Bookshelf    The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture

The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture

By Daniel P. Gregory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2020) Buy It Now

The New Farm, most often family run, embraces old farm methods and values—simplicity and sustainable agricultural practices—as well as innovative architecture that often riffs on the traditional farmhouse and barn. Of the 16 charming modern farms from around the world that are presented in Daniel P. Gregory’s The New Farm, two are located right here in the Hudson Valley, attesting to this region’s place at the forefront of the global sustainable farm movement as well as contemporary farm design. The Little Ghent Farm in Columbia County has assimilated the traditional with the contemporary by using recycled barn wood and materials from the original farm’s outbuildings to create gable-roofed, barnlike structures for an organic chicken and pig farm and community store. At Churchtown Dairy in nearby Claverack, builder Rick Anderson designed a huge, white, four-story “castle for cows” based on the 1908 Rebecca Rankin Round Barn in Indiana. Surely the designers of these New Farms will join the lineage of celebrated agricultural architects from throughout the centuries.

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