Modern hydroponic techniques were pioneered at the University of California Berkeley by William Frederick Gericke in the 1930s and continue to be used heavily in California both in industrial agriculture, as well as the legal gray zone of marijuana production. Hydroponic stores have multiplied across the California landscape in the past ten years selling scalable systems for both home gardeners and larger industrial productions. These systems served as a point of departure for the Hydroloops project, a series of hydroponics mechanisms that illustrate three typical forms of hydroponic cultivation. These hydro-mechanisms function as drawing machines, a type of automata originally described by André Masson and the Surrealists. Each hydro-mechanism has a simple drawing program associated with it, written in the Processing programming language and connected to the computer via an Arduino interface. The development of the plants and the operation of the hydro-mechanisms allow these drawing programs to run creating informal metrics of plants growth.
Paul Schuette is an architect and writer working in California.
On Farming - Contents
BRACKET [on farming]
On Farming
Food Matrix
Ecologically Emergent Leisure Landscapes [EELLs]
Aquaculture Seascape Park
Fructus Vegetabilis: Growing Profit in the War on Error
GEOtube: Vertical Salt Deposit Growth System
Line 13 – Superlinearity
Chia Mesa
Farm Plus: Hybrid Agricultural Landscapes
The Productive Surface
Cloud Skippers
Reforestation of Greenwood Farm: An Emergent Landscape and Intervention
Farm Logic
The Building That Farms…
Your Town Tomorrow
45°50’8”N 119°41’57”W: Hybrid-Poplar Farm
Project::Farm
Seasoned Pasture: A Demonstration Range and Public Park
Landgrab City
Hydrating Luanda
Notes Towards a History of Agrarian Urbanism
Cash Crops, Energy Landscapes
The Catalog: From Ploughs to Clouds
Migrational Fields: Farming and the Chinese Urban Village
Precipitating a Productive Countryside: A Renewed Company Town Model
Factory-Farmed Architecture: You Are How You Eat
Butter in the Mail: Experiments in an Epistolary Economy
Nomadic Allotments: London’s Farming Future
Learning from Salinas (Hopefully)
What We Are Is What We Eat
Beyond Disney
Rethinking Urbanism in the Shrinking City of New Orleans
Post-Agricultural Speculations
Vertical Farming in Las Vegas? Beyond Pragmatism, Toward Desire
Farming [PARK]: Rail, Roadways, and Urban Form Today
BLDG 2.0: Crowd-Sourcing Building Energy Performance
Globalgaelisation
Living Tower: A Vertical Horse Stable for Luxor
Harvesting Space
Recycling Takes Command
AGER-AGRI
Performative Landscapes
Microcosmic Aquaculture