Our thoughts and process behind "Cyclovis"

The project started from thinking about forms - what makes the farm looking like a farm, is there any particular pattern language.

We've looked at existing rural objects to find the similarities, something recognizable, and we found it - it's so often the round shapes of the structure - the silo towering over the plains. 

Silos and grain elevators photographed by

 Bernd and Hilla Becher

 The experimentation with forms was the next step, but so is thinking about basic functionalities of the animal farm - feeding, area to live, access, removing manure. 

The combination of both revealed the solution - the flow of food that turns into dirt, with the observation that animal feeder should wide to prevent overcrowding, and one manure storage to simplify disposal. This solution uses the basic geometry - in circles, the bigger the radius, the longer the arch. So the reasonable answer is "feeders on the outside, manure to the center".

The Cyclovis project is adressing two modern problems - emission crisis and more concious, every month more "vegetarian" moral outlook of the people. 

Cyclovis is supposed to deal with both of them. We implemented many solutions that are lowering the energy consuption, such as geothermal heating, solar panels or natural light. And on the other hand the animals have more space, better view, cleaner air than ever before. 

aerial view of the design

The finished form is simple conceptually but complex and exciting in visual way. With the cut made in the basic circle we not only divided building into two functional parts (barn, and the "human oriented" part for workers), we also made every element easily accesible from this central path.