City Pasture

Project Team: Sarah Carpenter + Brittany Drapac

Columbia University GSAPP: Core Studio III / LOT-EK, Giuseppe Ligano + Ada Tolla with Thomas de Monchaux

Date: Sept. 2009-Dec. 2009

Site: Hunters Point, Long Island City, Queens, New York, NY

Program: Public housing & food production

Size: 19.8 million SF (455 acres)

Occupancy: 12,500 people, 320 cows

There are 94.5 million beef cattle in the United States, and if grass fed, each requires 2.5 acres, totaling 370,000 square miles or 10% of the United States. The inhumanities of industrial beef production led us to design a way to mass-produce grass fed beef at an urban scale, where rural strategies inform a new lifestyle, and a closed waste cycle generates natural gas and electricity. We developed a 13-story tessellated grass landscape, carved to reveal apartment towers while providing ample pasture for cattle to graze. Grouped in clusters of nine, each unit views the pasture through the kitchen window, while the bedrooms and living rooms view Manhattan or Queens. The development shifts between its towering urban scale and a decidedly rural scale between floors, your visual neighbors 100 feet away.