IKEA Growroom Is A DIY Sustainable Garden For City Dwellers

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Last week, IKEA released the plans for its latest innovation, The Growroom, a spherical multi-level garden that can grow enough food for an entire neighborhood. The plans are online and can be downloaded for free. The IKEA Growroom comes from Space10, the company’s in-house design lab dedicated to creating future products.

IKEA Growroom

The IKEA Growroom doesn’t come in a box but it does go together in 17 steps much the same way the company’s traditional products do. All it takes is some sheets of plywood, some screws, and a bunch of friends to put it all together. You might need to engage the services of a local carpentry shop to make sure the plywood gets cut correctly, but after that its really just a weekend project.

IKEA says The Growroom can grow enough food to feed an entire neighborhood but is small enough to fit in your backyard. The garden’s plywood slices are designed to allow water and light to reach every level of the sphere. Space10 lab says,

“Local food represents a serious alternative to the global food model. It reduces food miles, our pressure on the environment, and educates our children of where food actually comes from. … The challenge is that traditional farming takes up a lot of space and space is a scarce resource in our urban environments.

“The Growroom …is designed to support our everyday sense of well being in the cities by creating a small oasis or ‘pause’ architecture in our high paced societal scenery, and enables people to connect with nature as we smell and taste the abundance of herbs and plants. The pavilion, built as a sphere, can stand freely in any context and points in a direction of expanding contemporary and shared architecture.”

There are already plans to build Growrooms in Helsinki, Taipei, Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco, according to a press release. If you are up to the challenge, the IKEA Growroom could bring local sustainably grown food right to your neighborhood.

Source: Huffington Post | Photos by IKEA


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Steve Hanley

Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Florida or anywhere else The Force may lead him. He is proud to be "woke" and doesn't really give a damn why the glass broke. He believes passionately in what Socrates said 3000 years ago: "The secret to change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new."

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