Introducing Dragonfly, Roosevelt Island's Tower of Salvation

What is it about the southern end of Roosevelt Island that inspires the very best from the most noted architects of our age? As if in direct counterpoint to one of our all-time favorite creations, the Roosevelt Island Tower of Death, wacky conceptual architect Vincent Callebaut presents us—nay, gifts us—with Dragonfly, a 128-story vertical farm that appears from the renderings to overshadow just about every other creation that man has yet realized on God's green earth. There's much to love, too about the archibabble that accompanies the renderings, but let's pause for a moment while you page through the photogallery above, fully aware that your life from this moment forward will never be the same again.

And now, we hand the microphone to M. Callebaut:

In order to conceptualize this project and give our point of view in the ecological and social crisis debates, Dragonfly sets up along the East River at the South edge of the Rooselvelt Island in New York between Manattan’s Island and the Queens’ district. So as to face the landed pressure, Dragonfly stretches itself vertically under the shape of a bionic tower relocating a new urban biotope for the fauna and the local flora and recreating a food production auto-managed by the inhabitants in the heart of Big Apple.

Floor by floor, the tower superposes not only stock farming ensuring the production of meat, milk, poultry and eggs but also farming grounds, true biological reactors continuously regenerated with organic humus. It diversifies the cultivated varieties to avoid the washing of stratums of soft substratum. Thus, the cultures succeed one another vertically according to their agronomical ability to provide some elements of the ground between the essences that are sowed and harvested. The tower, true living organism, becomes thus metabolic and self-sufficient in water, energy, and bio-fertilizing. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable to a continuous auto-feeding!..

Outlining the bank of the Roosevelt Island, the tower widens at each side of its basis to better integrate the flows that cross it and to welcome two marinas along the East River. This widening out forms two huge photovoltaic vaults such as a solar dress floating above these two urban harbours: on the western marina side, the wooden pontoons of the taxi boats open panoramically on the Midtown bank and on the eastern marina side, the floating market oriented towards the Queens’ district is designed to distribute through the river the food production of this vertical farm to the heart of Manhattan and to its million and a half of city slickers. Moreover, these two marinas accommodate two huge aquaculture ponds, true tank of soft water filtered by the planted frontages and dedicated to be reinjected in the hydroponic network of the Dragonfly tower.

City slickers, rejoice! Completion has just been set for 2144.
· Dragonfly: A Metabolic Farm for Urban Agriculture [Vincent Callebaut Architect via Roosevelt Islander]
· Vertical Farm Concept for NYC Inspired by a Dragonfly [PSFK]
· Introducing the Roosevelt Island Tower of Death [Curbed]