The Growroom exhibited at Copenhagen Opera House. Photo by Alona Vibe
From Space10 / 02.14.2017
Introduction
The design for The Growroom, an urban farm pavilion that looks into how cities can feed themselves through food producing architecture, is now open source and available for anyone to use.
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.
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 we now release The Growroom as open source design and encourage people to build their own locally as a way to bring new opportunities to life.
Easy as 1-2-3
Digital fabrication has made state-of-the-art factory tools accessible for ordinary people. A new generation of technologies such as 3D additive and subtractive manufacturing to laser cutting and surface-mount manufacture is available to the public in fab labs and maker spaces in any major city.
This mean most people — in theory — could produce almost anything themselves. Just as printers are now ubiquitous; local and on-demand, customised production could become the norm of the future. We’re tapping into this emerging potential by releasing the cutting files for The Growroom. All you then need to build it, is two rubber hammers, 17 sheets of ply wood and a visit to your local fab lab or maker space with a CNC milling machine. The design focuses on making 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 communities.
Designed for Cities
The original Growroom was designed as part of the CHART Architecture competition. Photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj
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 result on the dining table is just as fascinating. We could produce food of the highest quality that tastes better, is much more nutritional, fresh, organic and healthy.
The challenge is that traditional farming take up a lot of space and space is a scarce resource in our urban environments.
The Growroom is designed for cities and with it’s size 2,8 x 2,5 meter it has a small spatial footprint as you grow vertically. It 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.
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.
Build Your Own Growroom
Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm— the architects behind The Growroom. Photo by Niklas Vindelev
You can build your own Growroom in 17 easy steps. Find the instructions below and download the cutting files for free right here.
Please give us a nudge on Instagram: @space10_journal + #SPACE10Growroom if you build your own Growroom or shoot us an email on discover@space10.io. We would love to celebrate your version.
The Growroom has a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which means that the design can be shared, copied and build upon without asking permission and that we don’t take responsibility for your safety. 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.
Good luck!
Getting Started
The parts you need to build The Growroom. Photo by Niklas Vindelev
To get going building The Growroom, there are certain elements that needs to be ready and available:
CNC Cutting Files
Download the CNC cutting files here and share with your local fab lab or maker space that can cut the pieces for you.
Materials
- 13 sheets of plywood: 2440mm x 1220mm x 18mm
- 4 sheets of plywood: 2440mm x 1220mm x 4mm
- 500 stainless pan head screws: 3.5mm x 30mm
Remember to treat the plywood before you put soil and plants in.
Machinery
- CNC machine with a cutter, 8mm in diameter. Alternatively, the Growroom can be cut out on a laser cutter — (fab labs and maker spaces with a CNC milling machine that are open to the public can be found in most major cities).
- Table saw (read this helpful review if you need to buy one)
Tools
- Screwdriver
- Appropriate bit for the screws
- Drill, 2mm in diameter
- 2 hammers
The Growroom is produced in only one material, and is put together with hammers, or whatever hard object you have lying around, that can be used for knocking the chisels in place.
We’ll get back to that.
On the edge of each level, the thin plywood is mounted with the use of the screws.
We will also get back to that.
We hope you will enjoy building and using The Growroom.
Photos by Niklas Vindelev
Step-By-Step Process
Step 1
Step 2
The support pieces are put in place in the vertical A boards as shown in STEP 1. The vertical A boards with the attached supported pieces, are placed into every second slot in the Big A circle. Notice that the slot has small holes to one or both sides.
Photos by Niklas Vindelev
Step 3
The chisels are knocked into place under the bottom as illustrated above. Keep knocking the chisels with the hammers from both sides until they are completely fastened.
Photos by Niklas Vindelev
Step 4
The shoes are placed under each vertical A board with chisels inside it. The 4 shoes provide the foundation of the pavilion, so the pavilion won’t stand grinding on the edge of the vertical A’s.
Photos by Niklas Vindelev
Step 5
The vertical A1 boards are put into the remaining slots of the floor.
Step 6
Horizontal B1-B4 are now mounted on top of the vertical As with the attached support beams and the vertical A1s. Make sure that the opening is as depicted above, where there are no support beams.
Photos by Niklas Vindelev
Step 7.1
Vertical B is put into the slots of horizontal B1-B4 and slided to the side onto the part of the vertical A board that is sticking through.
Step 7.2
Two chisels are knocked into the slots as depicted above, aligning the 2 vertical elements.
Step 7.3
The chisels are positioned loosely in the slots first below and then above B1-B4 as depicted above. Once the chisels are positioned as depicted, they are knocked into place with two hammers from both sides simultaneously.
Step 8
You should now have successfully mounted the layer B of your pavillon as depicted above. In order to finish the pavillon, repeat STEP 6–7 for the remaining layers: C,D,E,F,G
Photos by Niklas Vindelev
You have now finished the pavilion, and are ready to head on to mounting the edging strips.
Step 9
Step 10
Step 11
Step 12
Step 13
Step 14
Step 15
Step 16
Step 17
Edging Strips
The 4mm plywood is cut up on the table saw as depicted above. This results in edging strips with a length of 1220mm. The edging strips are suggested cut per 100mm.
Since the geometry of the pavilion isn’t equivalent to the dimensions of plywood, each level has strips cut up in various lengths, as depicted in the table here.
The edging strips are 100 mm strips cut from plywood board measuring 1220mm x 100mm, with small add ons where needed. As you can see, the edging strips are mounted separately to the edge of the pavilion, placed directly next to each other.
When mounting the edging strips, it is important to position the band, so that the top of the band touches or aligns with the detail of the vertical boards, as depicted above.
Thereby you get divided spaces on most levels to contain the soil and plants, which is 70mm high. Below the edging strips becomes room for LED strip light if wanted. The arrows shows where to place the screws.
The edging strips are placed as depicted above in the section drawing. As you see they are always placed where the vertical boards has an indentation or the opposite. Be aware that the edging strips on groundlevel (Horisontal A) has a gap as big as the entrance, so the edging strips should be placed so they aligns with the above levels in terms of the entrance gap.
When mounting the edging strips, it is important to position the band, so that the top of the band touches or aligns with the detail of the vertical boards, as depicted above. Thereby you get divided spaces on most levels to contain the soil and plants, which is 70mm high.
Below the edging strips becomes room for LED strip light if wanted. The arrows shows where to place the screws.
Depicted above, you see the little element, that is in the slot of the vertical B boards. This element is mounted from each side of B. On the element the edging strips are screw in ( B-inside), from the inside. The length of the strip, as described on page 18, assures that the edging strip gets the proper circular curvature.
In this diagram an LED-strip is depicted, mounted on the bottom of the edging strip. This allows for an invisible and safe lighting of the pavillon, similar to the what is found on the original Growroom. The LED-strip can be mounted the same on all the levels.
The Pavilion is done, and you can start filling in the soil and plants on level C,D,E,F,G. To have a better control of the soil and water, you can advantageously put plastic in each space, so that it covers the whole area before you put soil and plants in it.
The Growroom in all its glory. Photo by Alona Vibe
The Growroom is enabled by future living-lab SPACE10 and Danish architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum
All architectural drawings are by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum.
Originally published by Space10 under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.