IKEA’s Spherical “Growroom”: A DIY Urban Garden to Grow Your Own Food
The IKEA innovation lab Space10, together with architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum, design the “Growroom”, a DIY spherical garden for people to grow their own food “in a beautiful and sustainable way.” The spherical-shaped room occupies space up to 2.8 x 2.5 meters only, giving the urban communities a chance to grow their own affordable gardens. The structure of Growroom allows an adequate amount of light to reach the vertically set greens and plants.
The original Growroom exhibited at CHART ART FAIR (with Bjarke Ingels). Image © Rasmus Hjortshøj. Via Space 10
“It is designed to support our everyday sense of wellbeing 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,” explained Space10, co-designer of Growroom.
Growroom designers Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm. Image © Niklas Vindelev. Via Space10
Building Growroom is like building any piece of IKEA furniture. The needed tools and materials are 17 plywood sheets, a rubber hammer, metal screws, and a CNC milling machine. Once you get them ready, you can start following the illustrated steps available on Space10’s open source platform and build your room.
Space 10, also, discussed the aim behind the idea of Growroom: “. . . 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.”
