A Growroom is how you can fit 140 plants in 2.8 square meters while having fun making it, building it, planting it and boasting about it while you are sitting in it with your friends eating the fattoush you have grown on it.
Wait, are you confused yet? The Growroom is basically a nook that also doubles as a vertical garden. It’s a DIY project that you can build at the Berytech Fab Lab, assemble at home and plant with anything you want. Don’t believe us? We made one ourselves just to show you.
What’s a Growroom?
The Growroom was created as part of a movement of food-producing architecture, a form of an urban farm that shows how cities can feed themselves.
With its 2,8 x 2,5 sqm size, it is designed to have a small space usage, allowing you to grow food and plants vertically. It also supports our sense of well-being in the city by creating a small oasis, a place to pause and connect with nature, to even taste and smell the abundance of herbs and plants in the course of our high-paced days.
The Growroon is built as a sphere and can stand freely in any context, indoor or outdoor. The overlapping slices ensure that water and light can reach the vegetation on each level, without reaching the visitor within.
The design makes the assembly easy and intuitive for anyone to handle, and The Growroom is produced from only one material, making it accessible and affordable for most.
All you then need to build it, is two rubber hammers, 16 sheets of
What can be planted in the growroom?
In The Growroom, you can use either commercial planters that could be placed on its different levels, or you can fill The Growroom directly with sand. You can use up to 140 plastic planters of diameter 30 cm. For those who opt to plant in The Growroom directly the material needs to be treated first. The choice of material also depends on whether The Growroom is meant to be indoors or outdoors. We created ours with plywood.
Who designed the Growroom?
SPACE10 and architects Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm have co-created a multi-sensory pavilion for people to smell, taste and enjoy.
“SPACE10 envision a future, where we grow our own food much more locally. To spark conversations about how we can bring nature back into our cities, grow our own food and tackle the rapidly increasing demand for significantly more food in the future, we teamed up with architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum to create The Growroom. Standing tall as a spherical garden, it empowers people to grow their own food much more locally in a beautiful and sustainable way.”
Why is the Growroom an Open source project?
From Taipei to Helsinki and from Rio de Janeiro to San Francisco, the original version of The Growroom sparked interest and people requested to either buy or exhibit The Growroom. But it doesn’t make sense to promote local food production and then start shipping it across oceans and continents. That is why The Growroom was released as open source design and people are encouraged to build their own locally as a way to bring new opportunities to life.
Excited to build your own Growroom at the Berytech Fab Lab? Get in touch for more info: fablab@berytech.org
