Build your garden with IKEA lab’s open-source Growroom
At the Space10 lab, innovators and designers worked on a pavilion that enables city dwellers to grow their own food. This freestanding urban garden called Growroom, designed by architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum, fits in a flat-pack.
Space10, IKEA’s research hub in Copenhagen, presents this as an alternative to the global food model since growing and sourcing produce locally reduces food miles and pressure on the environment.
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The first Growroom premiered at the CHART Art Fair in 2016, sparking interest and demand in cities across the world. “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,” said Space10 in their official statement.
The cutting files for the Growroom are available here. All you need are 17 plywood sheets, 500 pan head screws, and a visit to your local fab lab (for the CNC machine). The 5-tiered pavilion at 2.5 by 2.8 meters can be adapted to any context and modified via the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, just as long as Space10 and architects Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm are credited.
At the Seoul Architecture Biennale 2017, Husum and Lindholm presented a more flexible system called Growmore. Composed of just six parts, including a standard-sized planting box, shelves and fixings, Growmore can be configured to suit different needs and spaces.
The creators compare it to Lego. “You can have it indoors or outdoors, you can use it for dividing spaces, or you can use it as a quick way of building up a very airy and transparent space,” Lindholm told Dezeen. Plans for the modular system will be made available once the Seoul Biennale exhibit concludes.
Growroom and Growmore are what the designers call ‘pause’ architecture, oasis pockets in the city. “When the structures are placed around in the urban-scenery, as small nests, they not only provide a platform for social meetings and growth of vegetation, but also act as retreats to remind us to take a break and connect with nature,” they wrote. 
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