Tag Archives: greenhouse

This floating modular greenhouse can help coastal communities avoid a food crisis in 2050!

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By 2050, the global demand for food is expected to be 60-70% higher than today at the rate our population is increasing. There will be a scarcity of water and cultivable land and we need to solve this issue before we enter a global food crisis. Agriculture is already being threatened by climate change where in some parts things like rising sea levels are causing floods in fertile land and the weather is making it more challenging to grow crops in other parts. To avoid a major food crisis, we need to come up with alternative solutions for agriculture like this floating greenhouse which can give nature time to recuperate and us some time to switch to more sustainable habits.

Studiomobile and Pnat came up with the Jellyfish Barge which is a floating, modular greenhouse designed especially for coastal communities and can help them cultivate crops without relying on soil, fresh water and chemical energy consumption. The innovative greenhouse uses solar energy to purify salt, brackish or polluted water. There are 7 solar desalination units planted around the perimeter and are able to produce 150 liters (39.6 gallons) of clean fresh water everyday from the existing water body the greenhouse is floating on. The simple materials, easy self-constrction and low-cost technologies make it accessible to many communities who may not have a big fund.  The module has a 70 square meter wooden base that floats on 96 recycled plastic drums and supports a glass greenhouse where the crops grow. Inside it there is a high-efficiency hydroponic cultivation method that helps increase water savings by 70% compared to traditional hydroponic systems. The design takes the natural phenomenon of solar distillation and replicates it on a smaller scale for community crop cutlivation. The barge’s modular design allows it to be scaled up or down, and even be customized to fit various applications like floating farm-to-table restaurants, floating farmer’s markets, or floating community gardens that may travel between pick-up points.

This octagonal structure can empower families and communities that live in coastal areas or near a body of water to grow their own food, without the need for land in a time where we are all exploring more hybridized methods of food production – like urban rooftop farms – that doesnt rely on farmland. “In a future where perhaps a good portion of our food may not be grown in soil, this crop-growing barge is an engaging design that combines the best new-fangled approaches of food production, creating a possible solution that is powered by renewable energy, addresses the increasing scarcity of arable land, and can drift to wherever it needs to be. Its multifunctional attitude allows citizens to enjoy a weekly marketplace, allows farmers who manage the structure to rely on a profitable business, and creates resilience and social innovation for the community,” says the team of designers and plant scientists working on the Jellyfish Barge. It is an affordable, transportable and replicable solution to grow food within the cities. The Jellyfish Barge is also a future business opportunity for the stakeholders – with the right ones it can guarantee the economic sustainability of the project in a way that benefits local communities as well as reaps profits for investors all while doing good for our planet.

Designers: Studiomobile and Pnat

These origami greenhouses reduce plastic waste using a sustainable material: inflatable bamboo!

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You will find that in a lot of Southeast Asian countries people still use the traditional plastic-covered greenhouses and they are super popular in India which is the world’s second-biggest agricultural country. Polythene sheets are cheap and easy especially for those in developing countries like India where over 60% of the population depends on agriculture for income. We know that plastic is bad (and still find it so hard to remove it from our lifestyles), but most people in these countries don’t fully grasp that and the quickest way to convince them is by providing them with an accessible sustainable alternative while educating them simultaneously. This way we fast-track their sustainable journey and Designer Eliza Hague has already come up with the alternative solution – inflatable bamboo greenhouses!

Hague is a student at the University of Westminster where she is pursuing her Masters in Architecture. Her design features shellac-coated bamboo to emphasize the use of biomimicry in different disciplines of design – in her case it is providing eco-friendly architectural solutions inspired by nature. For the main structure, Hague drew inspiration from the Mimosa Pudica plant which closes its leaves when it senses danger and that is how she came up with collapsible beams featuring inflatable hinges. It gave the greenhouse a unique origami effect (it actually looks like paper too!) and also enables the structure to be easily flat-packed for transportation/storage. Rows of these bamboo-paper greenhouses can be connected to shared houses constructed from the soil, which has a high thermal mass, providing shelter from extreme temperatures in India. Hague envisions that the greenhouses would be shared by multiple families and would provide each family member with enough food to be self-sufficient, creating communal greenhouse villages in the city’s more rural and isolated areas.

“The tutors in Design Studio 10 encourage you to analyze what it means to be truly sustainable in architecture, rather than integrating sustainability as a generic requirement which is often seen throughout the industry. This helped to develop my project into something that challenges the suitability of widely used materials and current lifestyles. In light of the pandemic, the idea that architecture can provide spaces to encourage self-sufficient living has become more prevalent as we rely on supermarkets more than ever. This notion stimulated the desire to create a design that not only responded to its local environment but proposed innovative solutions to these challenges,” says Hague as she continues to develop her design so it can someday be an accessible alternative that will reduce plastic waste and educate people at the same time. Also, who wouldn’t love a cool, sustainable, origami dome as a greenhouse?

Designer: Eliza Hague

Polythene is used all over India because it is cost-effective for the rural demographic but it needs to be replaced each year which generates tonnes of plastic waste. With Hague’s alternative, the environmental impact can be minimized as the design uses locally sourced bamboo and natural resins extracted from trees.

The bamboo is then coated with shellac resin which makes it weather-resistant and gives it a texture similar to paper.

To set it up, all one has to do is inflate the greenhouse with air, cover it up with the bamboo-shellac material and fit the expandable fin-like black solar balloons that would sit between the inflatable beams and cladding for the hinges to facilitate natural ventilation based on the heat from the sun.

bamboo greenhouse

As each individual requires 40 meters-squared of greenhouse space to grow enough food to maintain self-sufficiency, the concept accommodates the potential different typologies based on two-person, three-person, and four-person homes.

This tiny greenhouse’s controlled microclimate shows why warming of even one degree is a big deal

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If you remember the movie Interstellar, you will recall that all the food on their dining table was made from corn – cornbread, corn side dish, whole corn kernels, etc. Why? Because climate change had made the conditions so catastrophic that the planet had only one viable crop left – corn. It also showed the frequent dust storms because the heat had killed the vegetation and now the wind could carry huge swaths of dust everywhere. “It is just a movie” is what we hear when we get a little stressed about climate change, but those scenes in the movie about having just one crop left and insane storms – that is an extremely realistic scenario and we are hurling towards it each time there is a rise of even 1 degree Celcius.

The design has a purpose to educate through interaction but it would be more interesting to see if the Studio set up different Hothouses showing how the temperature increase would impact other regions’ crops in comparison to the UK – the side by side comparison would help people grasp the global scale of disruption because otherwise it just looks like you get to have mangoes in the UK and that doesn’t sound “bad”. Scientists predict that air quality levels could be 5x times worse by 2050 and crop yields can decrease by 30% as temperatures rise towards a 4°C increase globally by the end of the century – to put it into context, the world is currently in a race against time to stop the temperature from increasing beyond 1.5°C because that could have life-threatening effects so 4°C is catastrophic. These changes will have a direct effect on all the crops inside the Hothouse so people can see the real-time evolution and effects of the world.

Designer: Studio Weave

It is hard for people to grasp how apocalyptic it will be through articles or movies, the easiest way is to show them the transition in real-time. 1 degree may not seem a lot when you go on the beach but a consecutive rise means death for agriculture and the collapse of entire ecosystems. Using experiential design as a medium, Studio Weave collaborated with garden designer Tom Massey to create the Hothouse which is a tiny greenhouse filled with edible tropical plants. The installation was made for the London Design Festival 2020 and is located in the International Quarter of London and provides a controlled habitat to grow specific plants that would not otherwise grow in the UK’s climate. The aim was to show the effects of climate change in a more tangible manner you can experience on an individual personal level.

The design highlights how local food in the UK will change with the rapidly growing temperatures – by 2050 tropical plants might become the norm and that is not an exciting thing. If the UK becomes a tropical zone, can you imagine what happens to actual tropical zones where most of the world’s vegetation and crops thrive? There will be a food shortage, more storms, wildfires, coastal flooding, and more. While it is hard to show that in an installation (most of us already experience it in real life with the recent wildfires and flooding), it lets people see how small temperature changes can change an entire country’s food consumption.

Studio Weave’s tiny tropical greenhouse wants to inspire and educate people about climate change and its choice of location has meaning too – the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park was once dominated by greenhouses that allowed for the production of ornamental plants and flowers, and exotic fruits in the 1930s. The structure is a minimal redesign of the Victorian glasshouse and has a micro-climate that can be regulated to suit the plants inside. Currently, the Hothouse has crops like guava, orange, gourd, chia seed, avocado, pomegranate, quinoa, mango, sweet potato, lemon, sugarcane, chickpea, loquat, and pineapple. Changes in agriculture and food consumption patterns can change the global trade cycles – the Hothouse is a small example of how that could look for the UK.

“Amid the strangeness of the COVID era of the last few months, reduced human activity has produced what feels like a profound shift in the environment, progressing a much-needed dialogue that will hopefully translate into sustained action and change,” says Je Ahn, Studio Weave’s founder. “We hope this little Hothouse acts as a continual reminder of our fragile relationship with nature while allowing us to rediscover the simple and enriching pleasure of looking after beautiful plants.” Design is a powerful tool when it comes to combating climate change – it can help educate people, create products that are better for the environment, and also help us adapt to the changing times. The design community must use their skills and collaborate with interdisciplinary practices for innovative solutions that can help people seamlessly transition to a sustainable lifestyle.

Nendo’s Tokyo house uses a giant stairway to keep the family and their 8 pets connected!

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When I saw Nendo’s latest project, there is just one song that started playing in my mind – Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven because that is exactly the emotion this house radiates. The unusual-looking home was designed to be a part of one of Tokyo’s residential neighborhood where two families can live on different levels while being connected by the defining staircase that runs through the entire space. The house is called Kaidannoie which actually means house of stairs and it truly feels like it will lead up to heaven.

The stairway house has three floors in total, the ground floor was created keeping in mind that it would be used by the elderly members of the family and the remaining two floors are meant for the couple and their children. Of course, you can choose the living arrangement as per your needs but given how not-normal this house looks, it still has a very wholesome vibe which is showcased in every carefully thought out detail. What I love most about this house is that the stairway also acts as an indoor garden filled with abundant sunlight which becomes a large common area for the family to have some bonding time. Because of the staircase, there are no conventional floor boundaries which means the entire house has the luxury of a high ceiling. While most of the home is smartly concealed to keep the residents’ lives private, the south-facing side is made completely of glass allowing sunlight to fill the space and provide a zen view of the existing persimmon tree. A staircase is usually never the center of attention in any house, but Nendo’s home flips that concept on its head so fast that now you would only want a house where the staircase is the fundamental and spiritual pillar of the structure. The style in which this house is built invites a lot of warmth, light, and nature without feeling trapped like Harry Potter was in his room under the staircase.

The staircase starts right from the roof, the upper part is a semi-outdoor greenhouse and as you go down, it diagonally connects every level (and provides ample space for the owners 8 cats!) organically and then casually extends all the way out onto the street. This house makes me feel like even if I was quarantined in it, I wouldn’t feel like I am indoors all day because of how well it is designed. You’d think the oversized staircase would be jarring on your eyes but it surprisingly has a gentle demeanor that instantly resonates with you, maybe because staircases are a symbol of connection and moving upward…and also where many of us may have nostalgic moments that are sometimes the defining steps of our lives (just like 12-year-old Mr. Potter).

Designer: Nendo

The house encourages natural ventilation and balances the urban setting with peaceful greens.

The stairway not only makes the house stand out visually but it also conceals the functional parts of the home, offset to the north side, from the street.

The stairway house is a blend of traditional and modern Japanese aesthetic – the lush greens inside and outside harmonize well with the monochrome and concrete interior design.

So the staircase is connecting each family member and each corner of the house among themselves but also with the outside world.

 

stairway house

 

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