Gives an idea of concept, designing and planning of Dragon fly building which is mainly constructed as a farm in Urban area

1. DRAGONFLY
(A METABOLIC FARM FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE)
PROGRAM : A Metabolic Farm for Urban Agriculture / Mixing Uses
LOCATION : New York City, Roosevelt Island
SURFACE AREA : 350.000 m²
HEIGHTS : Antenna=700m; Roof=600m; Top Floor=575m
FLOOR COUNT : 132
AGRICULTURAL FIELDS : 28

2. In the 21st century, city dwellers use less energy and more public transportation than their rural counterparts,
but urban landscapes often lack localized food production. A Belgian architect rethinks urban food production
for New York City and came out with a futuristic self-sustaining, twin-towered high- rise complex that would
bring organic farming right to the heart of the New York City.This modern architecture is a metabolic farm for
urban agriculture. It is also a bionic and energetically self-sufficient architecture. This building sets up along the
East River at the South edge of the Rooselvelt Island in New York between Manattan’s Island and the Queens’
district. Its surface area is 350m². Spanning 132 floors and 700 vertical meters, the building can accommodate
28 different agricultural fields for the production of fruit, vegetables, grains, meat and dairy.
BIOMIMICRY
This building is inspired by nature.When u look at the building, what will u think of it? A Butterfly? Actually,
this building is inspired by a dragonfly. Which part of the dragonfly is it?It is the dragonfly wing, more accurate
is the exoskeleton of a dragonfly.The architect mimics the wings of a dragonfly both for aesthetic merit and to
facilitate the use of renewable energy resources such as solar, wind and tide-turbine power.The farm has been
appropriately named “Dragonfly” for its unique glass-and-steel wings that stretch into the sky. Modelled after
the wings of a dragonfly, this incredible urban farm concept for New York City intends to ease the problems of
food mileage and shortage, and reconnect consumers with producers. Urban farming is a growing trend
amongst savvy city dwellers today, but in a densely packed borough like Manhattan, growth must come
vertically.

3. DESIGN PRINCIPLES
This conceptual design focuses on creating a completely self-sustaining organism that not only utilizes
solar,wind, and water energies, but also addresses the pending food shortage problem. The modern structure
also accumulates rainwater to irrigate the farming. The mixed programs in Dragonfly are centredaroundtwo
main towers. These symmetrically arranged towers allow growth to expand vertically rather than horizontally to
account for the crowded Manhattan conditions. A sprawling greenhouse links the two towers,which defines the
shape of the design, supports the load of the building. The complex is arranged in a way that housing units and
work offices are interspersed between meadows and farms.
Plant and animal farming is arranged throughout the Dragonfly’s steel and glass set of wings so as to maintain
proper soil nutrient levels and reuse of biowaste. The spaces between the wings are designed to take advantage
of solar energy by accumulating warm air in the exo-structure during winter. Cooling in the summer will be
facilitated through natural ventilation and evapo-perspiration from the plants. Exterior vertical gardens filter
rain water which is then mixed with domestic liquid waste. Together they are treated organically before being
recirculates for farm use, preserving and distributing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. At the bottom of the
complex, there would be a floating market on the East River for growers to sell their organic produce.

4. MATERIAL USED
The material used to build this building is just a simple material, that is metal and glass. The use of the material
is directly inspired by the structural exoskeleton of dragonfly wings. Plant and animal farming is arranged
throughout the Dragonfly’s steel and glass set of wings.
GREEN FEATURES
Each building would be self-sufficient and act as a mini-power station. Energy is harvested from the sun and
wind to heat and cool the building. Two inhabited rings buttress around the ‘wings,’ and along the exterior of
these are solar panels, which will provide up to half the buildings electricity, with the rest being supplied by
three wind machines along the vertical axes of the building.
During the winter period,the spaces between the wings are designed so as to take maximum advantage of solar
energy through the accumulation of the warm air in the outer part of the structure and the design of the spine
would efficiently separate and recirculate waste products from plants, human’s beings and animals. During
summer,cooling will be through natural ventilation and evaporation from plants.
Due to the appropriate sun and wind conditions within these wings, proper soil nutrient levels can be achieved
to maximize plant growth.

5. Plants and animal farming is arranged along the exterior of the structureas to maintain proper soil nutrient
levels and reuse of bio waste. Plants grow on the exterior shell to filter rain water, which is captured and mixed
with liquid waste from the towers, treated organically and used as fertiliser.
Together they are an organic processing, before being re-directed for use on farms, storage and distribution of
nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. This urban farm will be cultivated by their inhabitants, thus completing
the cycle of self-sufficient existence.
2009 : 800 MILLION OF URBAN FARMERS FOR RESPONSIBLE ECO-CITIES
The world of fast-food and frozen food is over! The urban keen interest of the beginning of our Century turns
toward the garden flat bringing back the countryside in our overcrowded cities fighting from now on for a
community urban agriculture able to contribute to the durability of the city and to rethink the food production.
On the roofs, terraces, balconies, in the hollow of the non-built public spaces, in the interior yards and the
suspended greenhouses, the eco-warrior aspires to escape from its competitive and consumeristic universe
imposed by the laws of the market. He desires to cultivate its immediate landscape so as to better take root in
the ground by creating his own ecologic and alimentary biodiversity. The consumer becomes from then on
producer and the garden inhabitant !.
From the Parisian « worker gardens » to the « community gardens » of New York going though Muscovite «
vegetable squares », eight hundred million of urban farmers, i.e. more than one human being out of ten,
consume nowadays chlorophyllous products from these cosmopolitan kitchen gardens. These new gardens,
aware of the emergency to reduce our fuel consumption and the necessity to modify our behaviour facing the
climatic changes, decrease thus their environmental impact and build eco-responsible cities on a community
way.

6. 2025 : 5.5 BILLION OF CITY SLICKERS FACING THE FOOD CHALLENGE OF THE 21ST
CENTURY
According to the PNUD (Programme of the United Nations for the Development), the worldwide urban
population will go from 3.1 billion of inhabitants in 2009 up to 5.5 billion of inhabitants within 2025. Looking
for a positive energetic assessment, the contemporary city aims within fifteen years at producing cleanly and
intensively more energy than it consumes so as to pack this urban exodus! It develops therefore the urban
agriculture to become food self-sufficient by recycling at the same time its liquid waste by phyto-purification,
its solid waste in fertilizers by composting and by producing energy by biomass, photovoltaic cells and other
renewable energies (thermic solar, photovoltaic solar, wind, tide-turbine energies…).
In order to avoid the asphixiation of the planet and the feeding of its 9 billion of inhabitants within 2050, it
deals thus with reinventing the traditional energetic pattern between the city and the countryside between
western countries, emerging countries and developing countries. This sums up as following: on the one hand
import of natural and food resources, and on the other hand export of waste and pollution. The ecologic city
aims at reintegrating the farming function on the urban scale by emphasizing the role of the urban agriculture in
the use and the reuse of natural resources and biodegradable waste so as to close the loop of ecologic flows.
The urban agriculture can feed the city without any pesticide or chemical fungicide (whose toxicity is proved
on the human being : cancer, sterility…), and make it less food dependant of its backcountry or other regions of
the world. Organising the distribution of fresh products in short circuits, that means linked directly with the
consumer, the urban agriculture complete thus the traditional agriculture. In addition to the nutritive quality of
the produced and consumed food, the urban agriculture is also a growth lever of the urban unemployment
market and the local economy. It is used directly as a social link in the conciliation of the primary needs of the
newcomers with the challenge of their integration in the life of the city, fighting thus against poverty and
exclusion. On the sanitary level, this farm approach presents also an interesting potential for the
decontamination of polluted grounds and undergrounds as well as for he purification of the polluted atmosphere
in CO2.
Due to the fuel crisis and climatical change, the rural agriculture of the western countries must answer to the
worldwide food crisis of the developing countries and mainly Africa. Its role is from now on to produce (with
an increase estimated of 60% within 2050) all the foodstuffs transportable by boat such as cereals or corn. This
is based on the evolution of the science and the most advanced biotechnologies. In addition to this nutritious
role, the rural agriculture is newly challenged to recycle its own culture rebus for the green chemistry in order
to produce the bio fuel called “second generation fuel” using the energy of non-consumable materials from the
plants, that means fibres such as celluloses.

7. DRAGONFLY, A NOURISHING VERTICALY CULTIVATED CENTRAL PARK
The architecture has to be in the service of this new agriculture and to design this new social desire in this
context of ecologic mutation and food autonomy! The Dragonfly project suggests therefore building a prototype
of urban farm offering around a mixed programme of housing, offices and laboratories in ecological
engineering, farming spaces which are vertically laid out in several floors and partly cultivated by its own
inhabitants. This vertical farm sets up all the sustainable applications in organic agriculture based on the
intensive production varied according to the rhythm of the seasons. This nourishing agriculture is furthermore
in favour of the reuse of biodegradable waste and the keeping of energy and renewable resources for a planning
of eco-systemic densification.
In order to conceptualize this project and give our point of view in the ecological and social crisis debates,
Dragonfly sets up along the East River at the South edge of the Rooselvelt Island in New York between
Manattan’s Island and the Queens’ district. So as to face the landed pressure, Dragonfly stretches itself
vertically under the shape of a bionic tower relocating a new urban biotope for the fauna and the local flora and
recreating a food production auto-managed by the inhabitants in the heart of Big Apple.
Floor by floor, the tower superposes not only stock farming ensuring the production of meat, milk, poultry and
eggs but also farming grounds, true biological reactors continuously regenerated with organic humus. It
diversifies the cultivated varieties to avoid the washing of stratums of soft substratum. Thus, the cultures
succeed one another vertically according to their agronomical ability to provide some elements of the ground
between the essences that are sowed and harvested. The tower, true living organism, becomes thus metabolic
and self-sufficient in water, energy, and bio-fertilizing. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable to a continuous
auto-feeding!

8. A BIONIC AND ENERGETICALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of Dragonfly prototype suggests reinventing the vertical building (that outlined the urbanistic
booming of New York City since the 19th Century) as structurally and functionally as ecologically and
energetically.
To ensure the social diversity and a permanent life cycle (24h/24) in the tower, the mixed programmation is
mainly laid out around two poles of housing and work places. Around housings, offices and research
laboratories as well as the most private to the most public agricultural and leisure spaces are designed in
gardens, kitchen gardens, orchards, meadows, rice fields, farms and suspended fields. The distribution of flows
is made around a true safe spine spreading in loop the numerous elevators, the goods elevators and stair wells
serving all the levels by separating simultaneously the inputs and the outputs recycled from plants, animals and
human beings.
Architecturally, the functional organisation is represented by two oblong towers symmetrically arranged in pair
around a huge climatic greenhouse that links them and deploys itself between two crystalline wings. These very
light wings in glass and steel retake the loads of the building and are directly inspired from the structure of the
dragonfly wings coming from the family of “Odonata Anisoptera” whose transparent membrane is very finely
nervured. Two inhabited rings buttress around these wings. Their organically chiselled exo-structure
accommodates the inter-climatic spaces that receive the agrarian cultures. They buttress.
The whole set forms «double layer» architecture in bee nest mesh that exploits the solar passive energy at its
maximum level, by accumulating the warm air in the winter in the thickness of the exo-structure, and by
cooling the atmosphere by natural ventilation and by evapo-perpiration of the plants in the summer. Protecting
thus the cultures from climatic changes in New York (from -25.5°C in the winter to +41°C in the summer),
these plug spaces are useful to reflect on the agriculture not anymore in terms of surface area but really in terms
of volume. Actually, whereas grounds nourish orchards, each wall and each ceiling are metamorphosed into
three-dimensional kitchen gardens. The interior frontages of the housing and offices throw towards the skyline
of New York the cantilever of their hydrophonic balconies with hexagonal section thanks to what it multiplies
the culture layers by floors. The vegetation abounds, the earth is swarming of insects and animals are freely
brought up in holding tanks by urban consumers with low income. The architecture becomes eatable!
In addition to this thermal called « passive » system, the integration of renewable energies has been thought
from the design of Dragonfly to meet the needs of a completely energetically self-sufficient project in urban
centre. Actually, the South prow of the tower receives in all the heights of its curve a solar shield producing half
of the electric energy needed for its functioning. The other half is ensured by the three wind machines with
vertical axes of Darrieus type that coils itself up in the three lenses hollowed in the North part of the micro-
pearled shell towards dominated wind of New York. The exterior façades of the tower present a double
personality. Actually, in the West of the Island near Manhattan, the façades are treated in planted walls,
whereas in the East near the Queens’ district, the wet exterior walls are cultivated with tropical essences. These

9. vertical gardens enable to filter the rain water and the effluents of domestic liquid waste of the tower inhabitants.
The collected waters undergo an appropriate organic treatment for the farming reuse, bringing all the nitrogen
and an important part of phosphor as well as potassium needed for the production of fruits, vegetables and
cereals.
Outlining the bank of the Roosevelt Island, the tower widens at each side of its basis to better integrate the
flows that cross it and to welcome two marinas along the East River. This widening out forms two huge
photovoltaic vaults such as a solar dress floating above these two urban harbours: on the western marina side,
the wooden pontoons of the taxi boats open panoramically on the Midtown bank and on the eastern marina side,
the floating market oriented towards the Queens’ district is designed to distribute through the river the food
production of this vertical farm to the heart of Manhattan and to its million and a half of city slickers. Moreover,
these two marinas accommodate two huge aquaculture ponds, true tank of soft water filtered by the planted
frontages and dedicated to be re-injected in the hydroponic network of the Dragonfly tower.
According to the evolution of the urban agriculture enhanced by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations) that has been realising since 2007 that the organic agriculture on a large scale would be
able to nourish the planet, the Dragonfly project challenges the city of New York to rethink its food production.
In response, this project of inhabited vertical farm replies to the contemporary dilemma of producing not only
ecologically but also more intensively on non-extensive earth. This by merging also directly production place
and consumption place in the heart of the city!

10. CONCLUSION
Callebaut's Dragonfly is probably too expensive for construction in the near future, but it's an imaginative look
at how cities can become more self-sufficient without sacrificing too much real estate.
The Dragonfly is described by Callebaut as a "true living organism. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable."
The goal is to bring agriculture and nature back into the urban core so that by 2050...we have green, sustainable
cities where humans live in balance with their environment. He hopes to cut down on the amount of food
needed to be trucked from all over world to feed the growing population of big urban centres like New York
City, which puts a strain on natural resources and the environment.
Building another skyscraper in the middle of New York may not seem like the most environmentally friendly
thing to do. That is of course, unless said skyscraper is capable of providing a sprawling urban populous with
food, the reuse of natural resources and bio-degradeable waste