CityFarm - Austin's Urban Farming Experience

The Seaholm Intake Facility once provided an essential resource to the City of Austin. Our proposal explored how its reactivation could allow the facility to once again act as a vital resource to Austinites, where its impacts reached further than its site's extent. The project began with exploring the strengths of the preexisting structure and site, studying the relation of the building in the scale of the city, and ultimately us challenging ourselves to create a program that pushes the discussion of sustainability from more of a material strategy to that of real social and cultural impact required for a truly sustainable future. The City of Austin had established itself as a pioneer in the discussion of building sustainability, having created the nation's first green building program. As Austin was (and still is) growing rapidly, our program also was a call for the City of Austin to become a pioneer at the scale of sustainable urban growth, specifically in promoting reliable sources of healthy foods for its inhabitants. Therefore, our proposal maintained that the Seaholm Intake Facility could provide the perfect vehicle in which the City could become a leader in sustainable urban growth discourse by creating CITYFARM, a public urban farming education, production, and resource center.

The proposed program naturally grew out of the articulation of the existing structure and its original function. The act of pumping the river water into the main building created an elegant and complex structural plastic that made good use of its heights and voids to structure the space.

It was deeply important to us to highlight that the application of urban farming could be achieved at any intervention scale, from a pepper plant in the window bay, to a suspended garden on the rooftop. From the vertical garden connected to the aquaponic system, passing through the research labs, community kitchen and teaching auditorium–in the lower levels–to the exhibition space, public living room and reception–in the upper levels, we devised the programmatic elements to provide a diversity of ways to learn and experience urban farming.

One of the unique features of the proposal was the Living Plant Library: An indoor space displaying live species that are currently in season for cultivation in Austin. In addition, adjacent shelves were designed to be installed with seedlings for Austinites to take home to plant. This is a library where not only all senses can be stimulated, but where the“books” do not need to be returned.