Check out the new photos on our flickr page! Add us as a contact on flickr and track our progress visually.
While we’re waiting for the official go ahead from the City, there are plenty of details to obsess over. Lately we’ve been revisiting where the main entrance should be and how folks will get to the public portions of the building. The current main entrance is right up against Pershing Road with no room for a ramp or a proper front porch. Anyone parking their car in the lot behind the building would need to walk about 600 feet to get to the door, so it makes sense to put the entrance on the east facade, close to what will be the main passenger elevators to the public areas. Two of the 11 freight elevator shafts will be converted to passenger use, while a few others will make fine convection ducts to move excess heat around.
On the financial end, by borrowing a larger pile of money up front, we can immediately insulate the walls and roof, and rebuild the windows with low-e double pane glass. The energy savings from those tasks boggles the mind. We’d go from a projected annual heating bill of $145,000 down to about $30,000. Once we start to recycle waste heat from the farm, we won’t be paying anything at all for gas.
Here are a few views of what the lobby might look like. Note the living wall at the back.
Big presentations today for the IIT team. IPRO (Inter-Professional Research Opportunity) day is when about forty groups at the Illinois Institute of Technology show off the labors of their semester. I think the students did a great job, and so did the judges, and I can’t wait to jump back in this January with a (somewhat) new group.
Down in the basement at Bubbly, water is burbling through growing beds, plants are reaching toward the lights and the system only leaks a little bit! After one month of bacteria growth and water quality monitoring, the first batch of tilapia will be introduced. Zack, from IIT, has found a breeder whose has developed “super males” which, when paired with certain females, only produce male offspring. It’s important not to mix genders to avoid overpopulating your system. After around eight months those fingerlings will reach maturity, but I plan to start eating them much sooner.
Yesterday, we took a little field trip to visit Growing Power’s Milwaukee headquarters. In a former commercial greenhouse on the northwest side, Will Allen has built an impressive operation on a mere 1.5 acre site (the Plant has 14 acres under roof). The organization has several goals: education, research and providing high quality, fresh foods in a food desert. They also like to share their knowledge with other people who are working on similar problems. We came (again) to see their aquaponics and composting systems since we’ll be building related systems ourselves. www.growingpower.org
Cynthia, who will be largely responsible for getting the farm built, brought up a good idea: Insulating with compost! If you build a top-load bin along an exterior wall, pull the finished material off of the bottom, and let the thing heat up, you’d be heating and insulating with a process you needed to do somewhere anyway. What does the city Department of Buildings think? Boy do we have an ever-growing list of things for them to object to. We’ll see…
Meanwhile in the system controls department, one of our IIT grad students, Fernando, is working on a detailed plan to manage energy flow throughout the facility. Our big advantage is having places to use all of the waste heat from lighting the farm nine months out of the year, 200,000 sq ft. of offices and manufacturing space. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little extra oxygen from the farm pumped into your office? Using open source Arduino microcontroller boards, we’ll monitor hundreds of temperatures, oxygen levels, CO2 levels, and air change rates. That data will be used to control hundreds of pumps, dampers, blowers, compressors and the geothermal system which will be tasked with moving much of that heat (or cold) around and storing it in, and under, the basement. This is the fun part for an amateur engineer like me. Don’t worry, some professional engineers have pledged their assistance.
Our dedicated group of students from IIT have started building a test Aquaponics system in the basement at Bubbly. We’ll be experimenting with plasma lighting moving on a linear track. Plasma is about twice the efficiency of florescent lighting with less in the UV and infra-red portions of the spectrum. The challenge will be to control the speed at which our 20,000 watt source moves over foliage without singeing our little plants. Current thinking is to use a stepper motor controlled by a card in a junk PC.
The green cornice is ready for plants. Our neighbor at Illinois Barrel is sending over ten used 55 gallon plastic drums which will be cut in half, partially filled with garbage styrofoam, a layer of filter fabric and 14 inches of soil. The barrels will sit just behind the parapet with vines growing over onto nine pieces of stainless cable stretched around the facade. What will we grow? Stay tuned, I don’t know yet, but Mark from Lake Street Landscape Supply is helping with the choice.
Nick and Frank, Bubbly’s longest running tenants are moving out. Know anyone who needs 1200 square feet?
We had a very good tour of 1819 Pershing yesterday, Adrianna from General Services was able to show us some of the crustiest parts of the structure. The reason for this tour was to get the IIT students inside to lay hands on the project, these sorts of things seem so abstract until you can walk around inside and get a little dirty. This was Cynthia Main and Rachel Swenie’s first chance to get inside and they still seem to think I’m not crazy for taking on a project like this. Every time I’m there, the place seems just a little smaller.
No word on the high level city meetings taking place (or not taking place, as the case may be) to decide our fate.
Mark and Andrew over at Lake Street Landscape Supply are working on a Living Wall system. The idea is that you cover some portion of the facade of a building with about four inches of growing media, held up by a fabricated module system, allowing you to grow gobs of plants right there on the side of that building. Why would you do that? Because it will help insulate, protect the brick, clean the air and look really freakin’ cool. Very few of these things exist anywhere in the world, mostly on art museums and other high dollar buildings. This will be the first installation on any industrial structure.
We’ll get half of the cost covered with the help of some Small Business Improvement Fund money, the rest will come out of my hide. Since this will be a Beta test of the system, Andrew and Mark will trim out any profit they had hoped to make in order to get the thing going. We should all get piles of press and notoriety from this, presumably leading to more installations. I’ve always tried to be an incubator for testing new green stuff.
Meanwhile, I’m about to start mounting the stainless steel brackets to hold nine pieces of aircraft cable, stretched around the top of the south facade, which will support vines as part of a “green cornice”. There are still a few technical difficulties to iron out, but I’m certain it will work.
If anyone wants to help with the living wall installation, let me know. info@plantchicago.com
Tags: Bubbly Dynamics, green wall, living wall
I can’t wait to start bringing people from different worlds together. Up on the 6th floor, we’ll have a community space where recyclers, farmers, artisans and manufacturers will gather. There will be a kitchen, eating area, couches and an amazing view of the skyline to stimulate the rhizome discussion deep into the night (I think that’s what farmers talk about). If things go well, we’ll even have a restaurant serving food so fresh that it’s picked after you order it.
We hope to remove the roof over about 8,000 sq. ft. toward the south end. Here, you’ll see the rooftop greenhouses cascading down and terraced gardens along a dramatic promenade. There will be a long, curving glass wall separating inside and out, with the farming operation visible inside. Right now these details are being worked on by the architecture team in Blake’s class at IIT. A big, boxy building needs some curves and angles to spice it up a bit.
The 6th floor also contains our auditorium, the former board room from Chicago Public Schools administration days. It’s a 3,000 sq. ft. room with risers and theater seating, the conference table and all of the furniture is intact. With some new paint to cover the beige, we’ll be able to use the space for events and education. Right now, the space is being used as a shooting gallery by the police, they like to shoot at posters of tough guys and break down doors. Get out your mud knife there’s lots of bullet holes to fill.
Kristin Ostberg and I took a bike ride down to Englewood to visit Larry O’Toole and see Growing Home’s .75 acre operation, www.growinghomeinc.org. Larry and I know eachother from way back in the early days of Critical Mass and our paths are again crossing on the subject of urban agriculture. Not being a farmer myself, I appreciate Larry’s words of wisdom. Growing Home focuses on transitional job training and does an amazing job of helping formerly homeless people build self confidence and marketable skills. The Wood St. Urban Farm recently received organic certification, which is a great feat considering its location on a fairly “dirty” site. They did this by building their growing beds and hoop houses on a deep layer of compost, which can be certified in only three months, as opposed to topsoil which takes years. SHED Studio designed the classroom building and other structures. Cool stuff. Watch this space for a potential partnership with Growing Home, providing training for folks to have permanent, year-round jobs at the Plant.
Tags: farm
Blake from IIT brought Mike Gustafson over to Bubbly today. Mike is studying entrepreneurial law at Chicago-Kent and has been assigned to work on our vertical farm. The more I think about it, the more tasks I can come up with related to zoning, food production licensing and standards, special waste hauling permits (for compost!?), commercial leases and a slew of other things to research. Welcome Mike, we’ll keep you busy.