Overview

The integration of food production into building design is not a new idea. For most of human history, the home and the farm were not separated. Gardens, orchards, and food-producing animals were part of the immediate domestic environment. The industrial separation of food production from domestic life is a historical anomaly of the last century or two, enabled by cheap transportation and large-scale agricultural systems that have produced abundance for many at the cost of enormous ecological damage.

A regenerative building begins to restore this connection. It does not claim to replace the entire food supply of its occupants — that is not a realistic goal for a single building in most climates. But it does produce a meaningful quantity of fresh food year-round, connects its occupants to the biological processes that food depends on, and demonstrates that the boundary between building and garden, between architecture and agriculture, is a choice rather than a necessity.

Food systems in a Pangea building operate at multiple scales: from the herbs growing in interior botanical cells to the banana trees in the greenhouse to exterior garden beds fed by treated waste water to community-scale food production infrastructure shared among multiple households. Book 9 of this series, Food Systems and Growing, covers each of these at the practical design and construction level.