From
Architecture
to Agriculture

Early experiments
Early Experiments
Jump to 2015-2019
Jump to 2015

For more than a decade, I've built expertise at the intersection of design and urban farming, not through theory alone, but by growing food in my living room, operating commercial vertical farms, and iterating through countless system designs. What started as architectural curiosity became a mission to make fresh, local food accessible to everyone.

This timeline documents the hands-on research, hard-won lessons, and design evolution that led to Plyant. Each stage represents real experiments, actual crops grown, and insights that can only come from getting your hands dirty, both in planting and in code.

2010

The Discovery

While studying architecture at UNLV, I encountered vertical farming for the first time, a skyscraper concept from Columbia University that promised to revolutionize urban food production. It reignited my belief in architecture's potential to solve re...
2011

Rethinking Scale

My thesis became a challenge to the vertical farm model. Instead of one massive structure feeding an entire city, I proposed distributed grow rooms integrated into existing buildings, apartments, offices, and community centers. My 150,000 sq ft mixed...
Rethinking Scale

2011

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Thesis Project

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2012-2015

Learning to Grow

I couldn't design systems without understanding what plants actually need. I volunteered with a local master gardener, maintaining community farms and backyard gardens, and quickly saw why outdoor growing fails urban residents: weather damage, theft,...
Learning to Grow

2012-2015

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2015-2019

Design Meets Reality

I moved and built a custom container box for my Tower Garden, something that looked like furniture, not lab equipment. I added T8 lights, retractable blinds to control light exposure, and made the system more mobile and accessible for maintenance. It...
Design Meets Reality

2015-2019

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Tower full

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2017-2019

Commercial Scale Reality

I was offered the chance to operate an abandoned Freight Farm in downtown Las Vegas, a 40-foot shipping container with 256 vertical towers capable of growing 4,500 plants. As a solo operator, I managed 1,000+ plants across 33 varieties, supplying kal...
Commercial Scale Reality

2017-2019

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2020-2022

Design Evolution

I handed the Freight Farm to a local charity and left to explore Southeast Asia, seeking manufacturing opportunities and finishing a poetry book. I landed in Bali on March 1, 2020, and COVID shut the borders. Stranded without a garden but armed with ...
2023-Current

Building the Ecosystem

The hardware solved one problem, but widespread adoption required infrastructure. During isolation, I discovered Web3 and taught myself to code, realizing blockchain could coordinate the missing pieces: service networks, seedling distribution, and ma...