Global concerns have emerged around current conventional agricultural practices. With looming population growth and the degradation of our arable lands, new solutions are needed to provide adequate food and water to the earth’s population.

The current model is broken.

These challenging global issues can be solved within the built environment. Urban agriculture aims to bring food production into city centers in order to reduce food transportation and alleviate the pressure on agricultural lands to continually produce more. In Seattle there are many efforts underway to bolster urban agriculture within the city including community gardens, distribution networks, hunger alleviation groups and even government legislation. Seattle is ready for the next step.

Eco•Laboratory is a conceptual project that addresses global issues with local solutions and brings commercial-scale urban agriculture (“vertical farming”) to Seattle. Our vision is a holistic response to provde the basic necessities of healthy food, clean water, and a place where residents can live, work, and restore their impacts on site. By growing food within this building we are balancing ecology, social justice, and profitability.

The building’s design responds to the most progressive sustainability benchmark, The Living Building Challenge, while not straying from the ultimate goal of implementation. The aesthetic is an honest representation of the performance of the building systems. In this way, we combined the most innovative, off-the-shelf technologies with tested passive systems to create a commercially viable building solution.

There is no silver bullet for sustainability.

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