Ikea’s Flatpack Vertical Garden Can Feed an Entire Neighborhood!

Ikea’s Flatpack Vertical Garden Can Feed an Entire Neighborhood!

February 27, 2017 by Admin Leave a Comment

Ikea has come up with a flatpack garden so city dwellers with little space can enjoy a green patch all of their own. The Swedish furniture giant has launched the Growroom – a DIY 9ft tall sphere for nurturing plants, vegetables and herbs that you can actually sit in with your family and friends.

There’s a lot to appreciate about the Swedish company IKEA. From its numerous projects which have helped raise awareness about the Syrian peoples’ plight to its commitment to the environment by using mushroom-based packaging that decomposes within weeks, the furniture business is progressive, to say the least.

Now, IKEA has released open source plans for The Growroom, which is a large, multi-tiered spherical garden that was designed to sustainably grow enough food to feed a neighborhood. The plans were made free on Thursday with the hope that members of the public will invest their time and resources to create one in each neighborhood, if not in every person’s backyard.

The tools required to create the spherical garden include plywood, rubber hammers, metal screws, and diligence to follow the instructions comprised of 17 steps. The Huffington Post reports that The Growroom isn’t shipped in a flat pack like most IKEA products. Instead, users are required to download the files needed to cut the plywood pieces to size and are encouraged to visit a local workshop where the wood can be professionally cut. The free instructions online walk the builder through the remaining steps.

According to a press release, there are already plans to build Growrooms in Taipei, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Helsinki. You can add your city to the list by jumping on the opportunity and crafting a Growroom in your neighborhood.

The project is the brainchild of Space10, based in Denmark. The company writes:

“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.”

Following are some photos of the open source design:

What are your thoughts? Please comment below and share this news!

This article,  by Amanda Froelich, (IKEA Just Released Free Plans For A Sustainable Garden That Can Feed A Neighborhood) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com. Photo credits: The Growroom.