In the post-COVID-19 era, there has been an increasing interest in re-evaluating citizens’ living conditions within dense and grey urban areas. The provision of green spaces has always been identified as an important aspect of alleviating contemporary everyday life stress and preventing or limiting mental health-related issues. It is also an important strategy to mitigate urban heat islands and foster adaptation strategies to climate change. Among the numerous experiments of ‘green action’ available to urban planners, urban farming strategies have been widely used in Europe to provide green spaces and ecosystem services, exploring the topics related to self-production of food, biodiversity, and zero-km cultivation. Therefore, finding new spaces for agriculture in urban environments has driven scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs to develop new soilless technologies (such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics) to maximize yields in urban areas, creating new agricultural and architectural models such as the vertical farms (VF) and the building-integrated greenhouses (BIGH). In this regard, the objective of this paper is to recontextualize the integrated greenhouse element for high-tech food production as new iconic architectural models derived from the experience of the Victorian Winter Gardens and the first tropical greenhouses. Revisiting these perspectives, this paper offers opportunities to redefine the greenhouse as a multifunctional asset that aligns with both environmental goals and architectural standards.

Yona Friedman’s vision of employing Urban Agriculture to eliminate the city’s dependence on the countryside by liberating agricultural land from exploitation is more pertinent than ever. In a world where cities are sustained by food produced in increasingly remote locations and the environmental impact of the agri-food supply chain grows ever more unsustainable, it is imperative to reconsider the relationship between urbanised areas and food production. Advances in soil-free cultivation technologies present new opportunities to integrate productive vegetation into urban and residential spaces. If deprived of utopian connotations, this approach invites reflection on the need for innovative design paradigms that integrate the built environment with cultivated spaces, fostering widespread and symbiotic interactions to promote sustainable regeneration.