Hortus Celestia
Designed an 80-metre vertical farm tower as a working expo for Dutch horticulture.
- Client and partners
- SIGN
Hortus Celestia is a vertical farm tower for Naaldwijk in the Westland, designed with a team of partners for SIGN, the Dutch foundation for greenhouse innovation. It rises 28 storeys and 80 metres above a landscape of greenhouses, carrying 14 farming floors with exhibition space embedded among them. Behind an ETFE facade, working greenhouses grow everything from tomatoes to roses in public view. The visitor route begins at the rooftop park and winds down through the farms. The structure is calculated, costed and feasibility-confirmed, and sits inside an ecological expo park.
The Problem
The Westland produces at world scale and shows almost none of it. Its innovation is distributed across thousands of low greenhouses that read, from outside, as an anonymous patchwork of glass. The sector needed a way to make its own advances legible to business partners and international visitors.
A conventional visitor centre would have described the industry from a distance. The design answers by making the demonstration a working farm. The building is not a display about horticulture, it is horticulture, at height, with the public inside it.
Process
Turn the landscape into a facade
The design language reflects the Westland's greenhouse patchwork as seen from above. A light, transparent, cost-effective ETFE shell wraps the tower, so the growing floors and the activity inside them read from the surrounding fields.
Route the visitor from the top down
The promenade starts at the panoramic roof garden 80 metres up, then descends through the farming floors so every stage of production is seen in sequence. The rooftop park and its panorama cafe are the pinnacle of the expo; exhibitions from local horticulture businesses occupy the floors beneath. The ground floor carries an auditorium, restaurants, cafes, changing exhibitions and event space.
Let gravity do the irrigation
Rainwater is stored in tanks at the top of the tower and fed to the growing floors by gravity, using zero energy for distribution. Offices are embedded within the greenhouse floors rather than separated from them, and the whole structure sits in an ecological park carrying recreation, nature and water.
Outcomes
- Height
- 80 m
- Twenty-eight storeys above the Westland greenhouse landscape.
- Farming floors
- 14
- Working greenhouses with embedded expo and office space.
- Irrigation energy
- Zero
- Rooftop rainwater tanks feed the growing floors by gravity.
Gallery
Except is a team of inspirational people working in innovative ways. Their integrated approach ensures they address highly relevant issues, taking individual health and happiness into account, in addition to economics and ecology.
Credits
Except team: Tom Bosschaert (Director).
With: Arjan Luiten (Sustainable Spatial Designer & Architect), Peter Oei (Client, SIGN), Peter van Zandvoort (Process manager, Kelsey's o.o.m.), Chiel Bartels (Construction engineer, Bartels & Vedder), Jelle Vedder (Construction engineer, Bartels & Vedder), Jaco van Halen (Building management, Van Riessen), Peter Brouwer (Building management, Van Riessen).
Except team: Tom Bosschaert (Director).
With: Arjan Luiten (Sustainable Spatial Designer & Architect), Peter Oei (Client, SIGN), Peter van Zandvoort (Process manager, Kelsey's o.o.m.), Chiel Bartels (Construction engineer, Bartels & Vedder), Jelle Vedder (Construction engineer, Bartels & Vedder), Jaco van Halen (Building management, Van Riessen), Peter Brouwer (Building management, Van Riessen).
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