IKEA Gives Away Free Urban Garden Sphere Plans

By Heather Callaghan, Editor

Meet the Growroom. It’s an open source vertical, garden sphere designed for cities that is 2,8 x 2,5 meters. The urban farm pavilion takes up an incredibly small space for the unspecified amount of food it can produce.

Several cities around the world are making plans to construct the garden sphere such as Helsinki, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro and Taipei. Architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum teamed up with SPACE10 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.”

All the builders need to complete the impressive food source – in 17 steps – is 2 rubber hammers, 17 sheets of plywood (sizes), screw driver, drill and bit, and a visit to a local fab lab or maker space with a CNC milling machine. (Aren’t more tech colleges now offering 3D and other printing services?)

IKEA via SPACE10 said in a press release:

The overlapping slices ensure that water and light can reach the vegetation on each level, without reaching the visitor within and thereby functions as a growth activator for the vegetation and shelter for the visitor.

[…]

This mean[s] most people — in theory — could produce almost anything themselves. Just as printers are now ubiquitous; local and on-demand, customized production could become the norm of the future. We’re tapping into this emerging potential by releasing the cutting files for The Growroom.

Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm— the architects behind The Growroom. Photo by Niklas Vindelev

The original Growroom exhibited at CHART ART FAIR. Photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj

The Growroom has a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, which means that the design can be shared, copied and build upon without asking permission. The only condition is that you credit the original work to SPACE10 and architects Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm, throw in a link and indicate if any changes have been made.

Find the instructions and cutting files HERE

IKEA expressed that local food is a solution to global food problems including long shipping distances, can relieve environmental pressure and can teach children where our food comes from. It would also be impossible to protest the glowing health benefits of picking fresh food directly from the Grow Room and placing it on the table.

If you build your own Growroom your creation may be celebrated if you connect on Instagram: @space10_journal + #SPACE10Growroom or email [email protected].

Will you build one? Be sure to let us know your results!

Photo by Space10, top photo by Alona Vibe

Heather Callaghan is an independent researcher, writer, speaker and food freedom activist. She is the Editor and co-founder of NaturalBlaze as well as a certified Self-Referencing IITM Practitioner. 

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