Save this picture! The Growroom exhibited at Copenhagen Opera House. Image © Alona Vibe. Via Space10

Fresh off winning the “Design of the Year” for their refugee housing solution, the “Better Shelter,” IKEA is again making waves for a pioneering, flat pack solution to societal needs. Developed by the IKEA innovation lab Space10 alongside architects sine lindholm and mads-ulrik husum, the spherical “Growroom” is a DIY garden structure intended to help people “grow their own food much more locally in a beautiful and sustainable way.” And now, plans for the structure have been made available online for free via Space10’s open source platform, giving anyone the opportunity to build their own 3-dimensional garden.

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Save this picture! The original Growroom exhibited at CHART ART FAIR (with Bjarke Ingels). Image © Rasmus Hjortshøj. Via Space 10

Designed for communities to affordably start their own urban gardens, the Growroom takes up only 2.8 x 2.5 meters of space, using a spherical shape that allows plants to receive ample light within a vertical setup.

“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,” Space10 explained in a Medium post. “The pavilion, built as a sphere, can stand freely in any context and points in a direction of expanding contemporary and shared architecture.”

Save this picture! Growroom designers Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm. Image © Niklas Vindelev. Via Space10

Building your own Growroom requires just 17 sheets of plywood, a rubber hammer, some metal screws and a CNC milling machine (or access to a local fab lab). From there, the instructions read as if it were any other piece of self-assembly IKEA furniture, with step-by-step diagrams and directions.

“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,” explain Space10. “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.”

You can learn more about the Growroom here, and download the cutting files for yourself, here.

News via Space10.

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