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The Ark of Eternal Food

Part 1 Project 2022
Bethany Sprigg
Newcastle University | UK
This project seeks to synthesize the vision established by Titus Salt in the development of the model mill-town, Saltaire, addressing concepts of utopia, self-sufficiency to the live-work model. Whilst engaging with the ideas of the past, it provides a programme of production within a community-based autarkic system using emerging sustainable technologies from renewable energy to carbon capture and indoor, vertical farming.

Thinking through energy and carbon cycles, circular systems allow for food production on site, with space for dining and selling the produce grown. Based on Geddes’s place, folk, work, the proposal provides educational understandings that can enable behavioural changes in consumption that are urgently needed to address a future 2050 Net Zero Carbon society. From arrival, visitors follow and learn about the fundamental resource cycles of energy, water, food and waste.

The project acts as a 21st Century monastery, self-sufficient, it provides a framework for both the developing systems and for expansion. Utilising modular elements across a multi scalar grid, it enables the structure to advance alongside the technology it supports. Robust yet adaptable, a framework for change is generated. Ultimately, staging the conditions for the emergence of a sustainable, resilient community and potentially a new sustainable ecological reality.

Bethany Sprigg

Tutor(s)
Prof Andrew Ballentyne
Neil Burford
Jianfei Zhu
2022
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