Vertical Farm Hengshui
27 oktober 2025
With its faceted glass facade, monumental entrance hall, and stacked functions, the Hengshui Vertical Farm offers a striking architectural face to horticulture in the metropolis. With its water reuse, passive heat recovery, and natural cooling, the building demonstrates how sustainable food can be produced in the metropolis.
The Vertical Farm is built in the International Horticulture Park in Hengshui, which serves as the innovation center for fruit and vegetable cultivation in Hebei Province and China. The transparent, four-story building serves as the main access point to the production and educational facilities and offers views of the horticultural park for food production.
A building for innovation and education
. The 12,800 m² building, spread over four floors, houses various innovative vertical farming methods stacked above a transparent entrance hall. An educational trail through the building guides visitors through the automated vertical cultivation of leafy greens and fruit under LED lighting, as well as a rooftop greenhouse where fruiting vegetables and fruit trees are grown under daylight.
At the heart of the building, on the lower two floors, are the automated vertical farms without daylight, under LED lighting, with laboratories and processing areas. Several of these facilities have glass walls and are visible from the ground-floor entrance hall. The third floor houses the demonstration center for healthy food and horticultural suppliers. The fourth floor houses the roof greenhouse, which provides space for educational activities and compartments for the horizontal cultivation of fruit vegetables and fruit trees under daylight.
One of the challenges was to combine and stack the lighting conditions for the various crop types and the work and educational spaces within a single four-story building. Jago van Bergen, van Bergen Kolpa Architects
Metropolitan Horticulture and Rural Revitalization
To provide millions of people in China's growing metropolises with green and healthy food, it is essential that production be made as sustainable as possible and integrated into and around the metropolis. Heibei Province, located around Beijing, Tianjin, and Hengshui, was originally the fruit and vegetable basket for these metropolises, but is also facing challenges such as aging, climate change, and water shortages. Making the revitalization more sustainable through greenhouse horticulture, shortening food chains, attracting a younger generation of horticulturists, and promoting a healthy lifestyle are the foundations of this revitalization.
Vertical Farm Hengshui offers an innovative and versatile solution for the future, combining stacked horticulture, entrepreneurship, and education on a compact scale. A new type of building for professional cultivation, accessible to a wide audience, it celebrates the central role of food in metropolitan areas.
"Vertical horticulture offers a solution for how metropolitan areas can both produce and consume food. This saves logistics costs and allows residents to actually receive fresh vegetables."
"This horticultural complex represents an important step in the development of the high-tech horticultural sector, together with international knowledge partners and Dutch suppliers in China."
Sustainable use of water and energy:
Not a single drop of water is wasted in the building. Excess water is collected and reused during plant irrigation. Natural ventilation and evaporative cooling are used to manage the building's climate. Passive solar heat and residual heat from LED lighting are used for heating.
"Vertical Farm Hengshui offers the opportunity to sustainably cultivate plants in nutrient-rich water, with artificial sources supplementing the daylight they need. Certain resources considered unusable in the metropolis can be reused in vertical farming, such as nutrients from sewage and carbon dioxide in the air."
A transparent sculpture.
Vertical Farm Hengshui is a proud sculpture of steel and glass that emphasizes its role in horticulture and education. The building is constructed from an industrial steel structure that silhouettes against the Hengshui sky with a series of transparent bay windows. The entrance is striking with its expressive, faceted glass facade.
The glass bay windows offer constant, reflection-free views throughout the day, both from inside and out. In the evening, the building glows like the treasure chest of the Horticultural Park, thanks to its characteristic ultraviolet light.
“For Vertical Farm Hengshui, we further improved the standard Venlo roof greenhouse and stacked it on a steel substructure, enabling an efficient and column-free span for Vertical Farming.”