Sky Vegetables has a strong community vision and deep understanding of the value of space and communication in an urban environment. They came to me looking to innovate in the rooftop agriculture space through the medium of advertising. I developed concepts that involved both economic models and rendered examples of how and where these rooftop garden advertising systems might work. I helped them develop a plan to combine advertising with roof top agriculture by carefully looking at billboard regulations and public greening incentives. Working closely with the City of San Francisco, property owners of the 12th Street Garage and seven other properties in the Bay Area, Whole Foods, Royal Motors car dealership and the team at Sky Vegetables, we created a proposal that would make rooftop greenhouses immediately viable.
The 12th Street Garage sits near the highway overpass, prime real estate for billboards that would normally command up to $25K / month in revenue with massive city fees paid. Building a greenhouse on the roof and positioning LED mesh within the greenhouse, creates an billboard within the greenhouse, warms the greenhouse without delivering spectrums of light that will upset the plants cycles and is readable from the highway. Because the advertisement is indoors, it cannot be taxed in the same way as outdoor traditional billboard advertising.
A second strategy developed was building massive vertical gardens on the sides of buildings using native perennial plants to create large scale messaging. I may not agree with the advertising world on most of their ethics in terms of civic beautification, but these projects worked economically and made high density urban agriculture financially viable the day they go up.