived as vertical vegetable plots to feed the adjoining apartments, with any surplus siphoned off into a local market.” And where’s all that husbandry taking place, you may wonder? “Public and private outdoor space includes a communal farm, allowing for small-scale animal husbandry up above street level.” Privacy would be decorous, yes.

Meier’s handmade collage for Wallpaper* sketching out his vision for urban farming in the future. (For more Meier collages, see here.) Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners

Rendering for the first level of Richard Meier’s Plug-In Farm. Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners

Building diagram for the Plug-In Farm. Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners.

The Plug-In Farm: not just for farming! Urban living, too. Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners

[Read the entire "Handmade" August issue of Wallpaper* magazine here.]

by Kelsey Keith

posted in General

tagged concept, Exclusive, handmade, plug-in farm, richard meier, urban farming, urban planning, utopia, wallpaper*

more articles by Kelsey Keith