V-FARM: Where Modular Farming Units Become the Building Blocks of Urban Housing

What if the apartment building itself grew your food? V-FARM takes that question literally, proposing a vertically stacked architecture where residential flats, hydroponic laboratories, communal farming terraces, and even livestock paddocks occupy distinct layers of a single modular structure. The result is not a tower with planters bolted on but a genuinely new building typology: one in which agricultural production is the organizational logic of the section, not a decorative afterthought.

Designed by Erinc Dogan and Berk Denizci, V-FARM received an Honorable Mention in the FarmUrban competition. The project reimagines vertical density as productive density, replacing the typical residential floor plate with a kit of scalable modules that can be assembled across different urban contexts. Each module responds to a specific programmatic need: living, growing, raising, or gathering. Bridges link the modules along horizontal planes, while the vertical stack separates functions for light, access, and biosecurity.

Reading the Section: Four Zones, One Productive Stack

The section perspective and axonometric diagram reveal V-FARM's organizational clarity. Four core unit types are stacked vertically: residential flats conceived as detached homes with private garden terraces, semi-open communal farming floors, fully enclosed indoor growing laboratories, and livestock modules with paddocks and sheltered enclosures. Continuous planted terraces run along each floor plate, turning the building's edge into a productive landscape rather than a simple balcony. Exposed concrete soffits span between these green layers, giving the structure a legible rhythm of solid and cultivated.

The axonometric section makes the programmatic distribution explicit, showing how greenery is not confined to one zone but threaded through the entire building. Bridges along the horizontal planes handle circulation and connect masses, allowing residents to move between living quarters, farm spaces, and social areas without descending to grade. This separation of flows, combined with the vertical stacking logic, ensures that farming activities, livestock needs, and domestic privacy each receive appropriate environmental conditions.

Hydroponic Labs and Hands-On Plots Side by Side

V-FARM splits its farming program into two complementary modes. Semi-open floors provide communal space for traditional, hands-on cultivation, while fully enclosed indoor zones house advanced hydroponic systems, smart irrigation, climate-controlled growth chambers, AI-powered crop monitoring, and automated harvesting. The interior rendering captures the latter: tiered grow beds and vertical plant towers fill a daylit volume, with people moving through what reads more like a research facility than a rooftop garden. This layered typology maximizes yield per square meter and minimizes water consumption, but it also creates an educational infrastructure where residents and visitors can engage directly with the food cycle.

Kinetic Hexagons: A Facade That Adjusts Like a Camera Shutter

The most visually striking detail of V-FARM is its adaptive modular facade. Inspired by biomimicry and hexagonal geometries, the system combines operable glass panels with white metallic solar-integrated surfaces arranged in a tessellated pattern. A kinetic framing mechanism, described by the designers as similar to a camera shutter, lets occupants adjust each panel's transparency, airflow, and solar gain depending on the season, time of day, or activity behind the wall. The corner detail image shows these hexagonal tiles wrapping curved balcony volumes, while vertical slat railings and planted edges soften the geometry.

The interior atrium view demonstrates the effect of this facade strategy from inside: planted terraces sit beneath board-formed concrete slabs, bathed in daylight that the hexagonal panels filter rather than block. For the farming floors, this user-driven adaptability is critical. Indoor growing conditions demand precise control of light and temperature, and the kinetic facade provides it without relying solely on mechanical systems. For residents, the same mechanism supports mental wellness and comfort by putting environmental control directly in their hands.

Green Roofs, HVAC Integration, and Circular Resource Loops

V-FARM's sustainability ambitions extend beyond the facade. The technical diagram and interior rendering show green roof slabs with integrated HVAC systems and timber slatted balustrades, revealing how the project embeds environmental services within its structural layers. Livestock modules incorporate biomass recycling, automated feeding, digital health monitoring, and sustainable poultry practices, contributing to a circular resource economy where waste from one module becomes input for another. Renewable energy generation, low-carbon material selection, and the modular construction approach itself all reinforce a framework designed to minimize ecological impact at every scale.

Why This Project Matters

Most urban farming proposals treat agriculture as an amenity: a green roof here, a community garden there. V-FARM is more ambitious and more specific. By making food production the organizing principle of the building section, Dogan and Denizci argue that farming is not a supplement to urban life but a fundamental component of it. The project addresses land use, energy, food security, animal welfare, and community building within a single modular system, which is exactly the kind of integrated thinking that vertical density demands.

The kinetic hexagonal facade alone deserves attention as a design contribution, but what elevates V-FARM beyond formal experimentation is its insistence on programmatic rigor. Every module has a clear spatial logic, every connection has a functional purpose, and the entire assembly scales from a single unit to a neighborhood-sized system. As cities confront the intersecting crises of food access, housing shortage, and carbon reduction, proposals like V-FARM offer a credible spatial framework for addressing all three simultaneously.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Erinc Dogan, Berk Denizci

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Project credits: V-FARM by Erinc Dogan, Berk Denizci FarmUrban (uni.xyz).