FEATURE EDIFICATION
TERREFORM ONE’S CRICKET SHELTER AND FARM RESEARCH THAT INVOLVED EATING BUGS TO IMPROVE THE ARCHITECTURE OF SURVIVAL INTERVIEW WITH MITCHELL JOACHIM
BY PHILLIP ANZALONE, AIA Project: Cricket Shelter: Modular Edible Insect Farm Office: Terreform ONE Date: 2016 Size: 580 sq. ft. Principal Investigator: Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D.
Research Team: Maria Aiolova, Melanie Fessel, Felipe Molina, Matthew Tarpley, Jiachen Xu, Lissette Olivares, Cheto Castellano, Shandor Hassan, Christian Hamrick, Ivan Fuentealba, Sung Moon, Kamila Varela, Yucel Guven, Chloe Byrne, Miguel Lantigua-Inoa, Alex Colard. Sponsor: Art Works for Change. Site: Dry Dock 4, Brooklyn Navy Yard, NY
PA: WHAT DID YOU INITIALLY SET OUT TO DESIGN? MJ: We investigated emergency shelters on a commission from the nonprofit Artworks for Change. Most existing survival architecture structural topologies are primarily shaped to immediately deploy and provide temporary security from the elements. But our Cricket Shelter and Farm provides an additional advantage: we thought we could combine shelter with a continual source of food. The modular structure contains 224 modified 22-litre chambers for producing edible crickets – the insects are a progressively stylish source of dietary protein. We created a multilayer structure based on their life cycle to be integrated into a simultaneous shelter for people in a crisis zone. Our project combined two programmatic building types: deployable shelter and vertical subsistence agriculture. CONTINUED
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Cricket Shelter + Farm has over 300 >>> bio-units that produce 50,000 adult crickets every six weeks. 32
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THE ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN JOURNAL OF THE YOUNG ARCHITECTS FORUM