Future Farm Forms

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 society’s 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.