GrowLofts share food, energy, and conviviality at its edges without sacrificing household autonomy. It combines solutions to three structural challenges that will reach tipping points in the future: affordable housing, access to healthy food, and renewable energy. This social housing structure sandwiches small urban lofts for short-and-long-term stays between a shared porch on the street edge—a ‘hyperporch’—and a shared greenhouse on its garden side. The greenhouse is a four-season operation supporting a food forest and powered by a natural “climate battery”.

The climate battery is a solar heat storage and air exchanger that uses fans to store excess heat and humidity from the greenhouse air in the growing soil through a network of perforated pipes. Roots, trunks, and leaves benefit from the distributed moisture drastically reducing the need for irrigation. During cool periods, warm air underground at 55° F is drawn from pipes and circulated to heat greenhouse air.

Heat can also be exchanged with the lofts, which directly open to the greenhouse. GrowLofts combine solar collection, thermal mass, and insulation to capture and circulate energy using the temperature differentials between soil and air. Wild temperature swings that once hampered greenhouse operations can be smoothed out to effectively grow food year-round while harnessing several times the energy than possible from solar arrays.

Greenhouse planting is based on permaculture growing principles—resilient farming based on closed loop systems involving the development of a healthy soil food web, polyculture or companion planting, nutrient recycling, and stacked growing or forest gardening. Unlike the one-dimensional growing space in industrial farming, forest gardening vertically layers growing space from tubers, groundcovers including culinary herbs, understory crops like leafy greens, midstory crops like citrus fruit and beans, growing vines like passionfruit, and overstory trees like bananas and papaya.

Flower towers of insectary plants invite pollinators and healthy predators to control pests inevitable in greenhouses. Paralleling the greenhouse, the ‘hyperporch’ facilitates greater hospitality and communality than what standard housing provides without sacrificing unit privacy. While GrowLofts is compatible within various contexts and climates, it provides for urbanites an ark—a regenerative socio-biological “living transect” connected to a larger context.

Category:Green ArchitectureYear:2024Location: Fayetteville, Arkansas, USAArchitects:University of Arkansas Community Design CenterLead Architect:Stephen Luoni Design Team:Stephen Luoni, Victor Hugo, and Shail PatelClient:Fayeteville Public LibraryPhotographers:University of Arkansas Community Design Center