Future Farm Forms: Architecture, Data, Agriculture

(Paperback)

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Description

Future Farm Forms is a research and design project that explores how synergies between cloud-based information technologies and agricultural production catalyze the design of new farm typologies with expanded program and collective space.

The overwhelming amount of storage required to accommodate societys reliance on cloud-based systems is impacting the design of our cities and regions. Hyperscale big box data farms occupy vast footprints, demand enormous power, and release warm exhaust air into the atmosphere. Future Farm Forms explores the potential co-benefits between data and agriculture (farm + farm) toward the design of unique info-agri adjacencies that reshape the countryside and the city and that offer sustainable and artful relationships between food, land, and the socio-technical assemblages that underpin urban life.

Through analysis, narrative and speculative design, the book reveals new typologies of architecture and landscape space that emerge from the synergies between data and agriculture.

Author Bio

Clare Lyster is an architect and writer whose work focuses on the built environment from the perspective of contemporary theories in landscape, infrastructure and, the socio-technical systems of capitalism. She is author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhuser, 2016) and co-editor of Third Coast Atlas: A Prelude to a Plan (Actar, 2016) and States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (Actar, 2021). Her writing has appeared in AD, the Architect's Newspaper, Cabinet, Chicago Architect, Harvard Design Magazine, Footprint, Fresh Meat, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Landscape Architecture, MONU, New Geographies, Places, and Volume and as chapters in edited anthologies on landscape and mobility networks. Research and design produced by her practice, CLUAA, has been exhibited locally and internationally, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, University College Dublin, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016) and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2017). She is a member of ANNEX, an interdisciplinary arts collaboration in Dublin that curated Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, Transmediale Arts Festival, 2022 and Galway International Arts Festival, 2022. Lyster has been awarded grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, the UIC OVCR Grants for the Arts, Architecture, and Design and the Humanities and the Graham Foundation. She received the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize, the CADA Distinguished Faculty Award (2019-2021) and a UIC Researcher and Scholar of the Year Award, Humanities, Arts, Design and Architecture (2020).