IKEA Garden Sphere Design

IKEA has made the designs for a garden sphere available to the public for free. By following a step-by-step guide, people can build a structure with the capacity to feed a whole neighborhood. (1)

The garden sphere, officially named the Growroom, originated through a contest put on by SPACE10. IKEA describes SPACE10 as “ a future-living lab, launched and supported by IKEA, that investigates the future of urban living, as well as the challenges and impacts people face globally. Their goal is to find more sustainable solutions to these sort of issues.” (1)

SPACE10 became interested in sustainable food production and urban farming. They partnered with Chart Art Fair to hold an architecture competition, calling for food production architecture designs. (1)

“We started looking into food and realized we need 70% more food within the next 35 years – which is a lot of food,” said Simon Caspersen, the director of communications at SPACE10. “At the same time, the current way we produce food is really unsustainable. Then we saw that meat is obviously a massive driver of climate change. So what are the alternatives to producing food today?” (1)

Architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum won the contest with the Growroom, a spherical pavilion-style urban farm. They partnered with SPACE10 to fine-tune the design and make it available to more people. (1)

Open-Source Architecture

Husum explained that people had inquired about purchasing the Growroom and having it shipped around the world.  “But our goal was different, we believe in local production and digital fabrication,” Caspersen said. “This was a perfect test case to explore open-source design.” (1)

Caspersen asked Lindholm and Husum if they’d be willing to make the design open-source so that anyone could access it. The architects were interested in the idea but needed to adjust the original design, which involved custom metalwork, making it expensive. (1)

Husum said, “[A] sphere is a complex structure to build, but we wanted to simplify it as much as we could, with as few tools as possible needed to construct it. Like the idea of IKEA furniture that anyone can build it.” (1)

The architects revised the design making it simple enough that anyone could take the digital file to a fab lab, which gives everyday people access to factory machines, like 3-D printers. The fab lab will produce the pieces for the garden sphere from the digital file. (1)

Adaptable Garden Sphere

The original Growroom design is a sphere with tiers of planters. The inside is open and has a bench so people can sit inside and enjoy a book or just some peace and quiet, surrounded by greenery. (1)

Building it is so easy that three people set it up in an hour at the IKEA festival. And because the design is open-source, people are able to play around with it and adapt it to their needs. Some have tried building it with different materials, even experimenting with mushrooms as a building material. (1)

“The Growroom supports your sense of well-being so you can actually produce food on your doorstep, but it’s also a place where you can get away,” Lindholm said. (1)